Enver Pasha (İsmail Enver)
Ottoman Minister of War 1914–18
Biography
Born in Constantinople to a railway-official family of Albanian-Turkish background; graduated from the Ottoman Military Academy and became the romantic figurehead of the 1908 Young Turk revolution. As Minister of War from January 1914 he engineered the secret Ottoman-German alliance and personally commanded the Third Army at Sarıkamış (December 1914 – January 1915), losing some 60,000 troops to cold and Russian fire, a catastrophe blamed on Armenian "treachery" in CUP propaganda thereafter. He shared overall responsibility with Talaat for the genocide and personally directed the Special Organisation killing squads. Fled to Germany on a U-boat in November 1918 after the Mudros armistice; sentenced to death in absentia by the 1919 Ottoman tribunals. Reinvented himself as a pan-Turkic adventurer in Soviet Central Asia, switched sides to lead the Basmachi revolt, and was killed in a Red Army cavalry skirmish near Baljuvon in present-day Tajikistan on 4 August 1922.
Events
| Year | Event | Role |
|---|---|---|
| 1914 | Ottoman entry into the First World War | decision-maker |
| 1914 | Sarıkamış catastrophe | commander |
| 1915 | Armenian Genocide | perpetrator |
| 1915 | Promulgation of the Tehcir Law | decision-maker |
| 1919 | Ottoman courts-martial of CUP leaders | aggrieved |
Party affiliations
| Party | Role | Years |
|---|---|---|
| Committee of Union and Progress (CUP / İttihat ve Terakki) | War Minister | , |