It was allegedly the result of a commission formed by the interior minister Mustafa Arif. It is said that they relied on reports and statistics they had compiled in a period of two months; on March 14, 1919, the results were made public by Djemal. This same figure was mentioned in Rauf Orbay's own memoirs. The initial results apparently represented those who were "massacred" during the deportation, without any indication as to the total number of people who perished. Mustafa Kemal, during a conversation with Major General Harbord, the chief of the American Military Mission to Armenia, in September 1919, repeated the same number. The figure of 800,000 excludes Armenian soldiers in the Ottoman army liquidated in the early stages of the genocide, as well as the number of women and male and female children assimilated into Turkish families.