spring of 1916 an Arab who had escaped from Syria published some facts
in the Egyptian Press which the Turkish censorship had previously
managed to conceal[13]. Business was ruined, because the Turks had
confiscated all gold and forced the people to accept depreciated paper;
the population was starving, and the Turks had prohibited the American
colony at Beirût from organising relief; the national susceptibilities
of the inhabitants were outraged in petty ways--the railway tickets, for
instance, were no longer printed in Arabic, but only in Turkish and
German; and spies were active in denouncing the least manifestations of
disaffection. A Turkish court-martial was sitting in the Lebanon, and at
the time our informant left Syria it had 240 persons under arrest, 180
of them on political charges. These prisoners were the leading men of
Syria--Christians and Moslems without distinction; for in Syria, as in
Armenia, the Turks put the leaders out of the way before they attacked
the nation as a whole; most of the Syrian bishops had been deported or
driven into hiding; by the beginning of March, 1916, it was reckoned
that 816 Arabs in Syria and 117 in Mesopotamia had already been
condemned to death with the confiscation of their property. A Turkish
officer, taking our informant for a Turk too, remarked to him: "Those
Arabs wish to get rid of us and are secretly in sympathy with our
enemies, but we mean to get rid of them ourselves before they have any
chance of translating their sympathy into action." This caps what a
Turkish gendarme in Armenia said to a Danish sister serving with the
German Red Cross: "First we kill the Armenians, then the Greeks, then
the Kurds[14]." Every non-Turkish nationality in the Ottoman Empire is
threatened with extermination.

But the aims of Turkish Nationalists are not limited by the Ottoman
frontiers. If they are resolved to clear their Empire of every
non-Turkish element, that is only a step towards extending it over