MUSTAFA KEMAL—commonly called Atatürk—poses at the end of the First Battle of İnönü during the Greco-Turkish War, in January 1921. The Turkish War of Independence, fought between 1919 and 1923, was waged by Turkish revolutionaries in the aftermath of the Ottoman defeat in the First World War, which resulted in the creation of the Republic of Turkey. On 15 May 1919, Greece landed its forces in Smyrna, one of the largest cities in the Ottoman Empire, located at a strategic point on the Aegean coast of Anatolia.
The previous month, the last Ottoman sultan, Mehmed VI, had sent Kemal to organise troops in Anatolia. Much to his surprise, Kemal began a movement against both the Ottoman government and the Allied powers. The Greek army in Smyrna, backed politically and financially by the Allies, forayed into Anatolia to quash the nationalist Turks, beginning the Turkish War of Independence.
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