As the dominant figure in the Ottoman triumvirate during World War I, he wielded the administrative machinery of a wartime empire to orchestrate the systematic deportation and mass killing of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks — campaigns now widely recognized as genocide. His effectiveness derived from his position as Interior Minister and later Grand Vizier, which gave him direct control over the security forces, provincial governors, and deportation orders that drove these policies. He fled after the Ottoman defeat in 1918 and was convicted in absentia by an Ottoman court-martial before being assassinated in Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian, a survivor of the Armenian Genocide, in 1921.