From 1894 to 1924, three waves of violence swept through Anatolia, targeting areas where Christian minorities resided, which accounted for 20 percent of the population until then. By 1924, Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent of the population. Most historians have treated these three waves of violence as separate and isolated events, while successive Turkish governments present them as a sequence of unfortunate incidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first work to show that in reality, these three waves were a unified, continuous, and deliberate effort to exterminate the Christian population of Anatolia.

This period, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended in the early years of Kemal Ataturk's rule. Despite the dramatic shift from the Islamic autocracy of the sultan to secular republicanism, the policies of extermination implemented in the country were remarkably consistent and systematic, with planned mass killings, displacements, forced conversion to Islam, mass rapes, and inhumane abductions of women and children. And the most consistent element was the call for holy war. Although it is not justified by the teachings of Islam, the extermination of two million Christians was carried out within the framework of a ruthless incitement for Turks to create a purely Muslim nation.

Revealing and based on extensive research, this book redefines the way we perceive one of the most heinous events in modern history.