From 1915 to 1916 hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deported from their homeland in the eastern Ottoman Empire by the Ottoman authorities, who viewed them as a possible ally of Russia in World War I. Many were murdered or died from disease or starvation; estimates of the number who died range from 600,000 to 1.5 million. The events of 1915–16 are widely considered to be an instance of genocide, but the Turkish government has refused to recognize them as such.