Metz Yeghern is the Armenian term for the extermination of the Armenian population of Turkey that took place between 1915 and 1923 under the government of the "Young Turks", who came to power in 1908.

The decision that led to the genocide was taken under pressure from the extremist wing of the "Union and Progress" party. This group demanded the liquidation of the Armenians, who were Christians and who opposed the transformation – in a nationalist sense – of the Turkish State on an ethnic and religious basis. The formalities of the massacre were defined between December 1914 and February 1915 with the aid of advisers from Germany – Turkey’s ally in World War I – and the aim was a radical solution to the question of the Armenians and their demands for autonomy on the model of the Western concept of the rule of law.

The government created a paramilitary structure, the Special Organization (S.O.), under the Ministry of War with the cooperation of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice. The main political responsibility for the genocide lay with: Talaat, Enver and Djemal.

In the years that followed, Mustafa Kemal, known as Ataturk, endorsed and completed the work of the "Young Turks" with new killings, thereafter denying any responsibility for the crimes committed.

In January 1915, the S.O. started systematically deporting the Armenian population out towards the Der-Es-Zor desert.

On 24 April 1915, all the eminent Armenians of Constantinople were arrested, deported and massacred. The provisional deportation order was dated May 1915, and was followed by another ordering all Armenian assets to be seized.

All the men liable for military service were slaughtered and the civilian population subjected to indiscriminate violence and killings. The survivors were forcibly deported and robbed of all they possessed. Many died of hunger and hardship during the terrible march and those who reached the desert found no chance of survival. They were thrown into caves, burnt alive or drowned in the River Euphrates and in the Black Sea.

Historians calculate that the genocide caused the death of two thirds of the Armenian population of the former Ottoman Empire, some 1,500,000 victims. Among the survivors, many children were Islamized and the women confined in harems. 

Today, the government of Turkey and most Turkish historians still refuse to admit that genocide was committed in 1915 against the Armenian population of their country.