Arab bedouin Bashir al Saadi said that he was 14 years old in 1915. He was a shepherd in Rakka on the Euphrates and was grazing livestock when he noticed a group of Armenians heading to them. They were dressed in rags, exhausted, emaciated by hunger and thirst. Only later he learned that the Turkish government exiled them from their homes and drifted to the Syrian deserts.

In 1915, I was 14 years old. I was a shepherd grazing the animals of our people on the bank of the Euphrates River, near Rakka. I saw groups of people – tired, exhausted, in rags, half-naked, who came to our areas.

Later, I learned that the Turkish government had deported them from their homeland and had driven them to the Syrian deserts.

Those Armenian exiles had walked under the guard of Turkish gendarmes for days, without knowing where they were going. They left their relatives by the roads. These were unable to walk and many of them had been killed by the Turks.

I and my cousins used to go to the desert on our camels and, seeing their miserable state, helped them by milking our camels and giving them the milk to drink instead of water. They were so emaciated and weak that all of a sudden they fell down on the ground and died like sheep.


Verjine Svazlian. The Armenian Genocide: Testimonies of the Eyewitness Survivors. Yerevan: “Gitoutyoun” Publishing House of NAS RA, 2011, testimony 303, pp. 498-499.