In the Armenian capital of Yerevan, thousands of people commemorated the victims of the Armenian genocide 106 years ago. About 1.5 million people and members of other Christian minorities in the then Ottoman Empire, including Arameans, Assyrians and Chaldeans, but also Yazidis, fell victim to the Young Turk genocide of 1915. Turkey, as the successor state, still refuses to classify it as genocide.

The commemoration in Yerevan began at noon with a state ceremony. Afterwards, thousands of people gathered at the Tsitsernakaberd genocide memorial to lay flowers and wreaths. The memorial complex is located on the hill of the same name in the western part of Yerevan. Members of the Kurdish community in Armenia also participated in the commemoration.

"As Kurds who have found refuge in Armenia, we condemn Turkey, as the legal successor of the Ottoman Empire, for the genocide perpetrated against the Armenian people. We share the pain of the Armenian people and will always stand by them in brotherhood," a joint statement by the Şevra Gelê Kurd Association, the Kurdistan Committee and the Union of Free Women said.

April 24, 1915 is considered the prelude to the genocide of the Armenian people in the Ottoman Empire. On that day in Constantinople (Istanbul), the Armenian elite - over 200 deputies, journalists, teachers, doctors, pharmacists, merchants and bankers - were arrested in the middle of the night and deported to internment camps near Ankara, only two of them surviving. After that, events followed a fixed pattern: Armenian men fit for military service were put into labor battalions and killed. The sick, the old, children and women had to go on death marches to the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. Due to periodic massacres, rapes and abductions by Hamidiye regiments, the deportation trains were already so decimated on the way that only a few of the completely exhausted people finally reached the camps in the deserts. The official pretext for the genocide by the Young Turk government was the alleged sympathy of the Christian Armenians with the Russian opponent of the World War. In fact, the racially fanatical Young Turks were concerned with the Turkification of Anatolia.