Ankara's nationalists tore up Sèvres and remade Turkey
Between 15 May 1919 and 24 July 1923, Mustafa Kemal's Turkish National Movement fought occupying Allies and Greek forces after the Ottoman defeat. Victory replaced the punitive Sèvres framework with the Treaty of Lausanne, abolished the sultanate, and seated the Grand National Assembly in Ankara.
Mudros ended Ottoman fighting in World War I, yet Allies kept occupying lands under Sykes–Picot logic and pursued Unionist leaders tied to wartime crimes against Armenians, Pontic Greeks, and Assyrians. Nationalist armies defeated the French in the south, partitioned Armenia with the Bolsheviks via the 1921 Treaty of Kars, and waged the Greco-Turkish War in the west. İsmet Pasha, later İnönü, turned militias into regular forces that broke Greek lines and secured Anatolia for the movement.
Lausanne recognised the Ankara assembly as Turkey's government, forced Allied evacuation of Anatolia and eastern Thrace, and buried the Ottoman monarchy and caliphal political order. Compared with Sèvres, the settlement restored far more sovereignty to a nationalist core state. The movement thus doubled as revolution: a new republic rose from an empire that Unionist coups after 1913 had dragged into German alliance and demographic catastrophe.
Summer 1918 collapses on Palestinian and Macedonian fronts, plus Bulgaria's armistice cutting links to Germany, had already told Ottoman elites the Great War was lost. What followed was not quiet partition but a nationalist reconquest that redrew who spoke for Turkey on maps and in treaty halls from Sèvres to Lausanne.
There was irony at the start: Sultan Mehmed VI had sent Mustafa Kemal into Anatolia to calm the unrest, and the general instead became the resistance's organiser, while an Allied-approved Greek landing at Smyrna (İzmir) lit the fuse. In the west the new army twice held the Greeks near İnönü, lost at Kütahya-Eskişehir, then halted their drive on Ankara along the Sakarya. A counter-stroke known as the Great Offensive pushed the Greeks out and retook İzmir, and after the Chanak Crisis an armistice at Mudanya closed the fighting. The assembly proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923.
Source: Turkish War of Independence
