After the Armistice, there were also tens of thousands of Armenian refugees in Iraq. The last survivors of the caravans of deportees driven into these regions, they had managed, by various expedients, to withstand the harsh conditions of the Mesopotamian desert. At war’s end, cities such as Mosul, greater Baghdad, and Basra were overflowing with Armenian refugees.
In January 1919, there were more than four thousand deportees in Mosul; another six thousand had found refuge in the surrounding villages. A number of khans in the city had been converted into shelters for the genocide survivors. The refugees’ plight had been made still more desperate by the appalling violence that accompanied the arrival of the Fourth Ottoman Army in the area commanded by General Halil (Kut), Enver’s uncle. Halil Pasha, who had already carried out brutal massacres in Persian Azerbaijan and the Bitlis vilayet, found it hard to accept the idea that several thousand Armenians who had been sent to this area had managed not to die. He accordingly waged a second extermination campaign in an area stretching from Mosul to Basra, and significantly reduced their numbers. Bishop Seropian, who had been named the prelate of Baghdad, dispatched an alarming report from Mosul in January 1919 on the condition of the surviving Armenians. Among the eleven hundred inhabitants of the city who had contracted venereal diseases in 1918, eight hundred were Armenian. Furthermore, the chief physician of the municipal health department reported that one hundred of ... Read all
Humanitarian Work in Iraq
Deportees in the Mesopotamian deserts. Left to right: Misak Sarkisian, Hagop Mikayelian, and Garabed Kevorkian (Coll. Bibl. Nubar/Paris).