The province 's Armenian population was devastated during Armenian Genocide by the Young Turks . The regional administrator , Cevdet Bey , was reported to have said that " We have cleansed the Armenians and Syriac Christian s from Azerbaijan , and we will do the same in Van . Numerous reports from Ottoman officials , such as a parliament deputy , the governor of Aleppo as well as the German consul in Van , suggested that deliberate provocations against the Armenians were being orchestrated by the local government . In Mid-April 1915 , Cevdet Bey ordered the execution of four Armenian leaders , which drove the Armenians to take up arms in self-defense . On the other hand , writer and genocide scholar Taner Akçam acknowledges that in the case of Van , the deportations may have been driven by military necessity and states the resistance in Van should be examined as a separate case
Armenian Genocide
Armenian Genocide
Van, Turkey