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The Turkish-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) has announced that its forces have captured the strategically important Watiya Air Base from the Libyan National Army.
The operation follows the announcement by Khalifa Haftar, commander of the Libyan National Army, in late April that he was terminating the UN-brokered political agreement with the Government of National Accord, claiming that his forces have a ‘popular mandate’ to rule the country. Although the agreement was intended to bring the two main belligerent groups together in a unity government, both sides frequently accused the other of breaching the agreement and armed hostilities continued.
The capture of the air base, located approximately 140 kilometres southwest of Tripoli, constitutes a major victory for the GNA forces, which have received a substantial boost in materials, troops and morale due to the increasing support it has received from Turkey over the last few months. While many regional powers, as well as numerous NATO countries and Russia, are widely considered to be directly and/ or indirectly supporting one side or the other in violation of a UN arms embargo, Turkey is the only country to have publicly declared its direct support for one of the belligerent parties and active participation in the conflict.
Turkey signed a bilateral agreement with the GNA in November of 2019 in defiance of the UN embargo, and in return was granted access to gas fields in the Mediterranean (a move that received an angry response from Greece in particular, which also claims sovereignty over the area affected). Turkey initially limited its support to weapons supplies and sending some advisors and technical experts, however more recently it has officially deployed some of its own troops supplemented by the transfer of up to several thousand militias from the battlefields of northern Syria.
The increasing participation of a foreign power in the conflict in Libya has inevitably brought other foreign powers to increase their involvement, aggravating the situation as developments in the country become enmeshed in broader regional and international disputes and rivalries for influence, resources and power.
It appears that Turkey can rely on the support of Qatar due to their close bilateral relationship (particularly the crucial support Turkey provided when Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates announced the blockade against Qatar), as well as the support of several NATO countries (at least unofficially). Not surprisingly, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia have denounced Turkey’s increased participation in the Libyan conflict and have in turn increased their support to the Libyan National Army, which also receives support from Egypt and possibly also indirectly from Russia, with numerous reports of Russian mercenaries (contractors of the company Wagner Group) present in the country.
A report filed earlier by the Libyan Observor quoted officials as saying that:
“GNA forces had seized Al-Watiya and all military equipment inside it from Haftar’s forces, including a Russian Pantsir anti-aircraft system that was provided by UAE to help Haftar in his war on Tripoli.”
The agency also refers to a news report from Turkey concerning weapons shipments from the UAE:
“A company from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has purchased six helicopters and two boats to raid ships off Libya in a move to support Khalifa Haftar in his ongoing war on Tripoli, a UN panel report revealed, according to Anadolu Agency.
According to confidential letters by a Panel of Experts, under the Security Council’s Libya Sanctions Committee, the sale of at least $18 million in military equipment was made through a Jordan-based company that was founded by Fulcrum Holding in the UAE.”
The shipment is reported to have included three Puma helicopters made in South Africa, and three French-built SA 341 attack helicopters purchased from Gabon.
The international entanglements are described in report by Deutsche Welle, commenting on the German government’s acknowledgement of weapons exports to several countries involved in the Libyan conflict despite the UN arms embargo. In this respect the report states that although Germany officially supports the arms embargo:
“Since hosting a Libya summit four months ago, the German government has approved arms exports worth €331 million ($358 million) to countries accused of supporting warring parties in the country, according a report from the German Economy Ministry seen by news agency DPA.
Between January 20 and May 3, Germany approved €308.2 million in arms destined for Egypt alone, the ministry said. The information was provided in response to a request from Germany’s leftist die Linke party.
The German government also approved €15.1 million in arms exports for Turkey and €7.7 million for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), DPA reported.
Turkey supports the Government of National Accord (GNA), which is backed by the UN, while Russia, Egypt, and the UAE support rival forces led by Khalifa Haftar…
Egypt, Turkey, Russia, and the UAE were among the signatories. United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres later accused these four countries of breaching the embargo and continuing to provide arms for the conflict.
‘I am deeply frustrated with what’s happening in Libya,’ Guterres said at a press conference in February. ‘They committed not to interfere in the Libyan process and they committed not to send weapons or participate in any way in the fighting. The truth is that the Security Council (arms) embargo remains violated.’”
While the recent military gains of the Libyan National Army achieved with Turkey’s assistance have improved their position considerably and could pave the way for further advances, they are also likely to provoke a response from Turkey’s rivals and further escalate the conflict in Libya.
The movie Genocide – A true story, which moved and was applauded in every room shown during the anniversary year of the Pontian Genocide, will be shown worldwide on YouTube on Tuesday, May 19
The movie Genocide – A true story, will be shown on YouTube in top 4K cinematic quality and with the option of choosing Greek, English and subtitles for people with hearing problems, as reported by infognomonpolitics.gr
To watch the movie, you need to subscribe to the REC Productions YouTube channel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_genocide
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkHy-tkTBYc&feature=emb_title
Interesting. Do you know what happened to the Greek muslims? Are there any left, in Greece, maybe?
Yes there are in northern Greece and they are fine.
”The Turks of Greece left few traces. They disappeared suddenly and finally in the spring of 1821 unmourned and unnoticed by the rest of the world….It was hard to believe then that Greece once contained a large population of Turkish descent, living in small communities all over the country, prosperous farmers, merchants, and officials, whose families had known no other home for hundreds of years…They were killed deliberately, without qualm or scruple, and there was no regrets either then or later”
William St Clair.
Ah yes , they are fine and living in Northern Greece.
BS
ROFL
ΙΝ 1821 there was the start of the Greek war of independence. It was a war between armies. Nothing to do with the crap you posted !
So Pontians in 1919 were not armed and they were not rebelling ?
Have you read Lausanne treaty ?
LAUSANNE TREATY ARTICLE 59.
Greece recognises her obligation to make reparation for the damage caused in Anatolia by the THE ACTS OF THE GREEK ARMY or administration which were CONTRARY TO THE LAWS OF WAR.
Signed by Elefterios Venizelos Greek PM , stamped by Greek state seal.
So everything was fine and dandy then ?
there fine ?ha ha ha you are a fu…..kn arsssss…….ho.llllllll
The Muslim minority of Greece is the only explicitly recognized minority in Greece. It numbered 97,605 (0.91% of the population) according to the 1991 census, and unofficial estimates ranged up to 140,000 people or 1.24% of the total population, according to the United States Department of State.
The minority is always represented in the Greek parliament, and is currently represented by PASOK members Çetin Mandacı and Ahmet Hacıosman. During the 2002 local elections, approximately 250 Muslim municipal and prefectural councillors and mayors were elected, and the Vice-Prefect of Rhodope is also a Muslim.
Now tell me, what happened to the elected Kurds in the Turkish parliament…? In which jail are they in ? ((Those that have not ”mysteriously” disappeared or commited ”suicide” …?))
You are talking of Turks in Greece, not Greek muslims, meaning Greek speaking muslims of Greek origin.
They even killed their own kin who were muslims.
Probably Turks. I know some Greek muslims from Crete, living in Turkey, who managed to flee the Greek prosecution and reached Turkey.
I GET THE POPCORN READY to watch something never happened …..typical propaganda …souflaki boy
I like Souvlaki and Gyros foods.
I have been following the two sides going at it with neither seeming to counter the others statements which comes down to a tirade of comments that The Greeks did this and the Turks did that…
One positive is that at least it gives more balance – the atrocities at the hands of the Turks was missing some important history that might explain some of the animosity such as an opportunistic Greece attempting to carve out parts of the former Ottoman Empire after the draconian Sevres Treaty dismembered the empire and left no viable state for the Turks.
The armed rebellion against the Sevres Treaty led by Kemal Ataturk was very successful in kicking out the foreign vultures that descended upon the former Ottoman lands. Given the situation I would get out if I was Greek and Ataturk forces were approaching – I would not expect kindness from the Turks that is for sure.
