Ottoman casualties of World War I

In addition to the 50,000 civilian deaths, an estimated 600,000 to 1.5 million Armenians, 300,000 to 750,000 Greeks, and 300,000 Assyrians, lebanese Maronites 200,000 were systematically targeted and killed by Turkish authorities either via the military or Kurdish gangs.

[3] The post-war partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, as well as the mass migrations that occurred during and after World War I,[3] made it difficult to estimate the exact number of civilian casualties.

However, the figure of military casualties is generally accepted as stated in Edward J. Erickson's Ordered to Die: A History of the Ottoman Army in the First World War.

Until World War I, Istanbul's civilian Muslim population and non-Muslim millets (minorities for some sources) were exempt from the conscription[8] Making exception of the indirect effects of often perennial arrangements, such as those that existed for the labor force of the arsenal and the dockyards.

Full conscription was applied in İstanbul for the first time during World War I, and a lasting phraseology describes the Dardanelles Campaign as Turkey having "buried a university in Çanakkale".

Soldiers, even at the front and who received the best care in comparative terms, were often (a) undernourished, (b) underclothed; troops deployed at high altitude in the mountains of Eastern Anatolia often had only summer clothes; Ottoman soldiers in Palestine often took great risks just to rob the British dead of their boots and even clothing; and (c) largely suffering from diseases (primarily cholera and typhus), which took many more lives than the actual fighting.

[11] The German general Friedrich Freiherr Kress von Kressenstein, in a report he wrote to army group headquarters on 20 October 1917, describes how a division (the 24th) that departed from Istanbul-Haydarpaşa Terminal with 10,057 men arrived at the Palestinian Front with only 4,635.

On the basis of previous Ottoman census, the Turkish historian Kamer Kasim (Manchester University, PhD), arrives at the conclusion that the movements of refugees from the Caucasus war zone had reached 1.500.000 people who were relocated in the Mediterranean region and Central Anatolia under very difficult conditions.

[15] Contributing to as many as 500,000 deaths of the civilians living in this region in the 1915–1917 period, the study lists eight basic factors: (a) the Entente powers' total blockage of the Syrian coast; (b) the inadequacy of the Ottoman supply strategy; deficient harvest and inclement weather; (c) diversion of supplies from Syria as a consequence of the Arab revolt; (d) the speculative frenzy of a number of unscrupulous local grain merchants; the callousness of German military official in Syria, and systematic hoarding by the population at large.