The Turkish War of Independence (15 May 1919 – 24 July 1923) was a series of military campaigns and a revolution waged by the Turkish National Movement, after the Ottoman Empire was occupied and partitioned following its defeat in World War I. The conflict was between the Turkish Nationalists and the Allied and separatist forces over the application of Wilsonian principles, especially self-determination, in post-World War I Anatolia and eastern Thrace. The revolution concluded the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern question, ending the Ottoman sultanate and the Ottoman caliphate, and established the Republic of Turkey. After leading the nationalists to victory, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced revolutionary reforms as president of the new republic.
While World War I ended for the Ottomans with the Armistice of Mudros, the Allies continued occupying land per the Sykes–Picot Agreement, and to facilitate the prosecution of former members of the Committee of Union and Progress and those involved in the Armenian genocide. Several Ottoman commanders therefore refused orders from the Ottoman government to disband their forces. In an atmosphere of turmoil, Sultan Mehmed VI dispatched general Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later Atatürk), to restore order; however, he became an enabler and leader of Turkish Nationalist resistance. In an attempt to establish control over the power vacuum in Anatolia, the Allies agreed to launch a Greek force to occupy Smyrna (İzmir), inflaming sectarian tensions and beginning the Turkish War of Independence. A nationalist counter government led by Mustafa Kemal was established in Ankara when it became clear the Ottoman government was appeasing the Allies. The Allies pressured the Ottoman "Istanbul government" to suspend the Constitution, Parliament, and sign the Treaty of Sèvres, a treaty unfavorable to Turkish interests that the "Ankara government" declared illegal.
Turkish forces defeated the French in the south, and remobilized army units went on to partition Armenia with the Bolsheviks, resulting in the Treaty of Kars (1921). The Western Front is known as the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). The regular army, organized from militia forces under İsmet Pasha (İnönü), fought the Greeks to a standstill in the First and Second Battles of İnönü, but was checked at the Battle of Aslıhanlar–Dumlupınar. The Greeks emerged victorious in the Battle of Kütahya-Eskişehir and drove on Ankara. The Turks checked their advance in the Battle of Sakarya and counter-attacked in the Great Offensive, which expelled Greek forces. The war ended with the recapture of İzmir, the Chanak crisis and another armistice in Mudanya.
The Grand National Assembly in Ankara was recognized as the legitimate Turkish government, which signed the Treaty of Lausanne, a treaty more favorable to Turkey than Sèvres. The Allies evacuated Anatolia and eastern Thrace, the Ottoman government was overthrown, the monarchy abolished, and the Grand National Assembly of Turkey declared the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. With the war, a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, and the abolition of the sultanate, the Ottoman era came to an end, and with Atatürk's reforms, the Turks created the secular nation of Turkey. Turkey's demographics were significantly affected by the Armenian genocide and the Greek genocide. The Turkish Nationalist Movement carried out massacres and deportations to eliminate native Christian populations—a continuation of the Armenian genocide and other ethnic cleansing during World War I. The historic Christian presence in Anatolia was largely destroyed; Muslims went from 80% to 98% of the population.
The Turkish War of Independence (15 May 1919 – 24 July 1923) was a series of military campaigns and a revolution waged by the Turkish National Movement, after the Ottoman Empire was occupied and partitioned following its defeat in World War I. The conflict was between the Turkish Nationalists and the Allied and separatist forces over the application of Wilsonian principles, especially self-determination, in post-World War I Anatolia and eastern Thrace. The revolution concluded the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Eastern question, ending the Ottoman sultanate and the Ottoman caliphate, and established the Republic of Turkey. After leading the nationalists to victory, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced revolutionary reforms as president of the new republic.
