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The siege and capture of Tripoli (Greek: Πολιορκία της Τρίπολης) by Greek rebels in the summer of 1821 marked the first decisive victory of the Greek rebels against the Ottoman Empire, which had began earlier that year. At the same time, it is notable for the large-scale massacre of its Muslim population which occurred after the city's fall to the Greeks. Background Tripoli was the administrative center for the Ottoman occupation of the Peloponnese, making it an important target for the Greek revolutionaries. Massacre of Civilians According to William St. Clair, upwards of twenty thousand Turkish men, women and children were killed by their Greek neighbors in a few weeks of slaughter.[1] Other estimates of the Turkish and Muslim Albanian civilian deaths by the rebels range from 15000 out of 40000 Muslim residents[2] to 30000 only in Tripolis[3] to 60000 (Turkish claim), but the revolution was successful in removing the entire Turkish and Muslim Albanian population from the Peloponnese,[citation needed] whether through death or displacement. The Turkish and Muslim Albanian population of the Peloponnese had ceased to exist as a settled community.[4] For the massacres that occurred following the capture of Tripolitza, Alison Phillips noted that : " For three days the miserable inhabitants were given over to lust and cruelty of a mob of savages. Neither sex nor age was spared… So great was the slaughter that Kolokotronis himself says that, from the gate to the citadel his horse’s hoofs never touched the ground... At the end of two days, the wretched remnant of the Mussulmans were deliberately collected, to the number of some two thousand souls, of every age and sex, but principally women and children, were led out to a ravine in the neighboring mountains and there butchered like cattle.”[5] References
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