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, at best a serious food shortage and famine in the eastern parts]] Ottoman casualties of World War I covers the casualties of the Ottoman Empire during that war. Ottoman Empire's casualties can be certified to have been enormous regardless of the method used in the calculations. After the war, the Ottoman Empire had lost its territories in the Middle East , which makes the estimation of the total civilian casualties harder as the timeline approaches 1918 . MILLETS AND OTTOMAN CLASSIFICATION See Also: Millet (Ottoman Empire) Ottoman Empire was not a Nation State . Its subjects were not grouped as based on ethnicity, but rather on the Ottoman concept of " Millet ", although it had evolved in time. Millet idea categorized subjects as based on their religious affiliations, independent of ethnic background. As such, there were three main groups in the Empire, namely the Muslims , the Christians and the Jews . Most census figures and statistics from the Ottoman era reflect this approach, and as such, it remains nearly impossible to determine the exact number of people belonging to a specific ethnicity in a given census. Therefore, "Ottoman Muslim" casualty numbers for the First World War include Turks , Arab s, Kurds , Albanians and others Muslim peoples of the Empire. But the majority in the Ottoman Muslim Millet were Turkish speakers. Population Balance 1914-18 If we look without breakdowns, the total Ottoman losses run almost as high as 25% of the population - approximately 5 million out of population of 21 millionJames L.Gelvin "The Israel-Palestine Conflict: One Hundred Years of War " Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN-13: 978-0521618045 Page 77. To be more exact, the 1914 census gave 20,975,345 as the population size, which 15,044,846 was Muslim millet, 187,073 Jew millet, 186,152 do not belong to any and the rest of the size is shared by other millets Stanford Jay Shaw, Ezel Kural Shaw "History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey" Cambridge University page 239-241. Among the 5 million, we know that 771,844 is military casualties which killed in action and other causesOrdered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War By Huseyin (FRW) Kivrikoglu, Edward J. Erickson Page 211. The military only covers 15% of the total casualties. The main question is what happened to 85% (all millets) of the casualties, which is more but not less than 4,000,000. Ottoman statistics analyzed by Turkish Kamer Kasim ( Manchester University , Ph.D.), claims that cumulative percentage was 26.9% (higher than 25% reported by western sources) of the population, which this size stands out among the countries that took part in the World War IKamer Kasim, Ermeni Arastirmalari, Sayı 16-17, 2005, page 205.. To understand the size of the issue, Kamer Kasım's %1.9 increase on the totals would add 399,000 civilians to the total number, which has not been reported in western sources. MILITARY CASUALTIES s, is used to find out males perished in conflictsWEBSTER, DONALD EVERETT (1935) "The Turkey of Ataturk" Philadelphia.]] The conditions on the whole in the Ottoman army were almost bad beyond description. Soldiers, even at the front and who received the best care in comparative terms, were often (a) undernourished, (b) underclothed; troops deployed at high altitude in the mountains of Eastern Anatolia often had only summer clothes; Ottoman soldiers in Palestine often took great risks just to rob the British dead of their boots and even clothing; and (c) largely suffering from diseases (primarily general Friedrich Freiherr Kress Von Kressenstein , in a report he wrote to army group headquarters on 20 October 1917 , describes how a division (the 24th) which had departed from Istanbul - Haydarpaşa Terminal with 10,057 men had arrived at the Palestinian Front with only 4,635. 19% of the men had to be admitted to hospitals since they were suffering from various diseases, 24% had deserted and 8% were allocated on the way to various local needs.Hans Kannengiesser, The campaign in gallipoli, London Hutchinson, 1927, p.266 Erik Jan ZÜRCHER, Between death and desertion. The experience of the ottoman soldier in World War I p.241 The ottoman soldier during World War I Until the World War I, Istanbul's civilian Muslim population and non-Muslim millets (minorities for some sources) were exempt from the conscriptionNur Bilge CRISS, "Istanbul under Allied Occupation 1918–1923", 1999 Brill Academic Publishers, ISBN 9004112596 p22 Making exception of the indirect effects of often perennial arrangements such as those which existed