All events · The World Wars

The Ottoman Deportation of Kurds from Eastern Anatolia

c. 1916–1918 · Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus

Displacement

Displaced

300,000

Estimates are unreliable. Studies of the eastern provinces, principally Ugur Umit Ungor's work for Oxford University Press, describe the deportation of Kurdish tribes from Bitlis, Erzurum, Mus and Palu towards Konya and the south in the winter of 1916, with figures of around 300,000 for that wave and up to 700,000 for the war as a whole appearing in the literature; Ungor stresses that there are no reliable statistics. The evidence is Ottoman interior ministry correspondence and army records rather than any enumeration.

Share of the population affected

30%

of the Kurdish population of the eastern Ottoman provinces of Van, Bitlis, Erzurum, Diyarbekir and Mamuretülaziz on the eve of the First World War, 1914

Killed

up to 150,000

Upper bound only: no lower bound can be defended. deaths in transit or in camps

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What happened

As the Russian army advanced into eastern Anatolia in 1916, the Ottoman government ordered the removal of Kurdish tribal populations from the frontier provinces and their resettlement in the Turkish-speaking interior, where they were to be dispersed in small groups so as to assimilate. The deportations were carried out in winter with little provision, and mortality from cold, hunger and epidemic was heavy; an early estimate by Safrastian held that half of those deported died. The policy formed part of a broader programme of population engineering in the region that also encompassed the Armenian deportations and the settlement of Muslim refugees, and it was resumed in a different form by the Turkish Republic in the 1920s and 1930s. The episode is poorly documented compared with the Armenian deportations and remains little known outside specialist scholarship.

Parties

The Ottoman government and army deported Kurdish tribal populations from the eastern provinces westward and southward and dispersed them among Turkish-speaking populations in central and western Anatolia

Disputed

Both the number deported and the mortality are uncertain, and no formal count was made; whether the deportations are best understood as a wartime security measure or as part of a deliberate demographic engineering programme is debated, with Ungor arguing the latter.

The denominator

The 1914 Ottoman census recorded religion rather than ethnicity, so Kurdish numbers are reconstructed from provincial administrative reports and later Turkish republican counts; estimates for the eastern provinces run from about 1 million to 1.5 million. Any figure is an approximation of a population that was itself mobile and partly nomadic.

Where the baseline comes from

Deportations of Kurds (1916–1934) — Wikipediaopen-edited
Ottoman census — Wikipediaofficial

On the death toll

No count exists. Contemporary and early estimates, including Safrastian's 1948 figure that half the deportees died, imply losses in the low hundreds of thousands, but these rest on impressionistic reporting rather than records; Ungor notes that establishing the mortality would require a separate study. Deaths were caused by exposure, hunger and epidemic during winter deportation rather than by systematic killing.

Documented forms of violence

Destruction of PropertyDenationalization

The forced removal, the dispersal quotas and the assimilationist purpose are documented in Ottoman interior ministry correspondence analysed in Ungor's study.