Union of America, one of the prominent ARF leaders, Karekin Pastermadjian, asserted that over 10,000 Azerbaijanis and nearly 2,500 Armenians were killed during the March Days of 1918. According to Firuz Kazemzadeh, Aftermath In the immediate aftermath of the March Days, many of the Muslim survivors fled to Elisabethpol (Ganja) in central Azerbaijan. While the Temporary Executive Committee of the Muslim National Councils and the Musavat ceased their activities in the territory of the Baku Governorate, the left-wing Azerbaijani political groups, such as the SRs and the Hümmet, benefited from the developments and became effective leaders of the Azerbaijani community in Baku. The Muslim Socialist Bureau appealed to the Committee of Revolutionary Defense to redress some of the grievances of some of the Muslims. On 13 April 1918, within few days of the massacres, the Bolsheviks under the leadership of Stepan Shahumyan proclaimed the Baku Commune. This new body endeavored to nationalize Baku's oil fields, drawing the ire of the British, and formed the "Red Army of Baku", an undisciplined and poorly managed force composed largely of ethnic Armenian recruits. Although the majority of the Commissars (the leaders of Baku Commune) were ethnic Armenians, two of them were ethnic Azerbaijani revolutionaries, Meshadi Azizbekov and Mir Hasan Vazirov. Nevertheless, in the Azerbaijani psyche, the Baku Commune symbolized the Bolshevik – Armenian collusion born out of the March Days bloodbath. The March Days of 1918 had a profound effect on the formulation of Azerbaijani political objectives as well. While previously Azerbaijani leaders had sought only autonomy within the Russian domain, after the Bolshevik-perpetrated massacres in Baku, they no longer believed in the Russian Revolution and turned to the Ottomans for support in achieving total independence. Therefore, when the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was proclaimed on 28 May 1918, its government immediately dispatched a delegation to Istanbul to discuss the possibility of Ottoman military support for the young republic. The Ottoman triumvir, Enver Pasha, agreed to the Azerbaijani requests and charged his brother, Nuru Pasha, with forming an Ottoman military unit, known as the Caucasus Army of Islam, to retake Baku. When in July 1918, the Ottoman-Azerbaijani force defeated the "Red Army of Baku" in several key battles in Central Azerbaijan, Bolshevik power in Baku started crumbling under pressure from the Russian Socialist Revolutionaries, Dashnaks, and British agents in the city. On 1 August 1918, the Baku Commune was replaced by the Centrocaspian Dictatorship,