Lesson: there is no actions taken in a vacuum as there is a history to be known to understand the cause and then the effect.
“A company from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has purchased six helicopters and two boats to raid ships off Libya in a move to support Khalifa Haftar in his ongoing war on Tripoli,”
So UAE soldiers will fast rope to Turkish vessels protected by Turkish navy , in mediterranean. LOL.
Have you found Malta yet…?
Yes we did , but it was long after we found greece and slaved them for 400 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_pogrom
The Istanbul pogrom, also known as the Istanbul riots or September events (Greek: Σεπτεμβριανά Septemvriana, “Events of September”; Turkish: 6–7 Eylül Olayları, “Events of 6–7 September”), were organized mob attacks directed primarily at Istanbul’s Greek minority on 6–7 September 1955. The riots were orchestrated by the Tactical Mobilisation Group, the special operations unit of the Turkish Army set up as Operation Gladio’s Turkish branch;[dubious – discuss] the Counter-Guerrilla (another Operation Gladio-related organisation),[dubious – discuss] and the National Security Service, the precursor of today’s National Intelligence Organisation. The events were triggered by the false news that the day before, Greeks had bombed the Turkish consulate in Thessaloniki, in northern Greece—the house where Mustafa Kemal Atatürk had been born in 1881. A bomb planted by a Turkish usher at the consulate, who was later arrested and confessed, incited the events. The Turkish press, conveying the news in Turkey, was silent about the arrest and instead insinuated that Greeks had set off the bomb.
A Turkish mob, most of whom had been trucked into the city in advance, assaulted Istanbul’s Greek community for nine hours. Although the mob did not explicitly call for Greeks to be killed, over a dozen people died during or after the attacks as a result of beatings and arson. Armenians and Jews were also harmed. The police remained mostly ineffective, and the violence continued until the government declared martial law in İstanbul and called in the army to put down the riots.
The pogrom greatly accelerated emigration of ethnic Greeks from Turkey, and the Istanbul region in particular. The Greek population of Turkey declined from 119,822 in 1927, to about 7,000 in 1978. In Istanbul alone, the Greek population decreased from 116,108 to 49,081 between 1955 and 1960.
The 2008 figures released by the Turkish Foreign Ministry placed the number of Turkish citizens of Greek descent at 3,000–4,000; while according to the Human Rights Watch (2006) their number was estimated to be 2,500.
Some see the attacks as a continuation of a process of Turkification that started with the decline of the Ottoman Empire, rather than being a contemporary, bilateral issue. To back this claim they adduce the fact that roughly 40% of the properties attacked belonged to other minorities. The pogrom has been compared in some media to the Kristallnacht, the 1938 pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany.
Historian Alfred-Maurice de Zayas has written that in his view, despite the small number of deaths in the pogrom, the riots met the “intent to destroy in whole or in part” criterion of the Genocide Convention.
In 2009, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan said that the Turks have committed mistakes. He said: “The minorities have been expelled from our country in the past. It was a result of fascist policy.
”For three days the miserable inhabitants were given over to lust and cruelty of a mob of savages. Neither sex nor age was spared. Women and children were tortured before being put to death. So great was the slaughter that Kolokotronis himself says that, from the gate to the citadel his horse’s hoofs never touched the ground. His path of triumph was carpeted with corpses. At the end of two days, the wretched remnant of the Mussulmans were deliberately collected, to the number of some two thousand souls, of every age and sex, but principally women and children, were led out to a ravine in the neighboring mountains and there butchered like cattle.[31]”’
But.. but .. it was a fight between two armies. But. but… greeks dont do such things.
Most of the Greeks in the Greek quarter of Constantinople were massacred.
