1920: 25,000–30,000[3]May 1920: ~40,000 men[4]Feb. 1921: 70,000 men[5]: 10,150 men[6] The Franco–Turkish War, known as the Cilicia Campaign (French: La campagne de Cilicie) in France and as the Southern Front (Turkish: Güney Cephesi) of the Turkish War of Independence in Turkey, was a series of conflicts fought between France (the French Colonial Forces and the French Armenian Legion) and the Turkish National Forces (led by the Turkish provisional government after 4 September 1920) from December 1918 to October 1921 in the aftermath of World War I. French interest in the region stemmed from the Sykes-Picot Agreement and was further fueled by the refugee crisis following the Armenian genocide.

On the one hand, that agreement gave France control of Ottoman Syria and southern Anatolia, including the key strategic locations of the fertile plain of Çukurova, the ports of Mersin and İskenderun (Alexandretta), and the copper mines in Ergani.

On the other hand, the fertile lands of Mesopotamia and the vilayet of Mosul (where oil fields were suspected to exist) were priorities for the British.

On 18 March 1919, two French gunboats brought troops to the Black Sea ports of Zonguldak and Karadeniz Ereğli to command the Ottoman coal mining region.

Because of the resistance they faced during their one-year stay in the region, French troops began to withdraw from Karadeniz Ereğli on 8 June 1920.

In the early stages of the Greco-Turkish War, French and Greek troops jointly crossed the Meriç River and occupied the town of Uzunköprü in eastern Thrace and the railway route from there to the station of Hadımköy near Çatalca on the outskirts of Constantinople.

In September 1922, at the end of that war, during the Greek pull-out after the advance of Turkish revolutionaries, French forces withdrew from their positions near the Dardanelles, but the British seemed prepared to hold their ground.

This was refused, and the French leaving the British on the straits signaled that the Allies were unwilling to intervene in aid of Greece.

French policy supporting the Turkish independence movement were set back during the Conference of Lausanne on the abolition of the Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire.

Furthermore, the fact that the sanjak of Alexandretta remained under French control also contributed to the tension between the two countries, as the Turks claimed the land in the Misak-ı Millî.