While still limping, Osman Ağa joined
World War I with 93 friends, later joined by 6 prisoners in
Trabzon. They charged the
Russian army, causing many casualties for the Russians but also the death of 6 friends of Osman Ağa. During the war, he caught
typhoid, leading to him returning to
Giresun. After recovering, he returned to the war. He joined the 37th Division in
Bayburt, which eventually retreated to
Harşit. The Russians couldn't go any further. Osman Ağa returned to Giresun to recruit more soldiers and went back to fight with 1500 young volunteers. After the
October Revolution took place, the Russians withdrew from the battle, leading the Turks to reconquer
Batum. Osman Ağa's battalion was the first one to enter
Batum. While in
Trabzon, Osman made a name for himself in the spring of 1915 as commander of a squadron of gangs. Osman, along with
Ishak Çavuş, was known to have partaken in the drowning and massacres of the local Armenian population. During this time, Osman had also profited from the confiscation of assets and property belonging to the Armenians. In July 1916, Osman arrested a group of men whom he accused of attempting to flee Giresun by sea, charging them with
espionage. He subsequently detained three wealthy Orthodox merchants on accusations of collaborating with the arrested men. One of them, Ioannis Deligiorgis, died in custody. As a result, Osman was court martialled, and served several months in prison. In
Çarşamba in 1921, Turks rounded up the Christian women. The majority were sent on a
death march, while a selected minority of "good-looking women...were being held for the pleasure of the troops under Osman Ağa," according to an American observer serving aboard the
USS Overton. Such attacks by Osman and his men were overt and frequent. An American serving aboard the
USS Williamson spoke to a local man, who said that "what had happened made him ashamed to be a Turk." Osman later traveled to
Trebizond and began robbing houses, but was driven off by a Turkish gangster called Yahya. A local Greek survivor recalled that when his village attacked in 1921 by Osman and his men, who were armed with guns and axes: "They gathered people in the middle of the village. They separated off the children. They stripped them and threw them into wells. Then they threw stones on top of them. The wells groaned. They filled the church, the school, and the barns with the old people and set fire to them." In 1922, Osman led his men to Ordu. Few Christian men remained, but many women and children did. Osman and his men picked the women and girls they wanted from the crowd. They forced all the other Christians into two buildings, which they set on fire. Osman and his men raped the selected women throughout the night, then "butchered" them the next day. Osman's men did the same in nine nearby villages. Foreign correspondents accused him as the principal organizer of the persecution against the Greeks at the
Pontus region In addition,
The Daily Telegraph's correspondent called him the "terror of the Pontus" adding that: "his career of crime and violence, for the equal of which one must go back to the Dark Ages". According to an Ottoman administrator, Osman was infamous for murdering "10-15 Orthodox Christians a day". His activities against the Greeks were so brutal that even
Adnan Bey sent a letter to the government in Ankara asking to take measures against Topal Osman.
Andrew Mango, in his Atatürk's biography, described Osman as "a sadistic ethnic cleanser of Armenians and Greeks, and the hammer of Mustafa Kemal's Muslim opponents".
Feud with Anton Paşa Anton Paşa, born Antonis Hacılefteryu (
Greek: Αντώνης Χατζηελευθερίου), was an important
Turkish-speaking Pontic Greek rebel and armed leader who operated in the
Bafra/
Samsun area and openly opposed Topal Osman. Out of fear, Topal Osman and his men avoided fighting directly against Anton Paşa and instead put a 50,000
Ottoman lira reward on his head, while abducting his wife and taking her hostage, in hopes that Anton Paşa surrenders. However, instead of surrendering, he stormed the gendarmerie station in Bafra with a group of Pontic Greek partisans and took the soldiers hostage. He threatened to kill the soldiers and then burn Bafra if his wife was not freed. After this event, his wife was released from captivity. Anton Paşa was betrayed by two of his own men, who had been bribed, and ultimately killed in 1917, although his wife, Captain Pelagia, kept fighting until 1923. ==Turkish War of Independence==