Talat explained that the Muslim migrants were resettled in the depopulated villages because they would have died if sent to the deserts of Syria and Iraq—exactly where he sent Armenian deportees a year later.[48][49] Historian Hans-Lukas Kieser writes that the success achieved by "the CUP men of action... exceeded all expectations" and they "could savor a crushing victory achieved in a secret war along domestic ethnoreligious lines".[50] Bjørnlund states that the perceived "success" of the Greek deportation "meant that even more radical measures could be seen as not only possible, but as yet another extension of a policy of social engineering through Turkification".[51] Historian Tessa Hofmann argues that "the deportations in Eastern Thrace appear as the prototype of all subsequent deportations of Christians".[46]