By the early 1900s the region of Cappadocia was still inhabited by Christian Cappadocian Greeks as well as Muslim Turks and also communities of Armenians and Kurds. By the beginning of the First World War, the Greeks of Anatolia were besieged by the Young Turks. Thousands of Greeks were massacred, approximately 750,000 Anatolian Greeks were massacred in an act of Genocide and 750,000 exiled. The Greeks were targeted prior to and alongside the Armenians and Assyrians. Ionian and Cappadocian Greek deaths alone totaled 397,000, while Pontian Greek deaths numbered 353,000 people. Turkish official Rafet Bey was active in the Genocide of the Greeks of the Anatolian interior, in November 1916 he stated "We must finish off the Greeks as we did with the Armenians…today I sent squads to the interior to kill every Greek on sight…" During the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) countless numbers of Greeks were deported by the Turks to the Mesopotamian desert where many perished. On January 31, 1917, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg of Germany reported that: