Battle of Marash

Overview

The Battle of Marash, also called the Marash Affair, took place in the early winter of 1920 between the French forces occupying the city of Maraş in the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish National Forces linked to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. It was the first major battle of the Turkish War of Independence, and the three-week-long engagement in the city ultimately forced the French to abandon and retreat from Marash and resulted in a Turkish massacre of Armenian refugees who had just been repatriated to the city following the Armenian Genocide.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Significance

The Battle of Marash was the first major engagement of the Turkish War of Independence, marking the opening of armed resistance by the Turkish National Forces against the Allied occupation of Anatolia. French forces, outnumbered roughly ten-to-one by Turkish National Movement fighters under Arslan Bey and Kılıç Ali Bey, held the city of Maraş for three weeks before withdrawing. The French retreat demonstrated that the postwar occupation of Ottoman territory, sanctioned by the Allied powers and administered in this sector under Henri Gouraud, was militarily vulnerable to organized nationalist resistance. The battle also carried a severe humanitarian consequence: the French withdrawal left Armenian refugees, recently repatriated to Maraş following the Armenian Genocide, exposed to massacre by Turkish forces. The outcome thus combined a strategic setback for France with a catastrophic civilian toll, and established an early precedent for the pattern of the wider Franco-Turkish War.

Forces & casualties

Commanders (3)