As promised, I will be sharing my own family history.

1/ My maternal great-grandmother (she was 14 years old at the time) escaped with her brother by train. She had left with the bare minimum from Mardin. Her mother (my great-great-grandmother) had told them to flee while she https://twitter.com/heybiiighead/status/1340758454512865287

2/ packed all their gold and belongings.

However, my great-grandmother never saw her mom after that. She had been killed while she was taking the train from Mardin to Syria (she was going to Aleppo). The T*rks had stopped her train and killed EVERYONE on board. Armenian,...

3/ Assyrian, Greek, it didn't matter. She was Assyrian.

So now my great-grandmother and her brother were left orphaned at the age of 15 and 9 years old.

As for my father's side. My great-great-grandfather was a salesman. He used to sell food to the Turkish army. One day, ...

4/ saw that one of the Turkish officials looked very disturbed. So my great-great-grandfather invited him over, they both drank and had a good time. Once he was drunk enough, the Turkish official told him to flee from Diyarbakir because something terrible was about to happen.

5/ This was in the 1890s. My great-great-grandfather decided to listen to his advice because the Turkish official had a very stern look on his face. So his family fled with their belongings and they went to Syria, specifically to Deir-ez-Zor. He was Armenian.

Thanks to that...

6/ his family was saved ant they were able to live in Syria. They heard later that there was a massacre, the Hamidian massacres 1894-1896, in his hometown, Diyarbakir. They would have been killed if not for that Turkish official.

As a result, both sides of my family were ...

7/ uprooted. They didn't teach Armenian to their children. They had both relocated to Syria and lost their homes and their old lives. I only spoke about 2 of my ancestors that had a particular story, but my whole story is much more complicated. My ancestors were not able to ...

8/ thrive. Much of my Armenia and Assyrian heritage was not passed down because my ancestors were too busy with surviving.

And I have proof of this too. I recently took a DNA Ancestry test and according to it, less than 200 years ago, my ancestors lived in Mardin and Diyarbakir

9/ There is a silence in my family tree and it is due to the Armenian genocide and the massacres. I have decided to reconstruct my family tree and reconnect with my roots.

My mom, maternal grandmother and my dad ended up immigrating to Canada. Today, we are thousands of km...

10/ from our homeland and I can never return to Mardin or Diyarbakir because these lands have been stolen by Turkey, a genocidal state that still refuses to acknowledge their bloody history.

My story is nothing special, all my Armenian friends have their own story.

11/ Our fears of genocide (at the hand of Azerbaijan) are founded. The first genocide might have been the Armenian genocide, but that was not a singular event. People tend to forget that there were massacres and pogroms before and after the Armenian genocide. As long as these...

12/ events are never acknowledged and no sanctions are given to Turkey and Azerbaijan, Armenians will never be safe in the Caucasus and even in the diaspora. Anti-Armenian and Armenophobia is on the rise across the world. Armenians were stabbed and knifed USA and France.

13/ Even in my hometown in Canada, an Armenian teenager was almost run over by a Turkish person (they had a Turkish flag in the car). Thankfully no one was seriously hurt.

We are facing a second genocide at the hands of Azerbaijan while the world is silent.

14/ For those that deny today's events as a genocide :

Elderly civilians are being kidnapped & beheaded. Civilians areas are fleeing their homes because they are scared for their lives. POWs are still not handed over to Armenia despite the "all for all" exchange. Our churches...

15/ are being shelled while @UNESCO says nothing. Not even mentioning all the graphic videos circulating online to terrorize us. We are receiving death and rape threats from Azeris and Turks online (and other Armenophobia comments)

This is more than enough to qualify as genocide

16/ I would like to thank @heybiiighead for her informative thread. Just as much as she is an ally to Armenians, I would like to become an ally to all indigenous people who have faced and are still facing colonialism and imperialism alone. Thank you my Mi’kmaq (and ABC) sister

17/ ABC = Armenian by choice

I also realized I made a typo in my thread. My maternal great grandmother was 14 (not 15) and her brother was 9