The first decade of the 20th century found the Ottoman Empire in turmoil. Foreign powers were directly and indirectly encroaching on Ottoman sovereignty, domestic elements used terrorism to agitate for independent ethno-nationalist states, and the Empire was beset by financial woes. These issues were precisely what the Young Turks (Committee of Union and Progress) chose to deal with when they came to power in 1908. However, once the afterglow of constitutional restoration had abated and the CUP had failed to bring the many challenges of the state under control opposition began to mount. The very elements that had coalesced around the Young Turks in defiance of Abdulhamid II now opposed them. Some of the groups that were opposed to the Young Turks were minority Muslim groups that had believed that constitutional restoration would result in a federative structure that would ensure linguistic ethnic/religious autonomy. This was particularly true of Albanian and Arab elements within the Empire. From the perspective of the CUP constitutional restoration was not the panacea for the Empire’s ills more radical measures needed to be taken and quickly to ensure the existence of the state. The Ottoman Empire needed to borrow and implement ideas from Europe, most importantly a strong military, modern bureaucracy and the latest technology. Indeed, an ethos can be associated with this project, an Ottoman modernism, which sought to fuse the Sultanic and Islamic characteristics of the Empire with the new ideas of the West. To promote this Ottoman modernism the CUP needed to regularize bureaucratic procedures and ensure the security in the Empire. One of the main obstacles to this goal were an array of administrative relationships that had developed throughout the centuries in peripheral regions of the Ottoman Empire. But the cost of regularizing the administration was high. The numerous rebellions that sparked as a result the CUP’s new policies were difficult to bring to heel and these conflicts lingered. These rebellions greatly impacted the citizens and soldiers involved and inflicted great trauma on areas in the midst of these conflicts.