On Easter Sunday, 9 April 1821, Gregory V was hanged in the central outside portal of the Ecumenical Patriarchate by the Ottomans. His body was mutilated and thrown into the sea, where it was rescued by Greek sailors. One week later, the former Ecumenical Patriarch Cyril VI was hanged in the gate of the Adrianople’s cathedral. This was followed by the execution of two Metropolitans and twelve Bishops by the Turkish authorities. By the end of April, a number of prominent Greeks had been decapitated by Turkish forces in Constantinople, including Constantine Mourousis, Levidis Tsalikis, Dimitrios Paparigopoulos, Antonios Tsouras, and the Phanariotes Petros Tsigris, Dimitrios Skanavis and Manuel Hotzeris, while Georgios Mavrocordatos was hanged. In May, the Metropolitans Gregorios of Derkon, Dorotheos of Adrianople, Ioannikios of Tyrnavos, Joseph of Thessaloniki, and the Phanariote Georgios Callimachi and Nikolaos Mourousis were decapitated on the Sultan’s orders in Constantinople.
The Turks and Egyptians ravaged several Greek islands during the Greek Revolution, including those of Samothrace (1821), Chios (1822), Kos, Rhodes, Kasos and Psara (1824).
The massacre of Samothrace occurred on September 1, 1821, where a Turkish fleet under the Kapudan Pasha Nasuhzade Ali Pasha killed most of the male population, took the women and children to slavery and burned down their homes.
The Chios Massacre of 1822 became one of the most notorious occurrences of the war. Mehmet Ali, the Pasha of Egypt, dispatched his fleet to Kasos and on May 27, 1824 killed the population. A few weeks later, the fleet under Husrev Pasha destroyed the population of Psara.
Shortly after Lord Byron’s death in 1824, the Turks arrived to besiege the Greeks once more at Missolonghi. Turkish commander Reşid Mehmed Pasha was joined by Ibrahim Pasha, who crossed the Gulf of Corinth, and during the early part of 1826, Ibrahim had more artillery and supply brought in. However, his men were unable to storm the walls, and in 1826, following a one-year siege, Turkish-Egyptian forces conquered the city on Palm Sunday, and exterminated almost its entire population. The attack increased support for the Greek cause in western Europe, with Eugène Delacroix depicting the massacre in his painting Greece Expiring on the Ruins of Missolonghi.
During the great massacre of Heraklion on 24 June 1821, remembered in the area as “the great ravage” (“ο μεγάλος αρπεντές”, “o megalos arpentes”), the Turks also killed the metropolite of Crete, Gerasimos Pardalis, and five more bishops: Neofitos of Knossos, Joachim of Herronissos, Ierotheos of Lambis, Zacharias of Sitia and Kallinikos, the titular bishop of Diopolis. After the Sultan’s vassal in Egypt was sent to intervene with the Egyptian fleet on 1825, Muhammad Ali’s son, Ibrahim, landed in Crete and began to massacre the majority Greek community.
In July 1821, the head of the Cypriot Orthodox Church Archbishop Kyprianos, along with 486 prominent Greek Cypriots, amongst them the Metropolitans Chrysanthethos of Paphos, Meletios of Kition and Lavrentios of Kyrenia, were executed by hanging or beheading by the Ottomans in Nicosia.
The French consul M. Méchain reported on 15 September 1821 that the local pasha, Küçük Mehmet, carried out several days of massacres in Cyprus since July 9 and continued on for forty days, despite the Vizier’s command to end the plundering since 20 July 1821.
On October 15, a massive Turkish Cypriot mob seized and hanged an Archbishop, five Bishops, thirty six ecclesiastics, and hanged most of the Greek Cypriots in Larnaca and the other towns. By September and October 1822, sixty two Greek Cypriot villages and hamlets had entirely disappeared and many people, including clerics, were massacred.
Historian David Brewer writes that in the first year of the revolution, a Turkish army descended on the city of Patras and slaughtered all of the civilians of the settlement, razing the city.
The forces of Ibrahim Pasha were extremely brutal in the Peloponnese, burning the major port of Kalamata to the ground and slaughtering the city’s inhabitants; they also ravaged the countryside and were heavily involved in the slave trade.