While World War I ended for the Ottomans with the Armistice of Mudros, the Allies continued occupying land per the Sykes–Picot Agreement, and to facilitate the prosecution of former members of the Committee of Union and Progress and those involved in the Armenian genocide. Several Ottoman commanders therefore refused orders from the Ottoman government to disband their forces. In an atmosphere of turmoil, Sultan Mehmed VI dispatched general Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later Atatürk), to restore order; however, he became an enabler and leader of Turkish Nationalist resistance. In an attempt to establish control over the power vacuum in Anatolia, the Allies agreed to launch a Greek force to occupy Smyrna (İzmir), inflaming sectarian tensions and beginning the Turkish War of Independence. A nationalist counter government led by Mustafa Kemal was established in Ankara when it became clear the Ottoman government was appeasing the Allies. The Allies pressured the Ottoman "Istanbul government" to suspend the Constitution, Parliament, and sign the Treaty of Sèvres, a treaty unfavorable to Turkish interests that the "Ankara government" declared illegal.
Turkish forces defeated the French in the south, and remobilized army units went on to partition Armenia with the Bolsheviks, resulting in the Treaty of Kars (1921). The Western Front is known as the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). The regular army, organized from militia forces under İsmet Pasha (İnönü), fought the Greeks to a standstill in the First and Second Battles of İnönü, but was checked at the Battle of Aslıhanlar–Dumlupınar. The Greeks emerged victorious in the Battle of Kütahya-Eskişehir and drove on Ankara. The Turks checked their advance in the Battle of Sakarya and counter-attacked in the Great Offensive, which expelled Greek forces. The war ended with the recapture of İzmir, the Chanak crisis and another armistice in Mudanya.
The Grand National Assembly in Ankara was recognized as the legitimate Turkish government, which signed the Treaty of Lausanne, a treaty more favorable to Turkey than Sèvres. The Allies evacuated Anatolia and eastern Thrace, the Ottoman government was overthrown, the monarchy abolished, and the Grand National Assembly of Turkey declared the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. With the war, a population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire, and the abolition of the sultanate, the Ottoman era came to an end, and with Atatürk's reforms, the Turks created the secular nation of Turkey. Turkey's demographics were significantly affected by the Armenian genocide and the Greek genocide. The Turkish Nationalist Movement carried out massacres and deportations to eliminate native Christian populations—a continuation of the Armenian genocide and other ethnic cleansing during World War I. The historic Christian presence in Anatolia was largely destroyed; Muslims went from 80% to 98% of the population.
Background
Following the chaotic politics of the Second Constitutional Era, the Ottoman Empire came under the control of the Committee of Union and Progress in a coup in 1913, and then further consolidated its control after the assassination of Mahmud Shevket Pasha. Founded as a radical revolutionary group seeking to prevent a collapse of the Ottoman Empire, by the eve of World War I it decided that the solution was to implement nationalist and centralizing policies. The CUP reacted to the losses of land and the expulsion of Muslims from the Balkan Wars by turning even more nationalistic. Part of its effort to consolidate power was to proscribe and exile opposition politicians from the Freedom and Accord Party to remote Sinop.
The Unionists brought the Ottoman Empire into World War I on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, during which a genocidal campaign was waged against Ottoman Christians, namely Armenians, Pontic Greeks, and Assyrians. It was based on an alleged conspiracy that the three groups would rebel on the side of the Allies, so collective punishment was applied. A similar suspicion and suppression from the Turkish nationalist government was directed towards the Arab and Kurdish populations, leading to localized rebellions. The Entente powers reacted to these developments by charging the CUP leaders, commonly known as the Three Pashas, with "crimes against humanity" and threatened accountability. They also had imperialist ambitions on Ottoman territory, with correspondence over a post-war settlement in the Ottoman Empire being leaked to the press as the Sykes–Picot Agreement. Russia's exit from World War I and descent into civil war was driven in part by the Ottoman closure of the Turkish straits to goods bound for Russia. A new imperative was given to the Entente powers to knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war and restart the Eastern Front.
