The Ottoman Turks carried out a series of violent massacres of ethnic Assyrian and Armenian Christians in the 1870s, these killings, which resulted in over ten thousand deaths, were known as the Hamidian massacre. The settlement of the Persian Kurds along the eastern border was the first powerful action in changing the demographics of the Assyrian homeland. The Kurds remained loyal to the Ottomans as long as they were enjoying power and greatness. The Ottoman Turks conducted a large-scale genocide and ethnic cleansing of the ancient and indigenous, Greek, Armenian, Assyrian and Maronite Christian inhabitants of Anatolia, north western Iran, the fringes of northern Iraq and northern Syria and Mount Lebanon during and immediately after World War I, resulting in well over 3 million deaths among the 6 million Christians who were living in the Ottoman Empire in 1914 of 26 million inhabitants and large-scale deportations in the Armenian genocide, Assyrian genocide, Greek genocide and Great famine of Mount Lebanon.