Although the total estimates of the casualties vary, the Turkish, Muslim Albanian and Jewish population of the Peloponnese had ceased to exist as a settled community.[2] Some estimates of the Turkish and Muslim Albanian civilian deaths by the rebels range from 15,000, 20,000 or more out of 40,000 Muslim residents[32][33] to 30,000 only in Tripolitsa.[34] Massacres of Turkish civilians started simultaneously with the outbreak of the revolt
But but greeks are good people. Tthey dont do massacres. Everybody loves them, they are civilized people.
Greek villages in Macedonia were destroyed, and many of the inhabitants were put to death. Thomas Gordon reports executions of Greek civilians in Serres and Thessaloniki, beheadings of merchants and clergy, and seventy burnt villages.
In May 1821, the governor Yusuf Bey ordered his men to kill any Greeks in Thessaloniki they found in the streets.
Haïroullah Effendi reported that then and “for days and nights the air was filled with shouts, wails, screams. “The Metropolitan bishop was brought in chains, together with other leading notables, and they were tortured and executed in the square of the flour market.
Some were hanged from the plane trees around the Rotonda. Others were killed in the cathedral where they had fled for refuge, and their heads were gathered together as a present for Yusuf Bey.
In 1822, Abdul Abud, the Pasha of Thessaloniki, arrived on 14 March at the head of a 16,000 strong force and 12 cannons against Naousa. The Greeks defended Naousa with a force of 4,000 under the overall command of Zafeirakis Theodosiou and Anastasios Karatasos. The Turks attempted to take the town on 16 March 1822, and on 18 and 19 March, without success. On 24 March the Turks began a bombardment of the city walls that lasted for days.
After requests for the town’s surrender were dismissed by the Greeks, the Turks charged the gate of St George on 31 March.
The Turkish attack failed but on 6 April, after receiving fresh reinforcements of some 3,000 men, the Turkish army finally overcame the Greek resistance and entered the city.
In an infamous incident, many of the women committed suicide by falling down a cliff over the small river Arapitsa. Abdul Abud laid the town and surrounding area to waste.
The Greek population was massacred.
The destruction of Naousa marked the end of the Greek revolution in Macedonia in 1822.
Historian George Finlay claimed that the extermination of the Muslims in the rural districts was the result of a premeditated design and it proceeded more from the suggestions of men of letters, than from the revengeful feelings of the people.[37] William St. Clair wrote that: “The orgy of genocide exhausted itself in the Peloponnese only when there were no more Turks to kill.”[28]
So when greek orgy of genocide finishes ? It finishes when there is no one left to kill…
Vrachori, modern day Agrinio, was an important town in West-Central Greece. It contained, besides the Christian population, some five hundred Musulman families and about two hundred Jews.[39] The massacres in Vrachori commenced with the Jews and soon Musulmans shared the same fate.[29]
Rudolph J. Rummel estimated that from 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes killed from 3,500,000 to over 4,300,000 Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians.
Rummel estimates that 440,000 Armenian civilians and 264,000 Greek civilians were killed by Turkish forces during the Turkish War of Independence between 1919 and 1922.
However, he also gives the figures in his study between 1.428 to 4.388 million dead of whom 2.781 millions were Armenian, Greek, Nestorians, Turks, Circassians and others, in line 488. British historian and journalist Arnold J. Toynbee stated that when he toured the region he saw numerous Greek villages that had been burned to the ground.
Toynbee also stated that the Turkish troops had clearly, individually and deliberately burned down each house in these villages, pouring petrol on them and taking care to ensure that they were totally destroyed.
There were massacres throughout 1920–23, the period of the Turkish War of Independence, especially of Armenians in the East and the South, and against the Greeks in the Black Sea Region.
There was also significant continuity between the organizers of the Armenian and Greek Genocides between 1915 and 1918 and 1919–1921.
