Ali Fuat was born on 23 September 1882 to father Ismail Fazil Pasha and mother Zekiye Hanım.

[3] Ali Fuat was the grandson (on his mother's side) of Mushir Mehmet Ali Pasha[3] (Ludwig Karl Friedrich Detroit) who was the commander of the Danube Army (Tuna Şark Ordusu) during the Russo-Turkish war, participated in the Congress of Berlin as one of three representatives of the Ottoman Empire and was killed on 7 September 1878[6] in Gjakovë (Kosovo) by Albanian insurgents who were dissatisfied with the results of the Berlin Congress.

[6][7][8] Ali Fuat attended the Ottoman Military College together with Kemal Atatürk, Kazım Karabekir, and Fethi Okyar amongst other notables of the Turkish War of Independence.

He became the chief of staff of the Yanya Corps, and on 101 November he was appointed to the deputy commander of the 23rd Division (Yirmi Üçüncü Fırka),[10] replacing Mirliva Djevad Pasha.

[11] On 12 December, when the Greek offensive commanded by Konstantinos Sapountzakis was launched, he planned to retreat in an orderly fashion, but panic amongst the ranks led to the defeat of his division.

In the defense line of Bizani he was severely wounded in the thigh, but continued to direct artillery fire whilst on a stretcher.

After the Armistice of Mudros was signed, he concurrently became the deputy commander of Seventh Army, replacing Mustafa Kemal.

Ali Fuat Pasha organized the resistance in Western Turkey against the Greek invasion and thus actually started the National Independence War.

He signed Amasya Protocol and at the end of the Sivas Congress in 1920, he was appointed as the general commander of the National Forces by the Board of Representatives.

By personally negotiating with Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin in Moscow, he signed the Treaty of Moscow (1921), along the lines of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, as the representative of the Ankara government, which provided financial and military support from Russia to the Turkish Independence War, in exchange for ceding the right to Batum, then controlled by the Georgian Republic, to the Soviet government.

After the military coup on 27 May 1960, he was initially arrested by the junta with the rest of the Democratic Party MPs but later set free.

In accordance with his will, he was buried in the backyard of a mosque near Geyve train station, where the first shots of the Turkish War of Independence were fired, when he died at the age of 86.