Imperial Resilience by Kayali Hasan;

Author:Kayali, Hasan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 6714449
Publisher: University of California Press

FAYSAL’S SETBACK IN PARIS AND EXPANSION OF JOINT RESISTANCE BY POPULAR GROUPS

Two weeks before the peace conference closed on January 21, 1920, Faysal arrived in Beirut from his second trip to Paris within a year having failed to influence the Allies to agree to independence for Syria.23 Faysal’s inability to procure an agreement, which would have bolstered his position in Damascus, strengthened the tendency in Syria to seek greater cooperation with the Anatolian groups, whose resistance against French occupation achieved its first successes in Maraş in February 1920 and emboldened the anti-colonial forces.24 The ARDRS leadership sent loyal young officers to the occupied provinces to assist in the coordination of local forces, among them Captains Kılıç Ali and Kamil Polat, who fought in the skirmishes that broke out in Maraş between the militias and the French troops amid destruction and hundreds of deaths and other casualties.25 Groups in Syria explored joint defense with the Anatolian militias. Just before Faysal returned to Syria empty-handed, his deputy Amir Saʿid al-Jaza’iri had commissioned two Syrian notables to establish contact with the Anatolian resistance: Sa‘id Haydar, a Lebanese who had studied law in Istanbul and possessed Arab nationalist credentials as a founding member of al-Fatat; and Badi’ Bakdash, a former Ottoman officer from Syria with multiple family links by marriage to high Ottoman officials. The two emissaries met with associates of Mustafa Kemal in Istanbul and drafted an agreement that included the unification of military forces under a single command from southern Jordan to the Black Sea. “In the event of the successful outcome of their efforts against the West, the Arabs and the Turks will live side by side in two independent states but their relations will be nearly on the same lines as the relations of Austria and Hungary in the pre-War Austro-Hungarian Empire.”26 If such an agreement ever had a chance to be approved and implemented, the diplomatic push in Europe toward the establishment of mandates thwarted it during the drawn-out trip of the envoys, who returned to Damascus in April.

More spontaneous collaboration manifested itself on the ground between militia forces in southeastern Anatolia and northern Syria. A circular Mustafa Kemal sent to army commanders on January 24, 1920, made manifest the Anatolian movement’s ties with Syria. Kemal indicated that a popular organization (teşkilat-ı milliye) had materialized in that part of the Aleppo vilayet claimed by the Arab government, which was making “every effort not to separate from the Ottoman community under any circumstance.” Division commander Lieutenant Colonel (Kaymakam) Emin (Amin?) Bey, together with Shakir Ni‘mat at the same rank, belonged to this organization. The circular recommended a pincer action against the French forces occupying Maraş and Pazarcık to its south to be executed by the Aleppines and a popular militia in the north yet to be constituted.27 In a diplomatic initiative, Shakib Arslan, propagandist for Cemal Pasha during the Great War and now advisor to Faysal, wrote to a Russian diplomat purportedly in the name of Faysal, that “Faisul has learnt a bitter lesson in France.

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