World War I would be the nail in the coffin of Ottomanism, an imperialist and multicultural nationalism. Mistreatment of non-Turk groups after 1913, and the general context of great socio-political upheaval that occurred in the aftermath of World War I, meant many minorities now wished to divorce their future from imperialism to form futures of their own by separating into (often republican) nation-states. Due to the Turkish nationalist policies pursued by the CUP against Ottoman Christians by 1918 the Ottoman Empire held control over a mostly homogeneous land of Muslims from eastern Thrace to the Persian border. These included mostly Turks, as well as Kurds, Circassians, and Muhacir groups from Rumeli. Most Muslim Arabs were now outside of the Ottoman Empire and under Allied occupation, with some "imperialists" still loyal to the Ottoman Sultanate-Caliphate, and others wishing for independence or Allied protection under a League of Nations mandate. Sizable Greek and Armenian minorities remained within its borders, and most of these communities no longer wished to remain under the Empire.
Conclusion of World War I
In the summer months of 1918, the leaders of the Central Powers realized that the Great War was lost, including the Ottomans. Almost simultaneously, the Palestinian Front and then the Macedonian Front collapsed. The sudden decision by Bulgaria to sign an armistice cut communications from Constantinople (İstanbul) to Vienna and Berlin, and opened the undefended Ottoman capital to Entente attack. With the major fronts crumbling, Unionist Grand VizierTalât Pasha intended to sign an armistice, and resigned on 8 October 1918 so that a new government would receive less harsh armistice terms. The Armistice of Mudros was signed on 30 October 1918, ending World War I for the Ottoman Empire. Three days later, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP)—which governed the Ottoman Empire as a one-party state since 1913—held its last congress, where it was decided the party would be dissolved. Talât, Enver Pasha, Cemal Pasha, Doctor Nâzım, Bahaeddin Şakir, and three other high-ranking members of the CUP escaped the Ottoman Empire on a German torpedo boat later that night, plunging the country into a power vacuum. With the fall of the CUP: the following factions hoped to take advantage of the power vacuum in the Ottoman Empire:
The Palace: With Sultan Mehmed V's death earlier in the summer of 1918, Mehmed VI was girded with the sword of Osman. Unlike his half-brother, the new Sultan wished to reassert the monarchy as a center of power in the Ottoman Empire. In the following conflict, his singular goal was to safeguard the interests of the royal family.
The Liberals: The Freedom and Accord Party would be reestablished, and attempt to salvage the Ottoman Empire's diplomatic position by cooperating with Allied demands, though their detractors accused them of appeasement. Like its first period of operation from 1911–1913, Freedom and Accord Party again fell into infighting, and would be defunct by the summer of 1919. One of its old leaders, Damat Ferid Pasha, would form a strong alliance with the Sultan, though he did not rejoin his party.
The Allies: Britain and France had several goals. Both countries hoped to carve up the Ottoman Empire with mandates and spheres of influence. Britain specifically focused on facilitating war crimes trials to try Ottoman war criminals. Their immediate short-term goal was to secure supply lines to assist the Whites in the Russian Civil War. Right after the armistice, a de factoAllied occupation began in Constantinople. Some Ottoman intelligentsia hoped the Empire could become a mandate under the United States, an upstart and trustworthy power that recently proclaimed the Fourteen Points.
Ethnic minorities: Ottoman Greeks hoped to join Greece and Armenians hoped to form a new Armenian Republic. Pontic Greeks hoped to establish their own state. In April 1919 they renounced their allegiance to the Ottoman state through their patriarchs. Some Kurds hoped to establish an autonomous Kurdish state, but their claims overlapped with Assyrian nationalists.
Unionists: Though their leaders had escaped the country and the CUP as a whole was discredited and dissolved as an organization, ex-Unionists still controlled parliament, the army, police, post and telegraph, bureaucracy, and more. They were the target of purges which started by 1919, but the Allies and the Liberals did not have the resources or manpower to go after all of them. They would eventually coalesce around Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk).
Prelude: October 1918 – May 1919
Armistice of Mudros and occupation
On 30 October 1918, the Armistice of Mudros was signed between the Ottoman Empire and the Allies of World War I, bringing hostilities in the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I to an end. The Ottoman Army was to demobilize, its navy and air force handed to the Allies, and occupied territory in the Caucasus and Persia to be evacuated. Critically, Article VII granted the Allies the right to occupy forts controlling the Turkish Straits and the vague right to occupy "in case of disorder" any territory if there were a threat to security. The clause relating to the occupation of the straits was meant to secure a Southern Russian intervention force, while the rest of the article was used to allow for Allied controlled peace-keeping forces. There was also a hope to follow through punishing local actors that carried out exterminatory orders from the CUP government against Armenian Ottomans. For now, the House of Osman escaped the fates of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, and Romanovs to continue ruling their empire, though at the cost of its remaining sovereignty.
