From 1691 the Ottoman government made the settlement of pastoral tribes a systematic policy, ordering named confederations to occupy fixed villages on depopulated land, above all along the Euphrates around Raqqa, and holding tribal leaders responsible for keeping their people there. The stated aims were to end raiding on caravan routes and settled villages, to bring nomads onto the tax registers, and to repopulate abandoned districts. Enforcement was uneven: many tribes fled back to their highland pastures and were ordered south again in successive decrees through the eighteenth century, and settlement in the malarial Euphrates lands carried heavy mortality. A parallel and better-documented campaign, the Firka-i Islahiye of 1865, used a reform army to settle tribes in Cukurova and the Amanus. The policy is one of the clearest early-modern instances of a state moving populations to make them legible and taxable rather than to punish them.
The Ottoman state ordered Turkmen, Yoruk and Kurdish tribal confederations to settle in designated villages, chiefly in the Raqqa region and Cukurova
Ottoman registers record the named Turkmen, Yoruk and Kurdish confederations as taxable households and tent-groups assigned to specific villages, not as a counted population, and the coverage of the iskan decrees shifted across six decades between Raqqa, Cukurova and western Anatolia. Sixteenth-century estimates that roughly a quarter of Anatolia's population was nomadic cannot safely be carried forward to 1700.
No death toll was recorded. Ottoman documents and later scholarship note high mortality among tribes settled in the malarial Euphrates plains, and punitive expeditions against tribes that fled, but neither was counted.
Syria, Turkey