At the orders of Talat Pasha, an estimated 800,000 to 1.2 million women, children, elderly, and infirm Armenians were sent on death marches leading to the Syrian Desert in 1915 and 1916. Driven forward by paramilitary escorts, the deportees were deprived of food and water and subjected to robbery, rape, and massacre. In the Syrian Desert, they were dispersed in a series of concentration camps; in early 1916 another wave of massacres were ordered and around 200,000 deportees were still alive by the end of 1916. Around 100,000 to 200,000 Armenian women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and integrated into Muslim households. Massacres and ethnic cleansing of Armenian survivors continued during the Turkish war of independence, carried out by the Turkish nationalist movement.