Page:The Rebirth Of Turkey 1923.pdf/200

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if there are Kurdish deputies at Angora, it is because the Turks are the only parties to the Mosul controversy who do not propose to divide the Kurdish country. There is a wider aspect, however, to the Mosul controversy. Turks and Arabs alike are Sunni Moslems and as long as the British can maintain a controversy over Mosul between the new Turkish State and the Arab State of Iraq, Islam remains in a divided condition. It is the desire to abstain from any action over Mosul which might widen that breach, which has prompted Djavid Pasha, the Turkish commander at Diarbekr, to refrain from the use of force in the recovery of Mosul. The sheikh of the Senussi who girded the late Caliph on his accession to the Throne in 1918, and who fled from Brussa to Angora when the Greeks entered Smyrna, has been at Diarbekr for the last three years, attempting to heal the Turco-Arab breach over Mosul. Thus far, the conduct of the Turkish command on the Mosul "front" has been marked by a conspicuous restraint.

As Kemal, Fevzi and Rafet Pashas looked toward the West, they were confronted by three military fronts, the Cilician front on their left, the Greek front behind Smyrna on their center, and the Allied occupation of Constantinople on their right. In the winter of 1919-'20, the British high command in Cairo withdrew its forces from Cilicia in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, to Palestine, leaving the French command at Beirut in sole occupation of the northern end of the Syrian corridor and of Cilicia. Here, under the French aegis in Cilicia, an Armenian enclave was being carved out and the Turkish administration