The study of North Caucasians has long been limited to the field of Russian and Soviet studies, and is usually perceived through the lens of genocide, displacement, and the mythology surrounding Imam Shamil’s anticolonial struggle against the brutalities of the Russian Imperial Army. However, scholars have recently begun to give greater attention to the role of North Caucasians after their arrival to Ottoman lands. This paper will follow three North Caucasian soldiers who defected or fled from the Russian Imperial Army and served in the Ottoman military, ultimately achieving senior positions in the Ottoman imperial command structure. The first figure, Ghazi Muhammad, was the son of Imam Shamil, the famed pan-Islamic anticolonial hero, holy warrior, and Sufi sheikh of the early nineteenth century. Following his father's surrender to the Russians in 1859, Ghazi Muhammad left for the Ottoman Empire, where he became the leader of Sultan Abdülhamid II’s Dağıstan Alayı (“Dagestani Regiment”), an elite guard corps responsible for the direct protection of the Sultan. During the Russo–Ottoman War of 1877–1878, Ghazi Muhammad fought in opposition to his own brother, Muhammad Shafi, who continued as a Colonel in the Russian Army. The second figure, Muhammad Fazil, is also a descendant of Imam Shamil. After serving as an imperial guard in St. Petersburg, he resigned from the Russian Army in 1877. He then served in the Ottoman Army as a cavalry lieutenant and joined Ghazi Muhammad as a commander in the Dağıstan Alayı. Both were later exiled to Iraq by an increasingly paranoid Abdülhamid II, after which Muhammad Fazil became Mayor of Mosul in 1909. The third, Musa Kundukhov, was a Russian general who himself oversaw the deportation of North Caucasians, actively putting down Shamil’s resistance. In 1865 he resigned from the Russian Army and defected to the Ottomans. There, he oversaw a special unit composed exclusively of North Caucasians, known as the Asâkir-i Muâvine-i Çerâkise, which led the Ottoman Army’s 1877–78 Caucasus campaign. His son, diplomat Bekir Sami Kunduh, became Turkey’s first Foreign Minister in 1920. This paper will rely on a close reading of recently published Russian, Turkish, and Arabic academic scholarship on these figures. By unifying this scattered historiography, this paper aims to trace the little-known aftermath of Imam Shamil’s surrender as it played out within Ottoman domains.