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.
Pan-Turkism
The agents of the Armenian genocide during the First World War advocated pan-Turkism, and Enver Pasha was a key player in the attempt to remove non-Muslim minorities from the Ottoman Empire in order to build a new pan-Turkic state. The Greek genocide refers to the fate of the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire during and after World War I and the ensuing 1919–22 Greco-Turkish War. Like the Armenians and Assyrians, the Greeks were massacred, expelled, and marched to death by the Ottoman government. George W. Rendel of the British Foreign Office and other diplomats noted the massacres and deportations of Greeks after the armistice. Hundreds of thousands of Ottoman Greeks are estimated to have died during this period. A population exchange between Greece and Turkey occurred in 1923 after the Greco-Turkish War. Most of the exchange was disorganized, with Turks and Greeks fleeing from each other's countries. Many people were unaccounted for, causing some scholars to suspect a more-brutal, ideologically motivated expulsion of Greeks from Turkey. The Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides took place under the Three Pashas of the Ottoman Empire. A 1922 memorandum from the Assyro-Chaldean National Council estimated that about 275,000 Assyrians were killed.