The Armenian genocide was the systematic mass murder of around one million ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress, it was accomplished primarily through mass executions, death marches leading to the Syrian Desert, and the forced Islamization of Armenian women and children.
Prior to World War I, Armenians were concentrated in eastern Anatolia and occupied a protected, but subordinate, place in Ottoman society. Large-scale massacres of Armenians occurred in the 1890s and 1909. The Ottoman Empire suffered a series of military defeats and territorial losses—especially the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars—leading to fear among CUP leaders that the Armenians, whose homeland in eastern Anatolia was viewed as the heartland of the Turkish nation, would also attempt to break free of the empire. During their invasion of Russian and Persian territory, Ottoman paramilitaries massacred local Armenians. Ottoman leaders took isolated indications of Armenian resistance as evidence of a widespread rebellion, even though no such rebellion existed.