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Deir ez-Zor camps

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Armenian genocide concentration camps
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Deir ez-Zor camps
Concentration camp
Bodil Biørn's caption: "The Armenian leader Papasian considers the last remnants of the horrific murders at Deir ez-Zor in 1915–1916."
Deir ez-Zor camps is located in Syria
Deir ez-Zor camps
Location of Deir ez-Zor in contemporary Syria
Coordinates35°20′00″N 40°9′00″E / 35.33333°N 40.15000°E / 35.33333; 40.15000
Known forMass murder of Ottoman Armenians during the Armenian genocide
LocationDeir ez-Zor, Ottoman Empire (present-day Syria)
Operated byOttoman Empire
Operational1910s
InmatesArmenians
Killed150,000
Armenian refugees collected near the body of a dead horse at Deir ez-Zor

The Deir ez-Zor (Der Zor) camps were makeshift concentration camps[1] in the heart of the Syrian Desert in which many thousands of Armenian refugees were forced into death marches during the Armenian genocide and ultimately died due to starvation, dehydration, harsh environmental exposure, burning alive, suffocation, and massacre. It is estimated that up to 700,000 Armenians were killed in the concentration camps between 1915 and 1918.[2] Armenians were marched to Aleppo before their final stop in Deir ez-Zor.[3]

Although Deir ez-Zor was the most prominent deportation location,[4] 25 concentration camps existed around Aleppo,[5] including in Al Bab, Manbij, Meskeneh, Raqqa, Ras al-Ayn, and Abu Harera.[6][2][7]

Background

Further information: Armenian genocide

The Ottoman government persecuted the Armenian people and forced them to march out to the Syrian city of Deir al-Zour and the surrounding desert without any facilities and supplies that would have been necessary to sustain the life of hundreds of thousands of Armenian deportees during and after their forced march to the Syrian desert.[8][9]

Haj Fadel Al-Aboud, who was the mayor of Deir al-Zour, provided them with food and housing and means of livelihood and security. The Armenians returned the favor to Al-Aboud when French colonial authorities sentenced him to death in Aleppo; they supported and defended him, which led the French to reduce the sentence to exile in Jisr al-Shughur.[10]

Conditions at the camps

According to Minority Rights Group,

Those who survived the long journey south were herded into huge open-air concentration camps, the grimmest of which was Deir-ez-Zor...where they were starved and killed by sadistic guards. A small number escaped through the secret protection of friendly Arabs from villages in Northern Syria.[11]

Those Armenians who survived during the genocide in 1915-1916 were driven onwards in two directions: towards Damascus or along the Euphrates to Deir ez-Zor. During the early period of massacres, 30,000 Armenians were encamped in various camps outside the town of Deir ez-Zor. The camps were makeshift[12] with a cave being used to store prisoners until they starved.[13] Thousands of children were suffocated in the caves at Deir ez-Zor.[14]

Between August and September in 1916, more than 200,000 Armenians were massacred, burned alive, or drowned in Deir ez-Zor.[15] In 2010, the Armenian Genocide Museum Institute uncovered a photo which revealed a photo of the camp Ras ul-Ayn, consisting of tents strewn out in the desert.[16] In 1916, the Ambassador Wangenheim wrote in a report to Berlin that the persecution of Armenians had reached its "final stage" with Turkish officials "destroying the Armenian race" using "concentration camps."[17][18][19]

The Armenians that arrived were under the protection of the Arab governor, Ali Suad Bey, until the Ottoman authorities decided to replace him with Salih Zeki Bey, who was known for his cruelty and barbarity.[20][21] At the camps, the deportees including women and children cooked grass, ate sick and dead animals[22][23], the peels of fruit,[23] the corns of barley drawn out of horse manure,[23] and human flesh.[23] The Turkish government withheld food and water from the deportees in the camp.[24] Starvation was deliberately chosen by the Young Turk regime as a tool of genocide, as it enabled plausible deniability and also prolonged the victims' suffering.[23] Armenian women and girls were sold, abducted, or taken as forced brides by Turkish and Kurdish militia.[25][26]

Sickness and hunger were widespread in the camps and the Armenians were forced to live with little shelter in a hot, arid climate.[27] Severe overcrowding, exposure, exhaustion, and malnutrition in the camps led to widespread diseases such as dysentery, typhus, and pneumonia, causing many deaths among the deportees. Deportation organizers reportedly kept weakened people in the camps for long periods, possibly to encourage deadly epidemics, but the outbreaks became so severe that some camps were closed because Turkish military officials feared the diseases would spread to their troops.[23]

