The speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, laid flowers on September 18 at a Yerevan hilltop monument honoring the nearly 1.5 million Armenians who died during World War I in a campaign of orchestrated violence by Ottoman Turks. The killings have been classified as genocide by a growing number of historians and countries, as well as by the U.S. Congress. Pelosi is the highest-ranking U.S. official to travel to Armenia since the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.