A Turkish governor, Ebubekir Hazim Tepeyran of the Sivas province, said in 1919 that the massacres were so horrible that he could not bear to report them.
He referred to the atrocities committed against Greeks in the Black Sea region, and according to the official tally 11,181 Greeks were murdered in 1921 by the Central Army under the command of Nurettin Pasha (who is infamous for the killing of Archbishop Chrysostomos).
Some parliamentary deputies demanded that Nurettin Pasha be sentenced to death and it was decided to put him on trial, although the trial was later revoked by the intervention of Mustafa Kemal. Taner Akçam wrote that according to one newspaper, Nurettin Pasha had suggested to kill all the remaining Greek and Armenian populations in Anatolia, a suggestion rejected by Mustafa Kemal.
“Such a tragedy seems to be more a side-effect of the butchering of the Turks of Tripolis, the last Ottoman stronghold in the South where the Jews had taken refuge from the fighting, than a specific action against Jews per se.”[43] However, in the case of Vrachori,[29] a massacre of a Jewish population occurred first, and the Jewish population in the Peloponnese regardless was effectively decimated, unlike that of the considerable Jewish populations of the Aegean, Epirus and other areas of Greece in the several following conflicts between Greeks and the Ottomans later in the century. Many Jews within Greece and throughout Europe were however supporters of the Greek revolt, and many assisted the Greek cause. Following the state’s establishment, it also then attracted many Jewish immigrants from the Ottoman Empire, as one of the first European states in the world to grant legal equality to Jews.[43]
Greek revolutionaries even killed jews who were supporting ”greek revolution”
There were also several contemporary Western newspaper articles reporting the atrocities committed by Turkish forces against Christian populations living in Anatolia, mainly Greek and Armenian civilians.
For instance, according to the London Times, “The Turkish authorities frankly state it is their deliberate intention to let all the Greeks die, and their actions support their statement.”
An Irish paper, the Belfast News Letter wrote, “The appalling tale of barbarity and cruelty now being practiced by the Angora Turks is part of a systematic policy of extermination of Christian minorities in Asia Minor.”
According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Turks felt that they needed to murder their Christian minorities due to Christian superiority in terms of industriousness and the consequent Turkish feelings of jealousy and inferiority.
The paper wrote: “The result has been to breed feelings of alarm and jealousy in the minds of the Turks, which in later years have driven them to depression. They believe that they cannot compete with their Christian subjects in the arts of peace and that the Christians and Greeks especially are too industrious and too well educated as rivals. Therefore, from time to time they have striven to try and redress the balance by expulsion and massacre. That has been the position generations past in Turkey again if the Great powers are callous and unwise enough to attempt to perpetuate Turkish misrule over Christians.” According to the newspaper the Scotsman, on August 18 of 1920, in the Feival district of Karamusal, South-East of Ismid in Asia Minor, the Turks massacred 5,000 Christians. There were also massacres during this period against Armenians, continuing the policies of the 1915 Armenian Genocide according to some Western newspapers.
On February 25, 1922, 24 Greek villages in the Pontus region were burnt to the ground. An American newspaper, the Atlanta Observer wrote: “The smell of the burning bodies of women and children in Pontus” said the message “comes as a warning of what is awaiting the Christian in Asia Minor after the withdrawal of the Hellenic army.
In the first few months of 1922, 10,000 Greeks were killed by advancing Kemalist forces, according to Belfast News Letter.
According to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin the Turks continued the practice of slavery, seizing women and children for their harems and raping numerous women.
The Christian Science Monitor wrote that Turkish authorities also prevented missionaries and humanitarian aid groups from assisting Greek civilians who had their homes burned, the Turkish authorities leaving these people to die despite abundant aid. The Christian Science Monitor wrote: “the Turks are trying to exterminate the Greek population with more vigor than they exercised towards the Armenians in 1915.”
