[cloudmountain]

Yup.
What I find weirdest are those people who seem to think the Nazis set some sort of record for people-killing efficiency, when they were actually pretty pathetic in that category.
Multiple times the Mongols captured a city with a surviving population of perhaps 500,000. The people would be captured, bound and marched out. Perhaps a half dozen would be distributed to each soldier in the 100,000 Mongol army, and on a signal everybody would chop heads. Then build a pyramid with them.
They’d ride away, leaving the bodies lie, and send a group back in a couple of weeks to slaughter any who had managed to hide in the ruins.
IOW, they’d routinely kill perhaps 500,000 people in just a few minutes. With the only added expense the labor of resharpening their swords and axes.
People today seem to think really mass killing requires technology and industrial methods. In actual fact all you need is a whole bunch of enthusiastic killers.

The "enthusiastic killers" thought they were doing RIGHT.
After Genghis, his GRANDSON took over the killing. It took Asia a L-O-N-G time to recover from the invasions of the Khans.

[Sherman Logan]

Yes. Large areas of central Asia had been heavily populated and highly civilized for millenia. The Mongols destroyed these civilizations and to a very considerable extent they have never recovered.

In fact, the same is probably true of Iraq. Highly civilized and heavily populated, one of the world’s greatest areas of civilization for at least 5000 years continuous. Conquered by dozens of groups over the millenia. Irrigation systems destroyed, etc.

The irrigation systems were always patiently rebuilt by the surviving peasantry and civilization revived.

Then the Mongols rolled through. Destroyed the irrigation systems AND killed the peasantry. The area has never fully recovered. BTW, this horrendous tragedy occurred during the Crusades, which is why for over a thousand years Muslims pretty much ignored the Crusades. They were, by comparison to the Mongol invasion, a minor irritant.

At one point Genghis implemented a policy of killing the entire Chinese population to free up land for grazing the Mongol flocks and herds. A captured Chinese official talked him out of it before it had gone too far. He convinced GK he’d make more by leaving the Chinese alive and exploiting them than by killing them. IOW, herding people has a higher ROI than herding animals.