This paper explores Ottoman settlement and nomad sedentarization projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the internal desert frontier of the empire through the perspective of one tenacious group of Chechen settlers established as an agricultural colony on the modern-day Turkish and Syrian border. It sheds light on the dynamism and agency of a community of refugees that took control of their situation and became influential actors in an area at the regional boundaries of Anatolia and Upper Mesopotamia. The Chechen settlers persisted in the face of three distinct periods of Ottoman attempts to expand settled agriculture at the expense of pastoralism: the late Tanzimat era of the 1860s and 1870s that coupled forced sedentarization with anchoring agricultural colonies to serve as models, the Hamidian era from 1876-1908 that focused less on coercive state measures and relied heavily on coopting tribal leaders into patronage relations with Abdülhamid II, and the Second Constitutional era from 1908-1918 that returned to aggressive settlement and sedentarization schemes. While the existing literature notes some of the experiences and actions of the Chechens of Resülayn in the Tanzimat era and the Second Constitutional Era, their actions during the Hamidian era are little known. In fact, the Chechen settlers played an important role in the rise of Viran?ehirli ?brahim Pa?a, chief of the Kurdish Milli tribe, who was the most powerful chief of a Hamidiye irregular cavalry regiment and possibly the most powerful man between Aleppo, Diyarbak?r, and Mosul in the early twentieth century. Using records from the Prime Minister’s Ottoman Archives in Istanbul, consular reports from the British National Archives, and a variety of travelogues, I argue that this small group eking out an existence at the margins of empire became active in negotiating the balance of power between agents of the Ottoman state and rival tribal confederations, ultimately helping to consolidate ?brahim Pa?a’s status as the most powerful Hamidiye chief. They therefore had central role in Abdülhamid’s schemes for governing the Kurdish districts of the empire. This analysis will show how marginal groups such as immigrants and refugees, whose agency is normally elided, often had a profound effect on the political developments of the regions they inhabited.