Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA)

The survivors of the massacres of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 found refuge in countries of the Middle East, Western Europe as well as in the United States. Ringleaders and key figures of the genocide were murdered in the 1920s by Armenians such as Soghomon Tehlirian (Operation Nemesis). However, the successor to the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey, continued to maintain that the events of 1915 were not genocide; on the contrary, the Turkish state campaigned against any attempts to bring these events to light and prevented recognition in the West. In fact, the government claimed that Armenians had instigated violence and accused the empire's Armenian minority of allegedly massacring hundreds of Turks, which was the cause of the deportation of the entire Armenian civilian population. In 1965, Armenians around the world commemorated the 50th anniversary of the genocide and began to push for worldwide recognition of the unaddressed genocide. When peaceful marches and demonstrations were ignored by intransigent Turkey, the younger generation of Armenians - due to Turkey's denial and the failure of their parents' generation to effect change - sought newer approaches to gain recognition and reparations. In 1973, two Turkish diplomats, Consul General Mehmet Baydar and Consul Bahadır Demir, were assassinated in Los Angeles by a genocide survivor, Kurken Yanikian. This event could have been gradually forgotten had it not initiated a chain of incidents that transformed the event and its perpetrator into a symbol representing the end of the conspiracy of silence that had surrounded the ArmenianGenocide since 1915.

The Asala was founded on January 20, 1975, at the beginning of the Lebanese Civil War by members of the Armenian diaspora in Lebanon's capital Beirut, where there was a strong Armenian community of genocide descendants, especially in the suburb of Bourj Hammoud. Key founding members included Hagop Agopjan (real name Harutiun Tokashian) and Hagop Tarakjian, and possibly the writer Kevork Ajemian. In the beginning, the Asala bore the name "Group of the Captive Kurk Yanikian". It consisted mainly of diaspora Armenians born in Lebanon whose parents and/or grandparents were survivors of the Armenian Genocide. The organization followed a theoretical model based on leftist ideology. The Asala was critical of its predecessors and the diaspora parties, accusing them of not understanding how to deal with the problems of the Armenian people. The head of the structural group was the General Command of the People of Armenia (VAN).

The group's activities consisted mainly of assassinating Turkish diplomats and politicians in Western Europe, the United States and the Middle East. Their first recognized assassination was the killing of Turkish diplomat Daniş Tunalıgil in Vienna on October 22, 1975. A failed attack in Geneva on October 3, 1980, in which two Armenian militiamen were killed, led to a new nickname for the group, the October 3 Organization. The Asala's eight-point manifesto was published in 1981.

The Asala, trained in the Beirut camps of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), is the best-known guerrilla group responsible for the murder of at least 36 Turkish diplomats. Since 1975, a dozen Turkish diplomats or family members of politicians have been targeted in attacks - with the result that Armenian revenge, as well as the background of the Armenian liberation struggle, made it through the world press. These noteworthy attacks were successful in denouncing the genocide and its silence before the international public, although they were carried out by a very small group.