Question: what was the premise of world war 1

title: World War I
text: The ethnic cleansing of the Ottoman Empire 's Armenian population , including mass deportations and executions , during the final years of the Ottoman Empire is considered genocide . The Ottomans carried out organized and systematic massacres of the Armenian population at the beginning of the war and portrayed deliberately provoked acts of Armenian resistance as rebellions to justify further extermination . In early 1915 , a number of Armenians volunteered to join the Russian forces and the Ottoman government used this as a pretext to issue the Tehcir Law ( Law on Deportation ) , which authorized the deportation of Armenians from the Empire 's eastern provinces to Syria between 1915 and 1918 . The Armenians were intentionally marched to death and a number were attacked by Ottoman brigands . While an exact number of deaths is unknown , the International Association of Genocide Scholars estimates 1.5 million . The government of Turkey has consistently denied the genocide , arguing that those who died were victims of inter-ethnic fighting , famine , or disease during World War I ; these claims are rejected by most historians . Other ethnic groups were similarly attacked by the Ottoman Empire during this period , including Assyrians and Greeks , and some scholars consider those events to be part of the same policy of extermination . Russian