His particularly strong hatred for the empire's Armenians was made manifest in the mass murders of Armenians and Assyrians he organized in the Diyarbekir province following his accession to the governorship on 25 March 1915, at the height of World War I. Reshid had persuaded himself that the native Armenian population was conspiring against the Ottoman state and he had accordingly drawn up plans for the "solution of the Armenian question."[15] He recounted in his memoirs: