In January 1916, he was given command of the Ottoman forces besieging the British garrison held up in Kut in southern Iraq. After 146 days, on 29 April, British forces surrendered. Four hundred eighty-one officers, including British commander General Charles Townshend, and 13,300 enlisted men were taken prisoner. Credit for this victory is shared with his senior officer and predecessor as commander of the Sixth Ottoman Army, German Field-Marshal Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz, who had died 10 days before. Halil was promoted to the rank of general following the British surrender. He was appointed governor of the Baghdad province (present day Iraq and Kuwait combined) and was made the commander of the Sixth Army from 19 April 1916 till the end of the war in 1918. In 1917, Halil Pasha was ordered by War Minister Enver Pasha to move some of his troops to northern Persia. It was an unsuccessful attempt to destabilize the British-supported government there. This limited his ability to defend Baghdad and led to its capture in 1917. After which fresh British forces were massed at the Iraq front after this surrender. Role in Armenian genocide Halil Pasha was responsible for massacring Armenians during the course of the Armenian genocide. He took part in the killings of civilians during the Siege of Van in 1915. He ordered Armenian men in the units under his command be put to death. A Turkish officer in Halil's force testified that "Halil had the entire Armenian population (men, women and children) in the areas of Bitlis, Muş, and Beyazit also massacred without pity. My company received a similar order. Many of the victims were buried alive in especially prepared ditches." The German vice-consul of Erzurum Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter reported that "Halil Bey's campaign in northern Persia included the massacre of his Armenian and Syrian battalions and the expulsion of the Armenian, Syrian, and Persian population out of Persia ..." After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I he was charged for his role in the Armenian genocide before the Turkish Court-Martials. Kut was arrested in January 1919 and later sent to detention in Malta. He managed to evade prosecution and fled from detention to Anatolia in August 1920. In his memoirs, he would proudly admit to his role in the genocide and his intention to kill every Armenian at every opportunity he could find. Halil justified