Human Conflict Project

All events · The World Wars

The Armenian-Azerbaijani War and the Massacres of Baku, Shusha and Zangezur

1918–1920 · Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus

Displacement Territory Seized Mass Killing
Displaced
400,000
Contemporary relief agencies and the short-lived Caucasus republics reported several hundred thousand refugees moving between Armenian- and Azerbaijani-populated districts, with figures of 300,000-500,000 commonly cited; the counts come from Near East Relief, British occupation authorities and the rival governments' own claims, all with an interest in the totals, and no census-quality data exists for these years.
Share of the population affected
12%
of the combined population of the Armenian and Azerbaijani republics in the contested South Caucasus, 1919
Killed
30,000–100,000
direct killing

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What happened

As the Russian imperial front dissolved, the newly declared republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan fought over Karabakh, Zangezur and Nakhchivan while communal massacres consumed mixed districts. In Baku, fighting between Bolshevik-Dashnak forces and Azerbaijani Musavatists in the 'March Days' of 1918 left thousands of Muslim civilians dead, and in September 1918 Ottoman-backed forces of the Army of Islam entered the city and killed large numbers of Armenians; estimates for each episode run from several thousand to tens of thousands and are strongly contested along national lines. In March 1920 the Armenian quarter of Shusha was destroyed and its population killed or driven out, with death estimates ranging from about 500 to 20,000. Hundreds of thousands of civilians fled in both directions, and the surviving refugee flows helped fix the ethnically separated map that Soviet delimitation formalised in 1921-23. Armenian and Azerbaijani historiographies differ sharply on sequence, responsibility and numbers for almost every episode in this period.

Parties

Armenian, Azerbaijani and Ottoman forces and local militias killed and expelled each other's civilian populations across the contested South Caucasus

Disputed

Every major figure and the question of who initiated each massacre are disputed between Armenian and Azerbaijani historiography, with Turkish and Russian archival readings adding further divergence.

The denominator

No reliable census covered the period. Russian imperial estimates of 1916 and the figures used by the two short-lived republics give Armenia roughly 1.3 million - swollen by refugees from Ottoman Anatolia and then thinned by famine - and Azerbaijan about 2 million. Both are contested and unstable given the refugee movements of these years.

The 400,000 counts killings and expulsions on both sides across three years and includes refugees who had arrived from Ottoman territory and are not in this denominator.

Where the baseline comes from

On the death toll

The lower bound reflects conservative scholarly tallies of the identifiable massacres (Baku March and September 1918, Shusha 1920, and village-level killings in Karabakh, Zangezur and Nakhchivan); the upper bound reflects the maximal claims of the Armenian and Azerbaijani national historiographies, each of which counts the other side's victims low and its own high. There was no neutral authority in the region to record deaths.

Documented forms of violence

Mass KillingDestruction of PropertySummary Execution

British occupation reports, Near East Relief workers and the rival republics' own commissions of inquiry recorded mass killings and the burning of Armenian and Azerbaijani quarters and villages.

Movements mapped

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Azerbaijan, Armenia

Sources

This entry rests only on reference, press or open-edited sources. Treat its figures as indicative and follow the links before relying on them.
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