premise: The Armenian Genocide was an extermination.
hypothesis: The Armenian Genocide ( Հայոց ցեղասպանություն , Hayots tseghaspanutyun ) , also known as the Armenian Holocaust , was the Ottoman government 's systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians , mostly Ottoman citizens within the Ottoman Empire and its successor state , the Republic of Turkey . The genocide was carried out during and after World War I and implemented in two phases : the wholesale killing of the able-bodied male population through massacre and subjection of army conscripts to forced labour , followed by the deportation of women , children , the elderly , and the infirm on death marches leading to the Syrian desert . Other indigenous and Christian ethnic groups such as the Assyrians and the Ottoman Greeks were similarly targeted for extermination by the Ottoman government in the Assyrian genocide and the Greek genocide , and their treatment is considered by some historians to be part of the same genocidal policy . Raphael Lemkin was explicitly moved by the Armenian annihilation , to define systematic and premeditated exterminations within legal parameters and to coin the word genocide in 1943 . The Armenian Genocide is acknowledged to have been one of the first modern genocides , because scholars point to the organized manner in which the killings were carried out in order to eliminate the Armenians , and it is the second most-studied case of genocide after the Holocaust .