[3] There are up to 4,500,000 Azerbaijani citizens who reside in Turkey, according to information provided by the Diaspora Committee of Azerbaijan, although the factual accuracy of this figure is disputed.
The next wave of Azerbaijani immigration to eastern Turkey took place in 1918–1925, when many Muslim residents of then newly independent Armenia fled their homes, escaping massacres by armed bands of Armenian nationalists.
[citation needed] They were followed by former members of the overthrown government of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan and their families, as well as many upper-class Azerbaijanis, who fled to Turkey in fear of persecution by the Bolsheviks and settled primarily in Istanbul, Bursa and Ankara.
The signing of Soviet-Turkish non-aggression pacts in 1925 and 1935 created obstacles in continuing this activity in the form of arrests and bans on the publishing of anti-Soviet periodicals.
[31] Finally, starting from the early 1990s tens of thousands of immigrants from the newly independent Azerbaijan have made their way to Turkey due to economic reasons, settling mostly in big cities.
Nevertheless, differences still remain in the areas of religion (Azerbaijanis are mainly Shi'a, whereas Turks are mostly Sunni), dialect, and self-conception in terms of historical memory and ethnic/national consciousness.
[10] In 2011, Sinan Oğan, an ethnic Azerbaijani and a diaspora activist from Iğdır, won a seat in the Turkish parliament as a Nationalist Movement Party candidate.