Faisal then formed a government under the auspices of the Allied military occupation administration of "OETA East", consistent with an earlier Anglo-French agreement.

[2] The Battle of Maysalun ensued as French forces set out from Lebanon to assert control over Damascus and topple Faisal's government.

With remnants of the Syrian army and local volunteers, Faisal's war minister, General Yusuf al-Azma, set out to confront them.

Despite the Syrian army's decisive defeat, the battle is viewed in Syria and the rest of the Arab world as a symbol of courageous resistance against a stronger, imperial power.

[3] However, the British and French governments secretly made previous arrangements regarding the division of the Ottomans' Arab provinces between themselves in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.

[4] To ensure his throne in Syria, Faisal attended the January 1919 Paris Conference, where he was not recognized by the French government as the sovereign ruler of Syria; Faisal called for Syrian sovereignty under his rule,[4] but the European powers attending the conference called for European mandates to be established over the former Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire.

Against King Faisal's wishes, his delegate to General Gouraud, Nuri al-Said, agreed to the French deployment and the disbandment of Arab troops from al-Mu'allaqa, near Zahle.

[11][12] On 18 July, Faisal and the entire cabinet, with the exception of War Minister Yusuf al-Azma, agreed to the ultimatum and issued disbandment orders for the Arab Army units at Anjar, the Beirut–Damascus road and the hills of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains overlooking the Beqaa Valley.

[16] On 22 July, Faisal dispatched Education Minister Sati al-Husri and the Arab government's former Beirut representative, Jamil al-Ulshi, to meet Gouraud at his headquarters in Aley and persuade him to end his army's advance to Damascus.

Accordingly, Gouraud sought to occupy Khan Maysalun,[18] an isolated caravanserai on the Beirut–Damascus road situated at the crest of the Wadi al-Qarn mountain pass in the Anti-Lebanon,[20] located 25 kilometers (16 mi) west of Damascus.

The cabinet subsequently rejected Gouraud's ultimatum and issued a largely symbolic appeal to the international community to end the French advance.

[17] On 23 July, al-Azma set out from Damascus with his motley force of army regulars and volunteers, which was divided into northern, central and southern columns each headed by camel cavalry units.

[26] According to historian Michael Provence, the "quarters of Damascus had been emptied of young men as crowds walked west, some armed only with swords or sticks, to meet the mechanized French column".

[29] The Syrians were equipped with rifles discarded by retreating Ottoman soldiers during World War I and those used by the Sharifian Army's Bedouin cavalry during the 1916 Arab Revolt.

[22] At one point in the first few hours of the clashes,[30] Syrian forces managed to briefly pin down two Senegalese companies that were relatively isolated on the French right flank.

[23] According to one version, when French forces were about 100 meters in the distance, al-Azma rushed to a Syrian artilleryman stationed near him and ordered him to open fire.

[1] King Faisal observed the battle unfold from the village of al-Hamah, and as it became apparent that the Syrians had been routed, he and his cabinet, with the exception of Interior Minister Ala al-Din al-Durubi, who had quietly secured a deal with the French, departed for al-Kiswah, a town located at the southern approaches of Damascus.

[31] Faisal denounced Gouraud's statement and insisted that he remained the sovereign head of Syria whose authority he was "granted by the Syrian people".

[31] Although he verbally dismissed the French order expelling him and his family from Syria, Faisal departed Damascus on 27 July with only one of his cabinet members, al-Husri.

My presence here consecrates the victory of the Cross over the Crescent.Although the Syrians were decisively defeated, the Battle of Maysalun "has gone down in Arab history as a synonym for heroism and hopeless courage against huge odds, as well as for treachery and betrayal", according to Iraqi historian Ali al-Allawi.

"[37] Sati' al-Husri, a major pan-Arabist thinker, asserted that the battle was "one of the most important events in the modern history of the Arab nation.