Torchlight march marks mass deaths of Armenians

YEREVAN, Armenia — About 10,000 folks bearing torches on Sunday night time marched by means of Armenia’s capital to commemorate the estimated 1.5 million Armenians killed in Ottoman Turkey greater than a century in the past.

The march from a central sq. to a sprawling memorial complicated started with activists burning the flags of Turkey and Azerbaijan. Tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan have spiraled in latest months because the blockage of the highway resulting in the ethnic Aremenian area of Nagorno-Karabakh inside Azerbaijan.

Historians estimate that, within the final days of the Ottoman Empire, as much as 1.5 million Armenians had been killed by Ottoman Turks in what’s extensively thought to be the primary genocide of the twentieth century.

Armenians have lengthy pushed for the deaths to be acknowledged as genocide.

While Turkey concedes that many died in that period, the nation has rejected the time period genocide, saying the dying toll is inflated and the deaths resulted from civil unrest throughout the Ottoman Empire’s collapse.