ALEPPO, DAMSCUS AND JERUSALEM DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR
It might be supposed that, in the first years of the war, when hundreds of thousands of Armenians were being massacred or deported to the Syrian and Mesopotamian deserts, no relief measures whatever were taken within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. But this is not the case; the refugees received some assistance even then. Undeniably, the city that played the pivotal role here was Aleppo. The Syrian metropolis was in an exceptional position throughout the war years. It was the switchpoint of the system created to carry out the deportation. The Sub-Directorate for Deportees, headed by a close colleague of Talât’s, Abdülahad Nuri, was based here; moreover, most of the convoys of deportees passed through Aleppo before being sent to the deserts of Der Zor, Mesopotamia or Palestine. Some deportees even managed, in defiance of the local authorities, to find refuge in Aleppo by going underground there, thus escaping the fate reserved for the others.1 This phenomenon finds its main explanation in the existence of a strong, dynamic, well-organized Armenian community in the city. Unlike the Armenians of Asia Minor, the estimated thirteen thousand members of the Aleppo community were not, as a rule, affected by the measures that the Ottoman authorities took to exterminate the Armenians. The phenomenon is also partly attributable to the presence, down to June 1915, of the vali Jelal Bey, who tried to obstruct, in the areas under his jurisdiction, the extermination measures taken by
The end of the World War and the emergence, in most Near Eastern countries, of political regimes controlled by the victorious powers—in the cases relevant here, France and Britain—marked the real beginnings of the gigantic humanitarian enterprise carried out by the AGBU. In the post-War years, all of its structures were harnessed to the task of providing relief for the hundreds of thousands of genocide survivors, including tens of thousands of orphans. It goes without saying that, in this period of
intense activity, the organization wrote the most striking pages in its history.
It must, however, be added that the Union’s post-War activities ...
AGBU in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq in the Post-War Period