“The Kurdish Role in the Armenian Tragedy Քրտական դերը հայկական ողբերգութեան մեջ”: Keghart Magazine, Sep 15, 2025, By Varouj Pogharian:
Any reckoning of Ottoman-Armenian relations must confront the truth that in the Ottoman Empire’s eastern frontier, the violence against Armenians was not carried out by Turkish hands alone. The Ottoman state often preferred to look the other way and supplied the rifles and bullets to Kurdish tribes to do the job. Many Kurds participated in the violence willingly or under duress. To be clear: not all Kurds were perpetrators, and not all Armenians were victims in every instance.
As Ottoman authority weakened in the 19th century, state control in the east grew more sporadic. Kurdish tribal chiefs, Aghas, raided Armenian villages, exacted tribute, and, during state-sanctioned massacres, became willing executioners. The violence was not a spontaneous eruption of inter-communal hatreds. The anti-Armenian actions were driven by Ottoman ideology and geopolitics. The land seizures, abduction of women, forced conversions, and extortion of Armenian villagers were part of a broader structure in which Kurds were encouraged or permitted to prey on their Armenian neighbors with impunity.
The Ottoman state outsourced violence against the Armenians to the Kurds, adding another layer to the betrayal of the Ottoman Armenians. The Kurdish Hamidiye cavalry regiments were state-sponsored militias created by Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1891. Modeled after the Russian Cossacks, they were meant to patrol the Russo-Ottoman frontier and serve as a paramilitary force to counterbalance both internal dissent and external threats.
The regiments were unleashed on Armenian villagers under the banner of counterinsurgency, and played a major role in the Hamidian massacres of 1894–1896, especially in the brutal suppression of the Sassun uprising. The Hamidiye became both an instrument of state violence and an agent for Kurdish ambitions.
Turkish and Armenian narratives diverge over the meaning of their “shared past.” A refrain in official Turkish rhetoric claims that Armenians, Turks, and Kurds lived peacefully together for centuries in the east, that villages bustled with shared festivals, markets, and mutual respect.
This seductive myth is based on selective memory designed to smooth over the jagged scars of history. Yes, Armenians, Turks, and Kurds shared space in the east, and while moments of coexistence did exist, the Ottoman Armenian experience was defined by structural violence and routine humiliation.
Shared space is not shared power. The Ottoman Empire, like other empires, comprised multiple nationalities, but did not treat them all equally. Armenians, like other non-Muslim subjects of the empire, were dhimmis—second-class citizens under Islamic law. They were denied basic rights, subjected to special taxes, and were vulnerable to the whims of their imperial rulers.
Their loyalty was always suspect, and their safety was never guaranteed. What masqueraded as coexistence was, in fact, a system of entrenched inequality. The massacres of 1894-1896, 1909 and most devastatingly the Genocide of 1915 were not betrayals of a shared life—they were the fulfillment of a system designed to erase Armenians.
Myths are dangerous when they conceal more than they reveal. The official Turkish denialist narrative uses myths to portray 1915 as a tragic mistake, an aberration rather than a deliberate policy.
These myths downplay Armenian suffering and obstruct calls for accountability. The Turkish government funds exhibitions, documentaries, and textbooks that frame Armenians as an ungrateful minority who betrayed their Muslim neighbors.
In reality, the seeds of genocide were planted long before 1915. They were sown in law, in custom, and in the ideology of racial supremacy.
When the Ottoman edifice began to collapse, Armenians paid the price of the structural inequality–the root cause of the Armenian tragedy.
Kurdish involvement in the Armenian tragedy does not absolve the Ottoman government’s central role in the massacres and the Genocide. The architecture of Ottoman governance was to divide and rule.
The Kurds did not invent this game, but they played it with brutal efficiency. Without the Kurdish variable, the scale of violence on Armenian villagers might have been less brutal or slower to escalate. Still, given the Committee of Union and Progress’s genocidal goals, Western Armenia was doomed to be erased irrespective of the Kurds’ actions.
The Kurdish narrative has shifted recently. Some Kurdish leaders have publicly apologized for their ancestors’ role in the violence against Armenians.
In parts of eastern Turkey, Kurdish communities openly acknowledge the truth that the Turkish state refuses to acknowledge. This Kurdish reckoning challenges official denialism and may help open the way for an honest accounting of the past.
Photos:
– Tapioca de L’etoile magazine illustration Armenian Massacres in Karahisar region
– Armenian children collected from Kurds and Turks
– Sultan Habdul Hamid has gathered a force from the Kurds, the Hamidie. Gutenburg Project Photo by Noël Dolen.
– The Armenians in the plain of Moush constantly suffered from the robberies of the Kurds. Gutenburg Project Photo by Noël Dolens
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The Author:
Varouj Pogharian was born and raised in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. His grandparents were from Van, Arapkir and Urfa. He is currently working on a historical novel, which is set in Asia Minor during the tumultuous period that spanned the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II and the rise of the Young Turks. His narrative is poised to explore the complexities of this historical backdrop.
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