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NASHVILLE, May 28, 2015 /Christian Newswire/ -- The current persecution of Christians in the Mideast has its echo in the religious cleansing that swept Asia Minor early in the last century. Over the course of ten years beginning in 1912, three million Christians were slaughtered. It was the first genocide of the 20th century. Smyrna was a majority Christian city inside the mostly Islamic Ottoman Empire, and its destruction was the final episode of the genocide. A small-town minister whose faith in God gave him the strength to save hundreds of thousands of lives during the Armenian genocide is at the center of a new book, "THE GREAT FIRE: One American's Mission to Rescue Victims of the 20th Century's First Genocide" (HarperCollins), written by critically-acclaimed author Lou Ureneck.

The book tells the story of Reverend Asa K. Jennings who arranged the evacuation of the city of Smyrna (Turkey) after it was burned and a slaughter of its Christian inhabitants was begun by the Turkish army. The slaughter occurred as the navies of the great powers – the United States, Great Britain, France and Italy -- stood by as neutrals, due to their interests in doing business with Turkey. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of helpless people seemed inevitable until Jennings staged a bold rescue with the help of a courageous U.S. Naval officer, Lt. Commander Halsey Powell. With Powell's assistance, Jennings was able to gather the ships needed for a massive rescue operation, removing a quarter million people from Smyrna in seven days. The Orthodox Patriarch at Constantinople later said Jennings saved a million lives all along the coast of Turkey.

Ureneck believes this story is one of the great humanitarian acts of history, and that there is a clear parallel of the Armenian genocide to what is happening in the Middle East today.

"The genocide that swept Turkey was fueled by a fanaticism rooted in a desire to create a 'Turkey for the Turks,'" Ureneck explains, "and the principal marker of Turkishness was Islam. It was fusion of radical religious fervor with an ideology that saw Christianity as an enemy and a threat. 'Holy War,' or jihad, was a term applied back then as well as now."

"The Great Fire" reveals forces that would define the rest of the century -- genocide, trading oil for national principles, and conflict between the Christian West and Muslim East.

For more information, visit www.smyrnafire.com.