A German, who was present in the Armenian Genocide, was running an orphanage in the area of Moush where the Turks were conducting their massacres. When he asked a Turkish officer in charge if the Armenian children of the orphanage would be given guaranteed safe passage, the Turk replied:
You can take them with you, but being Armenians their heads may and will be cut off on the way. (1)
In the slaughterhouses in Syria, there are countless corpses, all severely mutilated and cut into parts. This is exactly what the Turks did to Christians in their infamous Genocide.
Turkish peasants seized entire multitudes of Armenians and cut their bodies into pieces while they were still alive. A letter written by an anonymous source recounts how Turkish farmers cut to pieces a large body of Armenian men with their farming tools:
In the valley of Beyhan Boghazi, six or seven hours’ distance from the town, they were attacked by a wild horde of Turkish peasants, and, in pursuance of the order, were all massacred with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, saws — in a word, with every implement that causes a slow and painful death. Some shore off their heads, ears, noses, hands, feet with scythes; others put out their eyes. …The bodies of the victims were left in pieces in the valley, to be devoured by the wild beasts. (2)
William Willard Howard, an eye-witness to the Armenian Genocide, actually described how the Turks mutilated and cut to pieces the bodies of Christians:
…the soles of his feet are held before an open fire until the flesh drops off. After that his tongue may be pulled out, or red hot irons thrust into his eyes. If he is not dead by this time he is hacked to pieces with knives. (3)
Samuel Gridley Howe, an American who helped the Greek Christians revolt against the Turkish occupation in the 19th century, described the massacre of the Greek Christians by the Turks as a literal slaughterhouse, with severed body parts and decapitated heads being found without number. He described one massacre of a Greek town as such:
[T]he Turkish troops gathered round the town, rushed in among the defenseless inhabitants, and begun to butcher all they found. …And a few hours were sufficient for all this; a few hours of rapine and murder had changed the beautiful town to a scene of utter devastation; to a slaughter-house, still steaming with the blood of thousands of all ages, and of both sexes, whose mutilated and headless bodies, lay in every direction about the streets (4)
(1) Moush: Statement by a German Eye-witness of Occurrences at Moush; communicated by the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, in Arnold Toynbee, The Treatmen of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, p. 89
(2) Angora: Extract from a letter, dated 16th September, 1915; appended to the memorandum (doc. 11), dated 15/28th October, 1915, from a well-informed source at Bukarest
(3) William Willard Howard, Horrors of Armenia, ch. 1, p. 6
(4) Samuel Gridely Howe, An Historical Sketch of the Greek Revolution, ch. 3, pp. 99-100, brackets and ellipses mine