Nazım had joined the Young Turks Movement, and when the Greeks occupied Salonica in October 1912 during the Balkan wars, he was imprisoned for eleven months in an Athens prison as a Turkish nationalist. The guards abused him and told him that his family had been killed, and that Constantinople was already occupied, while Anatolia would soon fall to the Greeks. Sent to Smyrna (Izmir) after a request by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), he was deeply troubled by his family's fate (and that of his baby daughter) and the exile from his hometown. In newspaper articles he called attention to Bulgarian atrocities committed against Muslims and "call[ed] for vengeance against the remaining Ottoman Christians". The Ottoman defeat and the ethnic cleansing of Muslims was traumatic for many Young Turks and led to a desire for revenge; Nazım's "transformation from a patriotic doctor into a rabid, vindictive nationalist... symbolized the fate of many others".