Nuri Pasha (Killigil) §

Nuri Pasha, later Nuri Killigil, was an Ottoman officer and half-brother of Enver Pasha who commanded the Army of Islam in the Caucasus in 1918. His force, combining Ottoman regulars and Azerbaijani Muslim formations, advanced toward Baku after the collapse of Russian authority and the failure of the Baku Commune. The capture of Baku in September 1918 ended Bolshevik-Dashnak control of the city and was followed by massacres of Armenians, making Nuri a central figure in Azerbaijani memory of liberation and Armenian memory of catastrophe. His campaign also shows how Ottoman war aims, Pan-Turkic imagination and Azerbaijani state formation overlapped at the end of the First World War. After the Ottoman defeat he remained connected to Turkish military-industrial circles. In atlas terms he links Enver's wartime Pan-Turkist project to the birth of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and to the violent Baku sequence of March and September 1918.