Muhacir

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Muhacir are the estimated millions of Ottoman Muslim citizens, and their descendants born after the onset of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, mostly Turks but also Albanians, Bosniaks, Greek Muslims, Circassians, Crimean Tatars, Pomaks, Serb Muslims,^[1] Georgian Muslims,^[2] and Muslim Roma^[3] who emigrated to East Thrace and Anatolia from the late 18th century until the end of the 20th century, mainly to escape ongoing persecution in their homelands. Up to a third of modern-day population in Turkey may have ancestry from these Turkish and other Muslim migrants.^[4]

170,000 Muslims were expelled from the part of Hungary taken by the Austrians from the Turks in 1699. Approximately 5-7 million Muslim migrants from the Balkans (from Bulgaria 1.15 million-1.5 million; Greece 1.2 million; Romania, 400,000; Yugoslavia, 800,000), Russia (500,000), the Caucasus (900,000, of whom two thirds remained, the rest going to Syria, Jordan and Cyprus) and Syria (500,000, mostly as a result of the Syrian Civil War) arrived in Ottoman Anatolia and modern Turkey from 1783 to 2016 of whom 4 million came by 1924, 1.3 million came post-1934 to 1945 and more than 1.2 million before the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War.

The influx of migration during the late 19th century and early 20th century was due to the loss of almost all Ottoman territory during the Balkan War of 1912-13 and World War I.^[5] These Muhacirs, or refugees, saw the Ottoman Empire, and subsequently the Republic of Turkey, as a protective "motherland".^[6] Many of the Muhacirs escaped to Anatolia as a result of the widespread persecution of Ottoman Muslims that occurred during the last years of the Ottoman Empire.

Thereafter, with the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, a large influx of Turks, as well as other Muslims, from the Balkans, the Black Sea, the Caucasus, the Aegean islands, the island of Cyprus, the Sanjak of Alexandretta (İskenderun), the Middle East, and the Soviet Union continued to arrive in the region, most of which settled in urban north-western Anatolia.^[7][8] During the Circassian genocide, 800,000–1,500,000 Muslim Circassians^[9] were systematically mass murdered, ethnically cleansed, and expelled from their homeland Circassia in the aftermath of the Russo-Circassian War (1763–1864).^[10][11] In 1923 more than half a million ethnic Muslims of various nationalities arrived from Greece as part of the population exchange between Greece and Turkey (the population exchange was not based on ethnicity but religious affiliation). After 1925, Turkey continued to accept Turkic-speaking Muslims as immigrants and did not discourage the emigration of members of non-Turkic minorities. More than 90 percent of all immigrants arrived from the Balkan countries. From 1934 till 1945, 229,870 refugees and immigrants came to Turkey.^[12]

From the 1930s to 2016 migration added two million Muslims in Turkey. The majority of these immigrants were the Balkan Turks who faced harassment and discrimination in their homelands.^[7] New waves of Turks and other Muslims expelled from Bulgaria and Yugoslavia between 1951 and 1953 were followed to Turkey by another exodus from Bulgaria in 1983–89, bringing the total of immigrants to nearly ten million people.^[5]

More recently, Meskhetian Turks have emigrated to Turkey from the former Soviet Union states (particularly in Ukraine - after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in 2014), and many Iraqi Turkmen and Syrian Turkmen have taken refuge in Turkey due to the recent Iraq War (2003-2011) and Syrian Civil War (2011–present). Since the Syrian Civil War more than 3.7 million Syrians migrated to Turkey, but the classification of the Syrian refugees as Muhacirs has been described as controversial and politically charged.^[13][14]