'We have not forgotten our roots': Somber Kim and Khloe lay red tulips at memorial commemorating 1.5m victims of the 1915 Armenian genocide during eight-day tour of their homeland

Reality stars Kim and Khloe Kardashian laid red tulips at the memorial commemorating the victims of the Armenian genocide 100 years ago on Friday.

Wearing a long red jumpsuit, Kim, 34, and her sister visited the eternal flame of the Armenian Genocide Memorial Complex on the outskirts of the capital Yerevan as part of an eight-day tour of their ancestors' homeland.

The pair looked somber, and at one point Khloe, 30, was seen wiping tears away as she stood in silence with her two Armenian cousins.

Kim arrived with her rapper husband Kanye West, their child North West and Khloe on Wednesday and were greeted by hundreds of fans.

Prime Minister Hovik Abrahamyan received Kardashian and her family in Yerevan on Thursday.

'It was an honor to meet the Prime Minister of Armenia, Hovik Abrahamyan who expressed how proud they are that we are proud Armenians and we have not forgotten our roots! #NeverForget,' Kardashian wrote on her Instagram account. 

The Armenian ancestors are on their father's side - his family emigrated to the United States from an area that now lies in Turkey.

During her eight-day trip, Kim and her film crew will visit Yerevan's genocide memorial and Armenia's National Archives to see documents about her ancestors.

She is then to travel to the provincial city of Gyumri where her distant relatives live.

The 100th anniversary of the mass killings in World War One will be commemorated by Armenia on April 24.

Armenia, some Western historians and some foreign parliaments refer to the mass killings as genocide.  

Armenians say up to 1.5 million of their kin were killed between 1915 and 1917 as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart and have long sought to win international recognition of the massacres as genocide.

Turkey rejects the claims, arguing that 300,000 to 500,000 Armenians and as many Turks died in civil strife when Armenians rose up against their Ottoman rulers and sided with invading Russian troops.

Beyond snapping selfies with her fans, Kim has refused to talk with the press but instead took to social media to express her delight at being in Armenia.

'Armenia we are here!!!!! We are so grateful to be here & start this journey of a lifetime! Thank you to everyone who greeted us! I can't wait to explore our country and have some yummy food!' Kardashian wrote on Instagram.

'My husband and daughter came to Armenia as well to see my heritage and learn about my ancestors! My cousins came along too! So excited I can't sleep.'

There is now attention on whether Pope Francis with utter the word 'genocide' during his homily on Sunday when he will declare a little-known 10th-century

Armenian mystic a doctor of the church, one of the highest honors a pope can bestow.

Francis avoided the word on Thursday when he met the visiting Armenian church delegation, but said that what transpired 100 years ago involved men 'who were capable of systematically planning the annihilation of their brothers.'

'Let us invoke divine mercy so that for the love of truth and justice, we can heal every wound and bring about concrete gestures of peace and reconciliation between two nations that are still unable to come to a reasonable consensus on this sad event,' he said.  

According to reports in the Turkish media, Turkey has been working behind the scenes to discourage Francis from uttering the term 'genocide' and reportedly successfully campaigned to prevent the papal Mass from being celebrated on April 24, which is considered the actual anniversary of the start of the slaughter.

Last year, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan issued a message of condolences to descendants of Armenians killed and said Turkey was ready to confront the history of the killings.  

More recently, Erdogan has accused Armenians of not looking for the truth but seeking to score points against Turkey, saying numerous calls from Turkey for joint research to document precisely what happened had gone unanswered.

The Armenians have found a willing supporter in Francis, who as Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was particularly close to the Armenian community in Argentina and referred to the 'genocide' of Armenians three times in his 2010 book, 'On Heaven and Earth.'

As pope, Francis provoked Turkish anxiety — and a minor diplomatic incident — when in June 2013 he told a delegation of Armenian Christians that the killing was 'the first genocide of the 20th century.'

THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST: THE ARMENIAN MASSACRE THAT INSPIRED HITLER 

The killing of 1.5m Armenians by the Ottoman Turks during World War I remains one of the bloodiest and most contentious events of the 20th century, and has been called the first modern genocide. 

Chillingly, Adolf Hitler used the episode to justify the Nazi murder of six million Jews, saying in 1939: "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?"book

So how exactly did the events of 1915-17 unfold? Just as Hitler wanted a Nazi-dominated world that would be Judenrein - cleansed of its Jews - so in 1914 the Ottoman Empire wanted to construct a Muslim empire that would stretch from Istanbul to Manchuria.

