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After Greek troops landed at Smyrna (Izmir) on 15 May 1919 under Allied cover, Halide Edib addressed a mass rally in Istanbul's Sultanahmet Square on 23 May, with the city still under Allied occupation. A woman speaking publicly to a huge crowd turned diffuse humiliation over the occupation into an open, collective vow of resistance. The episode made her a marked figure to both the Allies and the Sultan's government.
When the Allies formally occupied Istanbul on 16 March 1920 and began arresting nationalists, Halide Edib and her husband Adnan escaped in disguise and travelled overland into Anatolia to join Mustafa Kemal in Ankara. The Sultan's government then sentenced them to death in absentia.
On the journey to Ankara, Halide Edib and Yunus Nadi planned the Anatolian Agency, which was founded on 6 April 1920. It sent nationalist bulletins by telegraph to towns and villages, where they were posted and read aloud.
Halide Edib insists that the war was sustained by ordinary Anatolians, above all peasant women who hauled ammunition to the front by ox-cart and worked the land while the men fought. By making these anonymous people the protagonists, she shifts credit away from the single-leader cult then forming around Mustafa Kemal. Her framing is also self-serving, since she wrote it in exile after breaking with him.