The armistice was signed because the Ottoman Empire had been defeated in important fronts, but the military was intact and retreated in good order. Unlike other Central Powers, the Allies did not mandate an abdication of the imperial family as a condition for peace, nor did they request the Ottoman Army to dissolve its general staff. Though the army suffered from mass desertion throughout the war which led to banditry, there was no threat of mutiny or revolutions like in Germany, Austria-Hungary, or Russia. This is despite famine and economic collapse that was brought on by the extreme levels of mobilization, destruction from the war, disease, and mass murder since 1914.
On 13 November 1918, a French brigade entered Constantinople to begin a de factooccupation of the Ottoman capital and its immediate dependencies. This was followed by a fleet consisting of British, French, Italian and Greek ships deploying soldiers on the ground the next day, totaling 50,000 troops in Constantinople. The Allied Powers stated that the occupation was temporary and its purpose was to protect the monarchy, the caliphate and the minorities. Somerset Arthur Gough-Calthorpe—the British signatory of the Mudros Armistice—stated the Triple Entente's public position that they had no intention to dismantle the Ottoman government or place it under military occupation by "occupying Constantinople". However, dismantling the government and partitioning the Ottoman Empire among the Allied nations had been an objective of the Entente since the start of WWI.
A wave of seizures took place in the rest of the country in the following months. Questionably citing Article VII, the British occupied Mosul, claiming that Christian civilians in Mosul and Zakho were killed en masse by the Turkish troops. In the Caucasus, Britain established a presence in Menshevik Georgia and the Lori and Aras valleys as peace-keepers. On 14 November, joint Franco-Greek occupation was established in the town of Uzunköprü in eastern Thrace as well as the railway axis until the train station of Hadımköy on the outskirts of Constantinople. On 1 December, British troops based in Syria occupied Kilis, Marash, Urfa and Birecik. Beginning in December, French troops began successive seizures of the province of Adana, including the towns of Antioch, Mersin, Tarsus, Ceyhan, Adana, Osmaniye, and İslâhiye, incorporating the area into the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration North while French forces embarked by gunboats and sent troops to the Black Sea ports of Zonguldak and Karadeniz Ereğli, commanding Turkey's coal-mining region. These continued seizures of land prompted Ottoman commanders to refuse demobilization and prepare for the resumption of war.
Prelude to resistance
The British similarly asked Mustafa Kemal Pasha (Atatürk) to turn over the port of Alexandretta (İskenderun), which he reluctantly did, following which he was recalled to Constantinople. He made sure to distribute weapons to the population to prevent them from falling into the hands of Allied forces. Some of these weapons were smuggled to the east by members of Karakol, a successor to the CUP's Special Organization, to be used in case resistance was necessary in Anatolia. Many Ottoman officials participated in efforts to conceal from the occupying authorities details of the burgeoning independence movement spreading throughout Anatolia.
Other commanders began refusing orders from the Ottoman government and the Allied powers. After Mustafa Kemal Pasha returned to Constantinople, Ali Fuat Pasha (Cebesoy) brought XX Corps under his command. He marched first to Konya and then to Ankara to organise resistance groups, such as the Circassiançetes he assembled with guerilla leader Çerkes Ethem. Meanwhile, Kâzım Karabekir Pasha refused to surrender his intact and powerful XV Corps in Erzurum. Evacuating from the Caucusus, puppet republics and Muslim militia groups were established in the army's wake to hamper the consolidation of the new Armenian state. Elsewhere in the country, regional nationalist resistance organizations known as Şûrâs –meaning "councils", not unlike soviets in revolutionary Russia– were founded, most incorporating themselves into the Defence of National Rights movement which protested continued Allied occupation and appeasement by the Sublime Porte.