Armenia, an ancient Christian civilisation spreading out from the eastern end of the Black Sea, stood in its way.

At the turn of the 20th century, there were two million Christian Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire. Already, 200,000 had been killed in a series of pogroms - most of them brutally between 1894 and 1896.

In November 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I against the Allies and launched a disastrous military campaign against Russian forces in the Caucasus. It blamed defeat on the Armenians, claiming they had colluded with the Russians.

A prominent Turkish writer at the time described the war as 'the awaited day' when the Turks would exact 'revenge, the horrors of which have not yet been recorded in history'.

Through the final months of 1914, the Ottoman government put together a number of 'Special Organisation' units, armed gangs consisting of thousands of convicts specifically released from prison for the purpose.

These killing squads of murderers and thieves were to perpetrate the greatest crimes in the genocide. They were the first state bureaucracy to implement mass killings for the purpose of race extermination. One army commander described them at the time as the 'butchers of the human species'.

On the night of April 24, 1915 - the anniversary of which is marked by Armenians around the world - the Ottoman government moved decisively, arresting 250 Armenian intellectuals. This was followed by the arrest of a further 2,000.

Some died from torture in custody, while many were executed in public places. The resistance poet, Daniel Varoujan, was found disembowelled, with his eyes gouged out. One university professor was made to watch his colleagues have their fingernails and toenails pulled out, before being blinded. He eventually lost his mind, and was let loose naked into the streets.

There were reports of crucifixions, at which the Turks would torment their victims: 'Now let your Christ come and help you!' 

So began a carefully orchestrated campaign to eradicate the Armenians. Throughout this period, Ottoman leaders deceived the world, orchestrating the slaughter using code words in official telegrams.

At later war crimes trials, several military officers testified that the word 'deportation' was used to mean 'massacre' or 'annihilation'.

Between May and August 1915, the Armenian population of the eastern provinces was deported and murdered en masse. 

In urban areas, a town crier was used to deliver the deportation order, and the entire male population would be taken outside the city limits and killed - 'slaughtered like sheep'. Women and children would then be executed, deported to concentration camps or simply turned out into the deserts and left to starve to death. 

Walking skeletons begged for food, and women threw their babies into lakes rather than hand them over to the Turks. There was mass looting and pillaging of Armenian goods. It is reported that civilians burned bodies to find the gold coins the Armenians swallowed for safekeeping.

Conditions in the concentration camps were appalling. The majority were located near the modern Iraqi and Syrian frontiers, in the desert between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor - described as 'the epicentre of death'. Up to 70,000 Armenians were herded into each camp, where dysentery and typhus were rife.

There, they were left to starve or die of thirst in the burning sun, with no shelter. In some cases, the living were forced to eat the dead. Few survived.

In four days alone, from 10-14 June 1915, the gangs 'eliminated' some 25,000 people in the Kemah Erzincan area alone.

In September 1915, the American consul in Kharput, Leslie A. Davis, reported discovering the bodies of nearly 10,000 Armenians dumped into several ravines near beautiful Lake Goeljuk, calling it the 'slaughterhouse province'.

Tales of atrocity abound. Historians report that the killing squads dashed infants on rocks in front of their mothers. 

One young boy remembered his grandfather, the village priest, kneeling down to pray for mercy before the Turks. Soldiers beheaded him, and played football with the old man's decapitated head before his devastated family.

At the horrific Ras-ul-Ain camp near Urfa, two German railway engineers reported seeing three to four hundred women arrive in one day, completely naked. One witness told how Sergeant Nuri, the overseer of the camp, bragged about raping children. 

In the desert regions, the Turks set up primitive gas chambers, stuffing Armenians into caves and asphyxiating them with brush fires.

Everywhere, there were Armenian corpses: in lakes and rivers, in empty desert cisterns and village wells. Travellers reported that the stench of death pervaded the landscape.d.'

By 1917, the Armenian 'problem', as it was described by Ottoman leaders, had been thoroughly 'resolved'. Muslim families were brought in to occupy empty villages.

Even after the war, the Ottoman ministers were not repentant. In 1920, they praised those responsible for the genocide, saying: 'These things were done to secure the future of our homeland, which we know is greater and holier than even our own lives.'

The British government pushed for those responsible for the killing to be punished, and in 1919 a war crimes tribunal was set up.