What happened to Armenians during the Ottoman deportations of 1915?

During the World War I era, the Ottoman Empire initiated a systematic campaign against its Armenian population, an event now widely recognized by historians as the Armenian Genocide.123

Beginning in 1915, the Young Turk government ordered the deportation of Armenians from Eastern Anatolia to Syria and Mesopotamia, citing national security concerns. This process involved:124

• Systematic Violence: Armenian soldiers were demobilized and murdered, while intellectuals and political leaders were arrested and killed.1
• Death Marches: Civilians were forcibly removed from their homes and marched through harsh terrain toward concentration camps, where many perished from starvation, disease, or direct massacres by irregular forces and local groups.12
• Erasure: By the end of the war, the vast majority of the Armenian population in the empire was gone, their property was seized, and survivors were often forced to abandon their identities.3

Estimates of the death toll range from 600,000 to 1,500,000 people. While the Turkish government acknowledges that deportations and killings occurred, it rejects the classification of these events as genocide, maintaining that they were not the result of a state-directed policy of extermination.1243