September Days
| September Days | |
|---|---|
| Part of the persecution of Armenians | |
| Location | Baku, Azerbaijan Democratic Republic |
| Date | September 1918 |
| Deaths | 10,000–30,000 Armenians killed |
The September Days (Armenian: 1918 թ. Բաքվի հայերի կոտորած t'. Bakvi hahyeri kotorats, 1918 massacre of Baku Armenians) refers to a period during the Russian Civil War in September 1918 when Armenian inhabitants of Baku were massacred by Enver Pasha's Army of Islam and their local Azeri allies when they captured Baku, the soon-to-be capital of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic. According to most estimates, approximately 10,000 ethnic Armenians were killed in the violence, although some sources claim the number to be as high as 30,000. The massacre is said by some scholars to have been carried out in retaliation for the earlier March Days, in which Dashnak and Bolshevik forces had massacred Azerbaijani inhabitants of the city in March 1918. It was the last major massacre of World War I.
Since April 1918, the city of Baku had been governed by a Soviet (council) under the leadership of the Bolshevik Stepan Shahumyan. The Baku Sovnarkom or Soviet had been collaborating with the local branch of the Armenian Dashnaktsutiun party to establish control over the city and its surrounding environs but by the beginning of the summer of that year, it found itself under increasing threat by the advancing armies of the Ottoman Empire. The armed forces of the two sides clashed in June and July but the forces loyal to the Baku Soviet were unable to halt the joint Ottoman-Azerbaijani offensive and were forced to retreat. With the Ottomans and Azeris poised to strike Baku and with no promise of material support from Moscow, the Baku Soviet was forced to turn to a British expeditionary force which was stationed in the region under the command of Major General Lionel C. Dunsterville. Although Shahumyan was under orders from Moscow to deny entry to the British, he was overruled by his peers in the Soviet, who formally requested British help in late July. On July 31, Shahumyan and the other Bolshevik members of the Baku Sovnarkom resigned from their posts and control of the city was assumed by the Centro-Caspian Dictatorship.
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