Mehmed Reshid was an Ottoman physician, official of the Committee of Union and Progress, and governor of the Diyarbekir Vilayet of the Ottoman Empire during World War I He is infamous for organizing the wartime genocides of the Armenian and Assyrian communities of Diyarbekir.
13 Facts About Mehmed Reshid
2.
Mehmed Reshid was born on 8 February 1873 to a Circassian family; due to increasing Russian persecution, he left with his family for the Ottoman Empire in 1874.
3.
Mehmed Reshid enrolled in the Imperial Military School of Medicine at the capital, Dersaadet, and was one of the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress.
4.
In 1894, Mehmed Reshid was employed as an assistant to the German professor During Pasha at the Haydarpasa hospital.
5.
Mehmed Reshid established a "Committee of Inquiry" with the aim of the solution of the "Armenian Question".
6.
Mehmed Reshid is said to have burned 800 Assyrian children alive by himself after enclosing them in a building.
7.
When Talat found out about this, he had Mehmed Reshid removed from his post.
8.
Mehmed Reshid then returned to Istanbul and began a business importing perfumes.
9.
On 5 November 1918, a little less than a week after Ottoman capitulation to the Allies, Mehmed Reshid was arrested and sent to Bekiraga prison in Constantinople.
10.
Mehmed Reshid was able to escape from the prison in January 1919, but when government authorities cornered him he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
11.
Mehmed Reshid's family was given two houses and, in a 1930 decree signed by President Mustafa Kemal and other members of the cabinet, was allocated further Armenian properties.
12.
Mehmed Reshid recruited people from the outside in order to perpetrate the killings.
13.
Mehmed Reshid murdered the Kaimakams in order to scare all other opposed Muslim men and women; he displayed the corpses of the Kaimakams in public.