In 1913, the year before the genocide, around 2 million Armenians were living in the Ottoman Empire. At the start of World War I the Ottoman Empire was fighting with the Russians, as well as the British and French at the same time. The losses of the Balkan War included more than half of the European territory that used to be part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman government decided that it was not possible for the Muslim Ottomans to live alongside the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire and wanted to homogenize the population. The Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) was the governing party of the Ottoman Empire from 1908 to 1918. The CUP was a nationalist party that believed in Ottomanism and saw the need for the Turks as a dominant group. This included relocating the non-Turk Muslim population and the non-Muslim population of the Ottoman Empire.