Turkey's minorities worry that they could again be pawns of shadowy forces that seek to exploit the country’s current discontents, Garo Paylan, an HDP lawmaker and an ethnic Armenian, has said, according to Al-Monitor.

Paylan's family is originally from Malatya.

Two days after Alevi homes were vandalized in eastern Turkey, an Armenian church association was pelted with stones when the office was empty. Only a few dozen Armenians still live in Malatya; they made up a third of its inhabitants before the Genocide during World War I annihilated the country’s Armenian population.

“[Minorities] remember what happened to their grandparents, or even their mothers and fathers, and they know that it is in the current kind of environment that crimes can occur,” he said.

“I’m not saying that the AKP wants that to happen. Some powers use minorities as a form of manipulation against each other [knowing] people are biased against these identities.”

Late last week, assailants painted an ominous red “X” on 13 homes in the predominantly Alevi district of Cemal Gursel in Malatya, a conservative city of nearly 800,000 people, said the head of a local Alevi group, adding police had yet to make any arrests.