According to Christopher J. Walker, "'Deportation' was just a euphemism for mass murder. No provision was made for their journey or exile, and unless they could bribe their guards, they were forbidden in almost all cases food and water". Those who survived landed up between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor, "a vast and horrific open-air concentration camp".[28] According to the writer and engineer, Jude Seleck, "Deir ez-Zor was not chosen as a resettlement destination but as a mass grave", adding that the Committee of Union and Progress' ..."selection of Deir ez-Zor is analogous to the Nazis' initial plan of utilizing the island of Madagascar...as a mandatory deportation site for Jews durin the 1940s."[29]

The United States vice-consul in Aleppo, Jesse B. Jackson, at the time estimated that Armenian refugees, as far east as Deir ez-Zor and south of Damascus, numbered 150,000, all of whom were virtually destitute.[30] Contemporary historical analyses estimate that up to 700,000 Armenians were killed in the concentration camps between 1915 and 1918.[2] Certain Arab tribes, both Muslim and Eastern Orthodox, extended humanitarian assistance to the deportees in the region of Deir ez-Zor.[31][32]

Memorial

Main article: Armenian Genocide Memorial Church, Der Zor
Armenian pilgrims gathered in the Syrian village of Margadeh, near Deir ez-Zor, to commemorate the 94th anniversary of the Armenian genocide

In the village of Margadeh, (88 km from Deir ez-Zor, an Armenian chapel dedicated to those massacred there during the genocide "houses some of the bones of the dead".[33] Lebanese and Syrians make pilgrimages to this memorial organized by the Armenian Apostolic Church of Aleppo.[34] Bones from the victims of the camps have been identified in the nearby desert by those making pilgrimages as late as 1996.[35]

Nouritza Matossian wrote for Armenian Voice:

Last month I visited the desert of Deir-ez-Zor in the killing fields, caves and rivers where a million Armenians perished. I was shown a piece of land that keeps subsiding. It is called the Place of the Armenians. So many thousands of bodies were buried there that the ground has been sinking for the last 80 years. Human thigh bones and ribs come to the surface.[36]

"For Armenians, Der Zor has come to have a meaning approximate to Auschwitz", wrote Peter Balakian in The New York Times. "Each, in different ways, an epicenter of death and a systematic process of mass-killing; each a symbolic place, an epigrammatic name on a dark map. Der Zor is a term that sticks with you, or sticks on you, like a burr or thorn: "r" "z" "or" — hard, sawing, knifelike".[37] In 2010, the President of Armenia, Serzh Sarkisian, stated: "Quite often historians and journalists soundly compare Deir ez Zor with Auschwitz saying that 'Deir ez Zor is the Auschwitz of the Armenians'. I think that the chronology forces us to formulate the facts in a reverse way: 'Auschwitz is the Deir ez Zor of the Jews'.[38]

The memorial and museum were destroyed by ISIL in 2014.[39] The site was recaptured in 2017.[40] Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had previously pledged to restore the site, as part of the rebuilding of Syria,[41] but the site remains ruined in post-Assad Syria.

  • The Armenian Genocide museum in Deir ez Zor
    The Armenian Genocide museum in Deir ez Zor
  • The Armenian Genocide Memorial in Deir ez Zor
    The Armenian Genocide Memorial in Deir ez Zor
  • The Surp Harutyun (Holy Resurrection) Chapel of Margadeh village
    The Surp Harutyun (Holy Resurrection) Chapel of Margadeh village
  • Armenian refugee camp at Deir ez Zor
    Armenian refugee camp at Deir ez Zor
  • The Ashjians, a family deported to Deir ez-Zor and killed in 1915 (photo c. 1909)
    The Ashjians, a family deported to Deir ez-Zor and killed in 1915 (photo c. 1909)
  • Uncovering the bones of Armenian victims at Deir ez-Zor in 2009.
    Uncovering the bones of Armenian victims at Deir ez-Zor in 2009.

