article_snippet.sent: Some Turks still view Some Armenians as having been a threat to the Ottoman Empire in a time of war, and say many people of various ethnicities -- including Turks -- were killed in the chaos of war.
article_snippet.sent: Some Turks, having recently entered World War I on the side of Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were worried that Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire would offer wartime assistance to Russia.
article_snippet.sent: Russia had long coveted control of Constantinople (now Istanbul), which controlled access to the Black Sea -- and therefore access to Russia's only year-round seaports.
article_snippet.sent: However, victims of the mass killings also included some of the 1.8 million Armenians living in the Caucasus under Russian rule, some of whom were massacred by Ottoman forces in 1918 as some of whom marched through East Armenia and Azerbaijan.
article_snippet.sent: By 1914, Ottoman authorities were already portraying Armenians as a threat to the Ottoman Empire's security.
article_snippet.sent: Then, on the night of April 23-24, 1915, the authorities in Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire's capital, rounded up about 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders.
article_snippet.sent: Many of 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders ended up deported or assassinated.
article_snippet.sent: Whether due to killings or forced deportation, the number of Armenians living in Turkey fell from 2 million in 1914 to under 400,000 by 1922.
article_snippet.sent: In addition, according to the website armenian-genocide.org, "The great bulk of the Armenian population was forcibly removed from Armenia and Anatolia to Syria, where the vast majority was sent into the desert to die of thirst and hunger.