Syrian Parliament Recognizes Armenian Genocide

Beyond Idlib, Turkey and its proxies have conducted three operations in Syria against both the Islamic State group and Kurdish fighters it views as “terrorists.”

After the last incursion, Turkey set up a so-called “safe zone” in a 120-kilometer (70-mile) strip on Syrian territory along its southern border.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened Wednesday to strike Syrian government forces “everywhere” if its soldiers are attacked again.

Damascus said he was “disconnected from reality.”

Clashes between Armenians and Turks started well before World War I, with between 100,000 and 300,000 Armenians killed between 1895 and 1896, according to Armenian sources.

That came as growing nationalist sentiments in the Balkans and elsewhere threatened Ottoman authority, particularly after Greek independence in 1830.

Turkey says the Armenians collaborated with its enemy Russia during World War I, accusing them of killing tens of thousands of Turks.

In 1915, thousands of Armenians suspected of being hostile to Ottoman rule were rounded up and a special law a month later authorized deportations “for reasons of internal security”.

Many Armenians were forced into exile in the Syrian desert and a large number were killed, either on the way to detention camps or after they arrived.

Some were burned to death, others were drowned, poisoned or died from disease, according to foreign diplomats and intelligence services at the time.

Many passed through the eastern Syrian desert region of Deir ez-Zor.

A genocide memorial there contained some of the remains of the victims and served as an Armenian pilgrimage site before it was bombed by jihadists in 2014.

In 2010, then-Armenian president Serzh Sarkisian visited the site, also a church, and said it was to Armenians what Auschwitz is to Jews.

Turkey’s defeat in the First World War led to the creation of an independent Armenian state in 1918.

Before the start of Syria’s civil war in 2011 with the repression of anti-government protests, the country counted some 350,000 Armenians including some 150,000 in second city Aleppo alone, according to Syria specialist Fabrice Balanche.

But when the government recaptured Aleppo from rebels in late 2016, just 10,000 were left there. Thousands had fled to Armenia, neighboring Lebanon or to the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Parliaments in nearly 30 countries have passed laws, resolutions or motions recognizing the Armenian genocide.

The US congress in December recognized the mass killings as genocide, angering Turkey. President Donald Trump’s administration opposed the move.