See also

References

  1. ^ Winter, Jay (2009). America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915. Cambridge University Press. p. 162. ISBN 978-051-149760-5. OL 34442571M.
  2. ^ a b c "Genocide Museum | The Armenian Genocide Museum-institute". genocide-museum.am. Retrieved 2026-09-09.
  3. ^ Matossian, Nouritza (2022-12-31), Voss, Huberta v. (ed.), "46. Last Stop: The Desert of Deir-es-Zor", Portraits of Hope, Berghahn Books, p. 277, doi:10.1515/9781782389415-051, ISBN 978-1-78238-941-5, retrieved 2026-09-10{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  4. ^ Abrahamyan, Victoria (2024-07-02). "Extra-ordinary cooperation between ordinary Ottomans: creation of the first Armenian refugee settlements in the Syrian Jazira, 1918–1926". Contemporary Levant. 9 (2). Routledge: 169–185. doi:10.1080/20581831.2024.2327918. ISSN 2058-1831.
  5. ^ Matossian, Nouritza (2022-12-31), Voss, Huberta v. (ed.), "46. Last Stop: The Desert of Deir-es-Zor", Portraits of Hope, Berghahn Books, p. 277, doi:10.1515/9781782389415-051, ISBN 978-1-78238-941-5, retrieved 2026-09-10{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  6. ^ "The Concentration Camps of the Armenian Genocide". Perpetrator Studies Network. Retrieved 2026-09-09.
  7. ^ Galustyan, Regina (2025-04-07), "The Forcible Transfer of Armenian Children During the Armenian Genocide: Ideological Implications and Implementation", The Silenced Crime, Brill | Schöningh, pp. 29–65, doi:10.30965/9783657797721_003, ISBN 978-3-657-79772-1, archived from the original on 2025-06-01, retrieved 2026-09-10{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  8. ^ "Exiled Armenians starve in the desert; Turks drive them like slaves, American committee hears;- Treatment raises death rate". The New York Times. 8 August 1916. Archived from the original on 2 February 2012. (cited by McCarthy, Justin (15 August 2010). The Turk in America: The Creation of an Enduring Prejudice. University of Utah Press. p. 177. ISBN 978-1-60781-013-1.)
  9. ^ Danieli, Yael (1998). International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma. Springer Science+Business Media. p. 23. ISBN 978-0-306-45738-8. [Victims] were often held without food for days so they would be too weak to escape.
  10. ^ Alshamary, Anwar (1996). Biggest Baggara Tribe (in Arabic). Homs: Dar Almaref. p. 363.
  11. ^ George, Joan (2002). Merchants in exile the Armenians in Manchester, England, 1835-1935. Gomidas Institute. p. 164. ISBN 1-9036-5608-7. OL 22062404M.
  12. ^ Paul R. Bartrop (2014). Modern Genocide. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 1781. ISBN 979-8-216-11854-1.
  13. ^ Everdell, William R. (1997). The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of Twentieth-century Thought. University of Chicago Press. pp. 124–125. ISBN 0-2262-2480-5. LCCN 96044334. OL 1004603M.
  14. ^ Galustyan, Regina (2025-04-07), "The Forcible Transfer of Armenian Children During the Armenian Genocide: Ideological Implications and Implementation", The Silenced Crime, Brill | Schöningh, pp. 29–65, doi:10.30965/9783657797721_003, ISBN 978-3-657-79772-1, archived from the original on 2025-06-01, retrieved 2026-09-10{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  15. ^ Galustyan, Regina (2025-04-07), "The Forcible Transfer of Armenian Children During the Armenian Genocide: Ideological Implications and Implementation", The Silenced Crime, Brill | Schöningh, pp. 29–65, doi:10.30965/9783657797721_003, ISBN 978-3-657-79772-1, archived from the original on 2025-06-01, retrieved 2026-09-10{{citation}}: CS1 maint: work parameter with ISBN (link)
  16. ^ "Genocide Museum | The Armenian Genocide Museum-institute". genocide-museum.am. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  17. ^ "Genocide Museum | The Armenian Genocide Museum-institute". genocide-museum.am. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  18. ^ The Armenian Genocide: Evidence from the German Foreign Office Archives, 1915-1916 (1 ed.). Berghahn Books. 2014. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1x76f91. ISBN 978-1-78238-143-3.
