refused, it would provide a pretext for massacres. Armenians fortified themselves in Van and repelled the Ottoman attack that began on 20 April. During the siege, Armenians in surrounding villages were massacred at Djevdet's orders. Russian forces captured Van on 18 May, finding 55,000 corpses in the province—about half its prewar Armenian population. Djevdet's forces proceeded to Bitlis and attacked Armenian and Syriac villages; the men were killed immediately, many women and children were kidnapped by local Kurds, and others marched away to be killed later. By the end of June, there were only a dozen Armenians in the vilayet. The first deportations of Armenians were proposed by Djemal Pasha, the commander of the Fourth Army, in February 1915 and targeted Armenians in Cilicia (specifically Alexandretta, Dörtyol, Adana, Hadjin, Zeytun, and Sis) who were relocated to the area around Konya in central Anatolia. In late March or early April, the CUP Central Committee decided on the large-scale removal of Armenians from areas near the front lines. During the night of 23–24 April 1915 hundreds of Armenian political activists, intellec