The crews and passengers of Turkish ships captured by Greek cruisers were often put to death: two hydriot brigs captured a Turkish ship laden with a valuable cargo, and carrying a number of passengers. Among these was a recently deposed Sheikh-ul-Islam, or patriarch of the Orthodox Muslims, who was said to be going to Mecca for pilgrimage. It was his efforts to prevent the cruel reprisals which, at Constantinople, followed the news of the massacres in Peloponnese, which brought him into disfavor, and caused his exile.[41] There were also several other Turkish families on board. British historian of the Greek revolt, W. Alison Phillips, noted (drawing from Finlay): The Hydriots murdered them all in cold blood, helpless old men, ladies of rank, beautiful slaves, and little children were butchered like cattle. The venerable old man, whose crime had been an excess of zeal on behalf of the Greeks, was forced to see his family outraged and murdered before his eyes…[42]
Atrocities against Pontic Greeks living in the Pontus region is recognized in Greece and Cyprus as the Pontian Genocide. According to a proclamation made in 2002 by the then-governor of New York (where a sizeable population of Greek Americans resides), George Pataki, the Greeks of Asia Minor endured immeasurable cruelty during a Turkish government-sanctioned systematic campaign to displace them; destroying Greek towns and villages and slaughtering additional hundreds of thousands of civilians in areas where Greeks composed a majority, as on the Black Sea coast, Pontus, and areas around Smyrna; those who survived were exiled from Turkey and today they and their descendants live throughout the Greek diaspora.
By 9 September 1922, the Turkish army had entered Smyrna, with the Greek authorities having left two days before. Large scale disorder followed, with the Christian population suffering under attacks from soldiers and Turkish inhabitants.
The Greek archbishop Chrysostomos had been lynched by a mob which included Turkish soldiers, and on September 13, a fire from the Armenian quarter of the city had engulfed the Christian waterfront of the city, leaving the city devastated.
The responsibility for the fire is a controversial issue; some sources blame Turks, and some sources blame Greeks or Armenians.
Some 50,000 to 100,000 Greeks and Armenians were killed in the fire and accompanying massacres.
According to the population exchange treaty signed by both the Turkish and Greek governments, Greek orthodox citizens of Turkey and Turkish and Greek Muslim citizens residing in Greece were subjected to the population exchange between these two countries.
Approximately 1,500,000 Orthodox Christians, being ethnic Greeks and ethnic Turks from Turkey and about 500,000 Turks and Greek Muslims from Greece were uprooted from their homelands.
M. Norman Naimark claimed that this treaty was the last part of an ethnic cleansing campaign to create an ethnically pure homeland for the Turks Historian Dinah Shelton similarly wrote that “the Lausanne Treaty completed the forcible transfer of the country’s Greeks.”
A large part of the Greek population was forced to leave their ancestral homelands of Ionia, Pontus and Eastern Thrace between 1914–22.
These refugees, as well as Greek Americans with origins in Anatolia, were not allowed to return to their homelands after the signing of theTreaty of Lausanne.
Greek Atrocities in Anatolia 1
Village of Melek Hadji Ismail, of the village of Evliafaki Kasakli, after being sworn in, gave the following evidence before the inquiry commission of the intelligence service of the West Front. “As I fled prior to the coming of the enemy, I don’t know what happened in Evliafaki Kavakly after I left it. On my arrival at Melek I heard the adjutant of the Greek Commander say to his soldiers not to burn the village which was nearly empty at the time, as most of the inhabitants had taken refuge I the mountains. The Greeks removed all the furniture from the houses and drove the cattle away and set the village on fire. Being not acquainted with the people of that village I am unable to tell the names of the women who were shamefully outraged by the Greeks. I saw them drag away a girl from Broussa who fell a victim to their lust. During the night they abducted many other women. They tried to extort money from one Ali Agha, who refused to accede to their demand as was thereupon killed. They massacred six persons, among them a man named Abdoullah, son of Nizameddin, stabbing him with their bayonets and throwing afterwards his corpse from the roof of a house down into the street.”
[Imgur](https://i.imgur.com/BWjXI8L.png)