The true beginnings of the CUP started in 1905. Starting in that year, the CUP transformed from a group of intellectual exiles into a secret activist organization through the efforts of Dr. Bahaeddin Şakir. In September 1906, the (OFS) was formed as another secret Young Turk organization based in Salonica (modern Thessaloniki). The leaders of the OFS included two of the future Three Pashas: Mehmet Talat and Ahmed Cemal, in addition to the CUP's future general secretary Dr. Midhat Şükrü as well as Mustafa Rahmi and . Especially from 1906 onward, the OFS enjoyed great success in recruiting army officers from the Ottoman Third Army based in Macedonia, one of whom was İsmail Enver, the future Unionist Minister of War. Officers of the Third Army believed the state needed drastic reforms in order to survive and bring peace to a region that was in seemingly perpetual ethnic conflict, known as the Macedonian conflict. This made joining imperially biased revolutionary secret societies especially appealing to them. This widespread sentiment led the senior officers of the Third Army to turn a blind eye to the fact that many of their junior officers had joined the CUP. Under Talat's initiative, the Salonica-based OFS merged with Rıza's Paris-based CUP in September 1907, and the group became the internal center of the CUP in the Ottoman Empire. After the Young Turk Revolution, the more radical and militant internal CUP would see themselves supplant Rıza's leadership of his network of exiles. For now this merger transformed the committee from an intellectual opposition group into a sort of clandestine paramilitary.