France, April 24 -- "A lady, a relative of mine, escaped with her two daughters. Soon after, they were recaptured, and the two girls were carried away to slavery. Their mother died," writes Yonan Shahbaz, a Persian Baptist minister in his harrowing, 1918 diary.

His is one of the rare eyewitness accounts of the genocide of Oriental Christians - Assyrians - by Ottoman and Kurdish troops in 1915 and the years that followed in Urmia in present-day Iran.

"A neighbor of mine was soaked in oil and burned. A minister, more than eighty years of age, had his legs and arms sawed off. Another minister was murdered in the most horrible and revolting manner while his wife was compelled to witness the foul deed from the roof of their home. She died fr...