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Sayfo
Context “Historians record that the first massacre of Assyrians in modern times took place in the 1840s, in northern Mesopotamia. The Ottoman Turks allowed the Assyrians to be massacred by the Kurdish chieftain Badr Khan Bey, who summoned the surrounding Muslim population to a ‘‘Holy War,’’ killing 10,000 Assyrians, enslaving many women and children, and…
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What exactly was the causes of the Armenian genocide?
The perpetrators of the Armenian Genocide were the menebers of the nationlistic political movement Committee of Union and Progress (ealier Young Turks). The Armenians and other Christian minorities became the scapegoats of a failed nationalistic agenda. The Ottoman Empire lost a series of wars against the Balkan states and Russia, and in nationalistic circles especially…
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Was Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in the Armenian genocide?
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk served long years in the Ottoman military and fought a series of battles. No sources during this time ties him to any of the Genocidical acts against the non-muslim populations. Even though he was a member of the Committee of Uniom and Progress, he was not one of the influential members. In…
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How far involved was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the ethnic cleansing of Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians?
There are lots of good books on this. you can check out Zurcher’s “The Unionist Factor,” and a more general but still scholarly biography is Andrew Mango’s “Ataturk.” Part of the argument in those books is that Mustafa Kemal was able to lead the resistance specifically because he was the most competent, highest ranking officer…
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What was the attitude of Turkey/Ottoman Empire toward communism in the early 1920s?
First, there was hardly an Ottoman Empire in the early 1920s. The Ottoman Parliament was disbanded by the Allied forces in January 1920 and a new Parliament in Ankara led by Mustafa Kemal Pasha convened in April 1920. In name, the Empire and the Sultan still existed until 1922, but their force was severely limited.…
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What impact did the German general Liman von Sanders have on the Ottoman Empire?
Liman von Sanders is almost a traitor in Turkish popular imagination. This is rather odd considering the man spent considerable time and effort in fighting for the Ottoman Empire in the Dardanelles Campaign and elsewhere. During the Dardanelles, it was none other than him who (at least de jure) led the Ottoman Army. The Allied…
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Why were the Ottomans accepted as Caliphs?
As early as the reign of Suleyman I (the Magnificent) in the 16th century there were ideas about the Ottomans not being Qurayshi and therefore not being eligible for the caliphate. The response from the Ottoman sadrazam (head-vizier) was that, simply, the Quraysh criterion was not a genuine one at all (Özcan, para. 3). The…
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Did the various Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire identify at any point as Ottoman?
First, the Ottoman Army always had a sizeable portion of Christian soldiers. I mean, always. If there is any point of a state like the Ottoman Empire waging wars against others for political and economic reasons, those are (beyond other, ideological reasons): getting taxes and recruiting soldiers. Now, you can recruit soldiers in three different…
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Did the Ottomans know they were ‘the sick man of Europe’?
They knew it very well. Ottoman observers felt there was “a disturbance in the force” even before “the Eastern Question” became a common name. We have good reason to think that there were Ottoman state officials who felt that Europeans were gradually surpassing the Ottomans in terms of military and political might as soon as…
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What did Russia hope to gain from the WW1 (Ottomans)?
The Turkish Straits. When you look at the map of the era, the Straits are the only obstacle between Russia and the Mediterranean sea. An opening to the Mediterranean sea would yield both military and commercial benefits. Unsurprisingly, the British were initially very hesitant to grant the Russians their wish. In 1877-78 Russo-Turkish War, the…