Hacı Topal Osman Ağa (1883 – 2 April 1923), was a Turkish officer, a militia leader of the National Forces, a volunteer regiment commander of the Turkish army during the Turkish War of Independence who eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel, and was a perpetrator of the Armenian and Pontic genocides. Besides the Greeks and Armenians, he also terrorised the local Muslim population who opposed him.
He was the commander of Mustafa Kemal's special Bodyguard Regiment. He showed usefulness in the War of Independence, but in 1923, when it was decided that he was the instigator of Trabzon Deputy Ali Şükrü Bey's murder, he was detained. He was captured and injured during clashes with military police, but he was killed by İsmail Hakkı Tekçe.
He was born in Giresun in 1883 and was of Turkish origin, more particularly the Chepni tribe. His father, Feridûnzâde Hacı Mehmed Efendi, was a hazelnut merchant. In his youth he helped with the family business and became a partner in a sawmill. He was known for his intelligence and determination, earning him the informal title of ağa ("lord") from his community. He later married and had two sons. Before the wars, Osman also worked as a boatman and owned a coffee shop in Giresun. Despite his father's offered paying the exemption fee of 45 golden liras, he refused to stay and joined the First Balkan War with his 65 friends, where they fought in Çorlu. He was wounded on 18 November 1912 near Çorlu during an assault against Bulgarian forces, when shrapnel struck his right kneecap. He insisted on being operated on without anaesthesia rather than have his leg amputated, causing him to become lame (Turkish: topal).
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.
After the fall of Trabzon to Russian forces on 17–18 April 1916, Osman and his band were used by Pirselimoğlu Hacı Hamdi Bey, commander of the Harşit front, to pursue military deserters and collect the war tax.
Topal Osman was known to have been responsible for massacres against Armenians and Greeks in the Pontus region where he was stationed during World War I and post-war years. 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 the Giresun-Karahisar-i Şarki region, unlike the Samsun-Amasya area which had Greek guerrilla bands, the Greek Orthodox population was largely unprotected. This made them particularly vulnerable to Osman, who both blackmailed them and, for a high fee, illegally transported some to Russia on his boat.
In 1916, Osman and a band of men attacked a Pontian Greek farming village, named Prossori, in Trebizond Vilayet. The men raped village women, killed young men, stole what they wanted from the houses, and beat a priest to death. On threat of death, the surviving villagers had to sign a document saying that the attackers were Armenian.
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.
Osman made similar attacks on Pontian Greeks after the war. In 1920, he and his men imprisoned all the Christian men of Giresun and held them for ransom. They raped the Christian women while their husbands and fathers were imprisoned. Every evening, Osman's team killed five or six prisoners.
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." In Merzifon that same year, Osman and his men broke into Christians' houses at night, raping, killing, or kidnapping the inhabitants. They also stole what they wanted from the townspeople. Many Christians took shelter in the local French school; Osman's brigands abducted and raped the women and girls, killed the men and boys, and later burned the school. Osman's band abducted many women and girls as they left the town. Some Turkish townspeople took part in the attacks, while those sympathetic to their Christian neighbors found themselves unable to stop the slaughter. Osman later traveled to Trebizond and began robbing houses, but was driven off by a Turkish gangster called Yahya.
Again in 1921, Topal Osman and his men traveled to Giresun and nearby Tirebolu. The same pattern repeated: They killed or deported the majority of local Pontian Greeks, but selected some women and girls for the troops' use.
A local Greek survivor recalled that when his village was 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 and also that he made a great fortune from the plundering of the churches. 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".
During the Greek resistance to the genocide, 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 fought against 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.