for the labor force of the arsenal and the dockyards. Full conscription was applied in İstanbul for the first time during the World War I, and a lasting phraseology describes the . Given that the Ottoman Empire was engaged in nearly eight years of continuous warfare (1911-1918 Italo-Turkish War , Balkan Wars , World War I ) social disintegration was inevitableNur Bilge CRISS, "Istanbul under Allied Occupation 1918–1923", 1999 Brill Academic Publishers, ISBN 9004112596 p21. H. G. Dwight, the author of the travellers guide book ''"Constantinople settings and traits"'', published in 1926, relates his experience of witnessing an Ottoman Military burial in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul ) and took pictures of it. The soldiers were from every nation, but they were only distinguished by their religion, in groups of "Mohammedans" and "Christians". The sermons were performed as based on the count of Bible s, Koran s, and Tanakh s in provenance of the battlefield. This is what the caption of one slide reads (on the right): Campaigns Gallipoli See Also: Battle of Gallipoli Caucasus Campaign See Also: Caucasus Campaigh Overview Seriously wounded (permanent loss) The losses of wounded soldiers (those who died off the battlefield, and therefore were not considered KIA ) of the same Third Imperial Army, assigned to the Caucasus Campaign , are put at 41,400 for the period between 1914-18. During the successive campaigns of the Middle-Eastern war theatre, particularly in Hijaz , Syria and Mesopotamia , the Ottoman side suffered about 325,000 casualties. Perished from diseases and epidemics When the war was declared in during the same time that also reported that Germany's medical infrastructure was more than five times better than the Ottoman Empire's. Totals The total number of soldiers who died in hospitals from Epidemics were reported to be around 466,759. However, the number of soldiers who perished because of epidemics outside medical establishments is hard to calculate since some of the soldiers were listed as simply "missing". The military records of the era are open to the public in the Ottoman Archives . These show somewhat different figures than Western European Sources . These are the statistics recorded in the Ottoman military archives: CIVILIAN CASUALTIES Ottoman Armenian See Also: Armenian Genocide Ottoman Armenian casualties Armenian casualties during World War I As many as 1.5 million Ottoman Armenians were reported to have died between 1915 and 1917. The Armenians claim that the event constituted a Genocide . The government of Turkey disputes this, claiming that the deaths were the result of a civil war. Ottoman Assyrian See Also: Assyrian Genocide Ottoman Pontus See Also: Pontic Greek Genocide Ottoman Muslim After the ). One plausible explanation that needs further study may be attributable to the productivity patterns of the Muslim millet which could have dropped beyond sustainable levels since most of the men were under arms. Turkish peasantry of Anatolia had dropped to 40% of the pre-war levels. Zurcher, 'Between Death and Desertion" It was not a novelty in world history to see from time to time people forced to move from one region to another, be it in the form of refugees, of population transfer or of search for political asylum, but the World War I and its aftermath caused migrations at unprecedently large scales. S.C Josh (1999), “Sociology of Migration and Kinship” Anmol Publications PVT. LTD. p 55 The Anatolian refugees included people who had migrated from war zones and immediate vicinity attempting, by doing so, to escape persecution. For the World War I, the relatively most reliable sources can be found for Anatolia , especially in relation to the Caucasus Campaign . There is a total number reached and reported by the Ottoman Empire at the end of 1916 . On the basis of previous Ottoman census, the Turkish historian Kamer Kasim ( Manchester University , Ph.D.), arrives at the conclusion that the movements of refugees from the Caucasus war zone had reached 1.500.000 people who were relocated in the Mediterranean Region and Central Anatolia under very difficult conditions.Kamer Kasim, Ermeni Arastirmalari, Sayı 16-17, 2005, page 205. Kamer Kasım's number or any other number on this issue has not been reported in western sources. The most horrible cases originate from the current region of ; (d) the speculative frenzy of a number of unscrupulous local grain merchants; the callousness of German military official in Syria, and systematic hoarding by the population at large. SEE ALSO NOTES |
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