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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
72 
By a similar approach McCarthy arrives at losses proportionately similar for the 
Muslim population of Anatolia; since that population was much larger than the 
Greek, the losses represent a much larger number of souls at around three million
162
. 
But the figures are not straightforwardly comparable because the Muslim total, being 
as in the Greek case a population shortfall, seems to include the Anatolian share of 
Ottoman military casualties after 1912 which alone are estimated to have exceeded 
750,000
163
. 
No short summary can do justice to the horrors of this war: the individual experience 
of bloodshed, devastation, rape and forced removal is heart-breaking, as anyone can 
affirm who has heard it from the lips of a survivor or even read his or her story in 
cold print. There were tens if not hundreds of thousands of such experiences. In a 
conflict over territory, in which anyone of the wrong ethnicity could be a rival or a 
threat, the distinction between combatant and non-combatant broke down. The 
killing on the first day of the Greek landing at Smyrna in May 1919 which was 
accompanied by large scale looting, inexcusable as it was, should have been a 
curable aberration due to faulty planning and command, but it presaged instead a 
general collapse of civilised standards. The ensuing weeks saw, to take only three 
instances, the killing of Turkish “collaborators” and some Greeks at Bergama by 
Turkish irregulars, the killing of several hundred Turkish civilians at Menemen by 
Greek troops withdrawing from Bergama and wholesale murder and destruction 
reciprocally perpetrated at Aydın: and this against a general background of low level 
162
McCarthy, 146 
163
Zürcher 2010, 186. Zürcher 2004, 163 gives the Anatolian Muslim death toll as 2.5 million. 

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