Sultan Abdul Hamid (1842–1918)

Sultan of the Ottoman Empire (1876–1909), son of Abdul Majid I. He succeeded his brother Murad V, who had been declared insane. Russia declared war on the Ottoman Empire in the second year of Abdul Hamid's reign, in retaliation for the Turks' mistreatment of the peoples of the Balkans. Sultan Abdul Hamid suffered heavy military losses in this war, which drove him to sign the Treaty of San Stefano in 1878, stripping him of most of his territories in Europe. Abdul Hamid refused to intervene in the massacres of the Armenians and Christians in Turkey in 1895 and 1896, and turned a blind eye to the international outcry. Internal dissatisfaction with his administration of the state encouraged a revolutionary organization known as the "Young Turks" to depose the Sultan in 1909 and exile him from the country.

Minister of Defense Enver Pasha (1881–1922)

A Turkish soldier and national commander who directed the Turkish war effort during the First World War. He was born in January 1881 and graduated from the Turkish Military Academy in 1902. He served in Macedonia, where he fought Greek and Bulgarian bands, and joined the "Young Turks" society in 1906. He came into public view as the hero responsible for the "Young Turk" revolution of 1908, when he restored the constitution drawn up in 1876. He became Minister of Defense in 1914. His greatest dream was to bring about an empire uniting all Turks, or all of Islam, but it ended in failure. After the victory of the Allies in 1918, Enver Pasha fled to Germany and then to Central Asia, where he tried to organize a secret Islamic resistance against the Soviets. He was killed in a battle against Soviet forces on August 4, 1922, in Tajikistan.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938)

Founder of the Turkish Republic and its first president (1923–1938). In recognition of his unique services to the Turkish nation, he was granted the title Atatürk ("Father of the Turks"). He was born in the city of Salonika (Thessaloniki) in Greece, and graduated from the Military Academy in Istanbul in 1905 with the rank of sergeant. He joined the "Young Turk" movement in 1908. He fought in Libya against Italy in 1911–1912. He organized the defense of the Dardanelles in the Balkan Wars (1912–1913) and earned his military reputation in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915. He formed a provisional government in Ankara in 1920, and recovered İzmir from Greece in October 1922. He founded the People's Party in 1923.

Armenia

One of the oldest sites of human civilization, and among the first lands in which grains of wheat, barley, corn, and rice were cultivated. It was occupied by the Assyrians, the Persians, the Romans, the Mongols, the Turks, and the Russians. Armenia enjoyed an independent state only for brief periods of time, the longest being the days of the reign of King "Tigranes the Great," when it extended from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean and controlled part of what is today called Syria. This period of independence ended in 69 BC with the Roman invasion. Armenia was subjected to the harshest hardships from external powers many times in its history, and was persecuted by the Russians and the Turks when it sought to be politically annexed. More than 200,000 Armenians were killed at the hands of Sultan Abdul Hamid between 1894 and 1896; more than a million other Armenians were slaughtered at the hands of the "Young Turk" government between 1915 and 1923; and more than a million other Armenians were scattered across the globe. In 1936 Armenia became one of the republics of the Soviet Union. In October 1991 the Soviet Union, under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev [?], declared the independence of Armenia and appointed "Levon Ter-Petrosyan" as the first president of the Armenian Republic. In 1992 Armenia became a member of the United Nations.

Al-Jazira and the Khabur

Al-Jazira, also called Diyar Rabi'a, lies between the Khabur and the Tigris. It was the homeland of the Taghlibids, or Banu Taghlib, one of the great Arab tribes, and was Syriac Orthodox Christian until the tenth century. Among its most famous men was Ghiyath ibn Ghiyath, known as al-Akhtal, the renowned poet, around the year 715. It was emptied of its people in the fourteenth century, then resettled in 1921, when the town of al-Hasakah, the city of Qamishli, and others were established there and urban development spread. The Khabur, or al-Khabura, is a vast province with numerous towns along the Khabur River between Ras al-Ayn and the Euphrates in the land of al-Jazira; the name of its river came to predominate, so the region was named after it.

The Young Turk Government

The constitution and parliament were renewed in the first years of the "Young Turk" government's rule. Numerous parties were formed, competing to hold the leadership. The most famous was the "Committee of Union and Progress," which was backed by the "Young Turks." The government's reforms reached all fields of activity and reached their peak in the secularization of the Islamic schools and courts, and the granting of women's rights, during the First World War (1914–1918).

The First Balkan War in 1912 led to a rebellion within the "Committee of Union and Progress" and an attempt to seize power by a triumvirate headed by Enver Pasha. It achieved complete control when it exploited the discord among the Balkan peoples to recover the Dardanelles in the Second Balkan War of 1913. At first, the triumvirate tried to avoid involvement in the First World War (1914–1918). But the German government showed its readiness to help recover the lost provinces. When the British government seized the Turkish warships that were being built in England, the government of the triumvirate entered the war on the side of the Central Powers in 1914.

The Turkish military forces achieved good success during the Gallipoli campaign, but did not succeed in the military campaign they launched across the Sinai Peninsula (whose aim was to seize control of Egypt and the Suez Canal). This campaign drove England to organize the Arab Revolt in the Arabian Peninsula. With Arab help, the British forces occupied Syria and reached as far as southern Anatolia by the end of the war.

Enver Pasha failed in his campaign into the Caucasus, owing to the poor organization of the campaign. The Russians invaded eastern and central Anatolia in 1915–1916. In addition to all of this, the internal revolts, the uprisings in the eastern provinces, famine, and epidemics took the lives of six million people of all religions, equivalent to a quarter of the original population. In the aftermath of the surrender, the Turkish government was placed under the control of the Allied powers, led by the English government. The Paris Peace Conference stipulated the separation of the Arabs and the Balkan states from the Turkish government, and placed the eastern and southern provinces of Anatolia under external supervision. Greek forces seized İzmir in 1922 and invaded southwestern Anatolia. In Anatolia, the Turkish national government emerged under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, and during the Turkish War of Independence (1918–1923) Atatürk rejected the Allied settlement. He drove out the Greek, English, French, and Italian occupation forces. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk signed the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, and the Turkish Republic was formed with its capital at Ankara.

The Kurds

Semi-nomadic tribes residing in the province of Kurdistan, the majority of whom belong to the Islamic religion (of the Sunni tradition). Their number was estimated at 26 million people according to statistics from 1990. More than half of them live in Turkey, and the rest live in Iran, Syria, and in several states of the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan). They came under the Seljuks in the eleventh century, and were brought into the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth century.

An independent Kurdish state did not come to pass (as provided for in the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920). In 1925 Mustafa Kemal began to crush Kurdish culture and identity, and the Turkish government still follows the same policy with the Kurds to this day. The Kurdish uprising began in Iraq and Iran until 1970, when the Iraqi government promised the Kurds autonomy over the region of northeastern Iraq. But Kurdish self-rule did not materialize; rather, the rebellion was suppressed in 1975 when Iran withdrew its support for the Kurds as one of the terms of the border agreement between Iran and Iraq.

The neighboring governments (Turkey, Iran, Syria) supported the Iraqi government in its stand against the Kurds' desire for self-rule. In March 1995 the Turkish government sent more than 35,000 armed soldiers into northern Iraq to punish the Kurdish rebels. The battles between Turkey and the Kurds since 1984 have led to the killing of more than 25,000 Kurds, and more than 600,000 Kurds remain in refugee camps under the protection of the United Nations as of 1992.