Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922)
The Greek campaign was launched primarily because the western Allies, particularly British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, had promised Greece territorial gains at the expense of the Ottoman Empire, recently defeated in World War I. The armed conflict started when the Greek forces landed in Smyrna (now Izmir), on 15 May 1919. They advanced inland and took control of the western and northwestern part of Anatolia, including the cities of Manisa, Balıkesir, Aydın, Kütahya, Bursa and Eskişehir. Their advance was checked at the Battle of Sakarya in 1921 by forces of the Turkish national movement. The Greek front collapsed with the Turkish counter-attack in August 1922, and the war effectively ended with the recapture of Smyrna by the Turkish forces and the Great Fire of Smyrna.
Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922)
Rudolph J. Rummel estimare that from 1900 to 1923, various Turkish regimes killed from 3,500,000 to over 4,300,000 Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians. Rummel estimates that 440,000 Armenian civilians and 264,000 Greek civilians were killed by Turkish forces during the Turkish War of Independence between 1919 and 1922. However, he also gives the figures in his study between 1.428 to 4.388 million dead of whom 2.781 millions were Armenian, Greek, Nestorians, Turks, Circassians and other, line 488. British historian and journalist Arnold J. Toynbee stated that when he toured the region he saw numerous Greek villages that had been burned to the ground. Toynbee also stated that the Turkish troops had clearly, individually and deliberately burned down each house in these villages, pouring petrol on them and taking care to ensure that they were totally destroyed. There were massacres throughout 1920–23, the period of the Turkish War of Independence, especially of Armenians in the East and the South, and against the Greeks in the Black Sea Region. There was also significant continuity between the organizers of the Armenian and Greek Genocides between 1915 and 1918 and 1919–1921.