Andranik Ozanian (25 February 1865 – 31 August 1927) was an Armenian general and statesman who was one of the key leaders of the Armenian independence movement.
Biography[]
Andranik Ozanian was born in Shabin-Karahisar, Ottoman Empire in 1865, and he became involved with the Armenian independence struggles during the 1880s and later joined the ARF to defend the Armenian peasantry against the Turks. When he was 17, he married a wife who unfortunately died a year later while she was giving birth to their son. After a failed uprising in Sasun in 1904 and the ARF's alliance with the Young Turks, he left the ARF in 1907 and served in the Bulgarian army during the First Balkan War. During the early stages of World War I, he led an Armenian volunteer battalion which served in the Imperial Russian Army and captured much of the Armenian homeland. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, the Russians withdrew from the Caucasus, allowing for the Ottomans to counterattack and take Erzurum in early 1918. In May 1918, Ozanian halted the Turks at Sardarabad, and Armenia declared independence shortly after, although it gave up Western Armenia in exchange for peace with Turkey. Ozanian refused to recognize the new republic due to its concessions, and he fought in the Armenian-Azerbaijani War to help keep Zangezur in Armenia. He left Armenia in 1919, and he went into exile in Europe and the United States. He settled in Fresno, California in 1922, and he died in Richardson Springs in 1927 at the age of 62.