Article 166 was meant to control the possession of arms, but it was used to target Armenians by not letting them possess arms. Local Kurdish tribes were armed to attack the defenseless Armenian population. Some diplomats said that the aim of these groups was to commit massacres so as to show counter-measures, and to invite "foreign powers to intervene," as Istanbul's British Ambassador Sir Philip Currie seen in March 1894. Even some Turkish authors admit the that this was just a pretext for the massacres.