Young Turks
The term "Young Turk" is now used to describe an insurgent trying to take control of a situation or organization by force or political maneuver,[16] and various groups in different countries have been named Young Turks because of their rebellious or revolutionary nature. Members of the CUP were known as Unionists, while for most of the world, the Unionists were conflated with the larger Young Turks movement.[citation needed]
1915–1918: Armenian genocide[edit]
Main article: Armenian genocide
The Armenian genocide was the Young Turk government's systematic extermination of its Armenian subjects.
The conflicts at the Caucasus Campaign, the Persian Campaign, and the Gallipoli Campaign affected places where Armenians lived in significant numbers. Before the declaration of war at the Armenian congress at Erzurum, the Ottoman government asked Ottoman Armenians to facilitate the conquest of Transcaucasia by inciting a rebellion among the Russian Armenians against the tsarist army in the event of a Caucasian Front.
Jakob Künzler, head of a missionary hospital in Urfa, documented the large scale ethnic cleansing of both Armenians and Kurds under the Three Pashas during World War I.[23][better source needed] He gave a detailed account of deportation of Armenians from Erzurum and Bitlis in the winter of 1916. The Armenians were perceived to be subversive elements (a fifth column) that would take the Russian side in the war. In order to eliminate this threat, the Ottoman government embarked on a large-scale deportation of Armenians from the regions of Djabachdjur, Palu, Musch, Erzurum, and Bitlis. Around 300,000 Armenians were forced to move southwards to Urfa and then westwards to Aintab and Marash. In the summer of 1917, Armenians were moved to the Konya region in central Anatolia. Through these measures, the CUP leaders aimed to eliminate the ostensible Armenian threat by deporting them[citation needed] from their ancestral lands and by dispersing them in small pockets of exiled communities. By the end of World War I, up to 1,200,000[citation needed] Armenians were forcibly deported from their home vilayets. As a result, about half of the displaced died[citation needed] of exposure, hunger, and disease, or were victims of banditry and forced labor.[24]
Around this period, the CUP's relationship to the Armenian genocide shifted. Early on, Armenians had perceived the CUP as allies;[citation needed] and the beginnings of the genocide, in the 1909 Adana massacre,[citation needed] had been rooted in reactionary Ottoman backlash against the Young Turks' revolution. But during World War I, the CUP's increasing nationalism began to lead them to participate in the genocide.[citation needed] In 2005, the International Association of Genocide Scholars affirmed[25][non-tertiary source needed] that scholarly evidence revealed[better source needed] the CUP "government of the Ottoman Empire began a systematic genocide of its Armenian citizens and unarmed Christian minority population. More than a million[citation needed] Armenians were exterminated through direct killing, starvation, torture, and forced death marches."
