Death Marches into the Syrian Desert
The deportees were rudely evicted from their homes, often at a moments notice. Often, they did not have time to gather basic food and clothing for a journey, never mind gather all their possessions together – or indeed locate all their family members. In the mountain village of Geben, women at work at the communal washtub were ordered to leave there and then, barefoot and half-clothed for their work.
Any young, able-bodied men were split from the women, children and the elderly and bound or removed to cut down on the chance of resistance. The deportees were then forced to walk, on foot into the Syrian Desert and onto an uncertain destination.
The authorities made no provisions for food, water or shelter for the deportees. Witnesses also report on the cruelty of the guards. The American Embassy report states that guards drove pregnant women like cattle and many went into labor prematurely, often dying of hemorrhaging because of their ill-treatment. Franz Gunther, a representative for the Deutsche Bank which was funding the construction of the Baghdad railway, forwarded photographs to his superiors in Germany and complained bitterly about having to hold his silence in the face of the ‘bestial cruelty” he was witnessing.
By August 1915, The New York Times was reporting how “the roads and the Euphrates are strewn with corpses of exiles, and those who survive are doomed to certain death. It is a plan to exterminate the whole Armenian people”. In the meantime, the abandoned homes and Armenian villages were repopulated with Muslim refugees displaced in the Balkan wars and the government automatically claimed all abandoned Armenian goods and properties.