Muhacir

Muhacir or Muhajir (from مهاجر) are the estimated 10 million 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, and Muslim Roma 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. Today, between a quarter and a third of Turkey's population of 85 million have ancestry from these Muhacirs. 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. 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. 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. These Muhacirs, or refugees, saw the Ottoman Empire, and subsequently the Republic of Turkey, as a protective "motherland". 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.