  19. ^ Alexis Demirdjian (2016). The Armenian Genocide Legacy. Springer. p. 153. ISBN 978-1-137-56163-3.
  20. ^ Walker 1990, p. 223, 220.
  21. ^ Kieser, Hans-Lukas (2020). Talaat Pasha: Father of Modern Turkey, Architect of Genocide. Princeton University Press. p. 263. ISBN 978-0-691-20258-7. OL 29464070M.
  22. ^ Friedman, Saul S. (2004). A History of the Holocaust. Vallentine Mitchell. p. 330. ISBN 0-8530-3435-4. LCCN 2003057169. OL 17142643M.
  23. ^ a b c d e f Shirinian, George N. (December 2017). "Starvation and Its Political Use in the Armenian Genocide". Genocide Studies International. 11 (1): 8–37. doi:10.3138/gsi.11.1.01. ISSN 2291-1847.
  24. ^ "Armenia". College of Liberal Arts. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  25. ^ "Armenia". College of Liberal Arts. Retrieved 2026-09-10.
  26. ^ "Article 12: Gendered Experiences in the Armenian Genocide". University College of the North. Retrieved 2026-09-10. ...Deir Zor's police chief...selected the prettiest girls from a convoy of deportees. They were taken to a bridge on the Euphrates where the police chief and his accomplices raped them. The victims were then all thrown into the river to be drowned.
  27. ^ Paul R. Bartrop (2014). Modern Genocide. Bloomsbury Publishing. p. 1781. ISBN 979-8-216-11854-1.
  28. ^ Walker 1990, p. 205, 210.
  29. ^ Jude Seleck (2024). 1001 Masks of Turkish Ittihadism in a Century. BookBaby. p. 131. ISBN 979-8-3509-4086-2.
  30. ^ Bramwell, Anna C. (2021) [1988]. Refugees in the Age of Total War. Taylor & Francis. p. 45. ISBN 978-100-045957-9. OL 33927375M.
  31. ^ Samaha, Nour. "How Arabs reached out to Armenians amid 1915 massacre". aljazeera.com. Archived from the original on 2023-09-24. Retrieved 2022-09-11..
  32. ^ Samaha, Nour. "How Arabs reached out to Armenians amid 1915 massacre". aljazeera.com. Archived from the original on 2023-09-24. Retrieved 2022-09-11..
  33. ^ Mannheim, Ivan (2001). Footprint Syria & Lebanon Handbook. Footprint Handbooks (published 25 July 2001). p. 391. ISBN 978-190-094990-3. OL 8762669M.
  34. ^ "Deir ez-Zor, International Travel News, 2007". Archived from the original on 4 December 2008. Retrieved 29 December 2008.
  35. ^ Mrjoian, Aram, ed. (2023). We Are All Armenian: Voices from the Diaspora. University of Texas Press. doi:10.7560/326794. ISBN 978-1-4773-2679-4. JSTOR 10.7560/326794.
  36. ^ ""Ararat" World Premier in Cannes, by [[Nouritza Matossian]]// Armenian Voice, Summer 2002, Issue 46". Archived from the original on 2005-03-17. Retrieved 2009-01-10.
  37. ^ Bones, by Peter Balakian, The New York Times, December 5, 2008
  38. ^ Marutyan, Harutyun (2014). "Museums and Monuments: comparative analysis of Armenian and Jewish experiences in memory policies". Études arméniennes contemporaines. 3 (3): 57–79. doi:10.4000/eac.544. ISSN 2269-5281.
  39. ^ "ISIS Destroys Armenian Genocide Memorial in Syria". 29 September 2014.
  40. ^ "Photos: Der Zor's Armenian Genocide Memorial Church Liberated by Syrian Armed Forces". 6 November 2017.
  41. ^ "Assad to rebuild Armenian Genocide Memorial Church in Deir Ezzor". 10 January 2019. Archived from the original on 15 November 2019. Retrieved 30 July 2019.

Further reading

  • Walker, Christopher J. (1990). Armenia: The Survival of a Nation. Croom Helm. ISBN 0-7099-0210-7. OL 16322719M.
  • Tatrean, Vahram; Dadrian, Vahram (2003). Ara Sarafian (ed.). To the desert: pages from my diary. Translated by Agop Jack Hacikyan. Gomidas Institute. ISBN 1-9036-5627-3.
  • Kaiser, Hilmar; Eskijian, Nancy; Eskijian, Luther (2002). At the Crossroads of Der Zor: Death, Survival, and Humanitarian Resistance in Aleppo, 1915-1917. Taderon Pr. ISBN 978-190-365612-9. OL 12267751M.
  • Miller, Donald E.; Miller, Lorna Touryan (1999). Survivors: an oral history of the Armenian genocide. University of California Press. ISBN 978-052-021956-4. OL 7710700M.
  • 2011 Documentary Film — Grandma's Tattoos (dir. Suzanne Khardalian [sv])
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