Enver Pasha

Enver Pasha (1881-1922), Turkish soldier and nationalist leader, who directed the Turkish war effort during World War I. Enver was born on November 23, 1881, in İstanbul. He graduated from Turkey's military academy in 1902 and served in Macedonia, where he fought Greek and Bulgarian nationalist guerrillas. In 1906 he joined the Young Turks, a secret nationalist group officially known as the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). He emerged as the principal hero of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which re-established the constitution granted in 1876.

Enver went to Berlin as military attaché in 1909 but rushed back to crush the İstanbul counter-revolution in April. He fought with distinction against Italy in Libya (1911-1912), returning to İstanbul during the disastrous Balkan Wars (1912-1913) to participate in a second CUP coup (January 1913). He recaptured Edirne from Bulgaria in July 1913 and became war minister in 1914, with the task of reforming a demoralized army. Enver helped negotiate Turkey's alliance with Germany in August 1914, and during World War I he pursued a policy that served German strategy. His dreams of an empire that would include all the Turkish or all the Islamic peoples, however, ended in failure. After the Allied victory in 1918, he fled to Germany and then to Central Asia, where he tried to organize Muslim resistance to the Soviets. He was killed in battle against Soviet forces in Tajikistan on August 4, 1922.