The Circassians, an indigenous people of the northwest Caucasus region, are a non-Arab, Islamic people originally from the Caucasus region of western Asia. Southward Russian expansion during the 19th century forced between 1.5 and two million Circassians to emigrate south to the Ottoman Empire following the 19th century Russian-Circassian war, according to web sources. The first wave of Circassian immigrants, who were mainly of Shapsugh extraction, arrived in Jordan in 1878 and took refuge in Amman. They were one of the first communities who settled in the capital and some of downtown Amman’s neighbourhoods were named after them such as Shapsugh and Mohajirin (refugees). Circassians were the first community in Jordan that used carts, introducing a new mode of transport to the Kingdom in the mid-20th century.