No reliable figure exists, and the unreliability is itself worth reporting. Estimates for Turkey range from about 4 per cent of the population to about 15, somewhere between three and thirteen million people. Three things drive the spread. The Turkish census does not record sect within Islam. Generations of concealment following massacres suppress self-reporting, and the tradition has its own practice of concealment to draw on. And the boundary question (whether Kurdish and Zaza Alevis, Bektashis, and the Arab Alawites of the south are inside or outside the category), moves the denominator by millions. Any confident single number is an advocacy figure.
The concealment has causes. At Kahramanmaras in December 1978 a mob killed between 105 and 111 people, mostly Alevi women and children; trials ran to 1991, and all the defendants were released by 1992 under an amnesty law. At Sivas on 2 July 1993 a Sunni mob burned the Madimak Hotel during an Alevi cultural festival, killing 37 people. Thirty-three death sentences were passed in 1997 and commuted to life imprisonment in 2002 when capital punishment was abolished; the remaining cases were dismissed on the statute of limitations in March 2012, and further cases were dropped at the thirty-year mark in September 2023. There were killings at Malatya in 1978 and at Corum in 1980.
The impunity, rather than only the killing, is the living grievance. Turkey has also lost repeated cases at the European Court of Human Rights over compulsory religious education and the status of assembly houses.
There is a large Alevi diaspora, principally in Germany, where cemevis operate without the recognition problem.