Enver Pasha

Biography

İsmail Enver was born in Constantinople in 1881 and grew up partly in Monastir. He graduated from the Ottoman military academy in 1902 and the staff college in 1903, a classmate and rival of Mustafa Kemal, and spent 1903-1908 fighting insurgent bands in Ottoman Macedonia.

There he joined the Ottoman Freedom Society, soon merged into the Committee of Union and Progress, and built up its Monastir branch. In July 1908 he took to the hills with a guerrilla band alongside Ahmed Niyazi, and the Young Turk Revolution that restored the constitution made them popular heroes. He served as military attaché in Berlin, helped crush the 1909 countercoup, and fought the Italians in Libya.

On 23 January 1913 he led the raid on the Sublime Porte that brought the CUP to power, and in the Second Balkan War he retook Edirne. In January 1914 he became Minister of War and chief of the general staff and married into the Ottoman dynasty. With Talaat and Djemal he ruled the empire through the First World War: he steered it into the alliance with Germany, led the disastrous Sarıkamış offensive, and was one of the principal organisers of the Armenian genocide.

Dismissed in October 1918, he fled to Germany and then Soviet Russia, and a court-martial in Constantinople sentenced him to death in absentia in 1919. Barred by Mustafa Kemal from the Turkish national movement, he was sent by Lenin to Bukhara in 1921, defected to the Basmachi rebels, and was killed fighting the Red Army near Dushanbe in August 1922. His remains were reburied in Istanbul in 1996.