I am hoping someone comes in here to provide better sources than I can, unfortunately this part of the Ottoman Empire is not something I am well versed in.

But to answer your question, they kind of were colonized. It's called the partition of the Ottoman Empire, mostly of the lands that we now consider to be Syria,Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, and the entire Arabian Peninsula. Similar claims were made on Anatolian lands as well as lands in mainland Europe by Greece.

The Turks did not want to be occupied (obviously) so they formed a new government called the Grand National Assembly, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Kemal also had support from other military leaders that had fought in WW1-read this book for an in depth look at the gallipoli campaign, as well as a look at some of the military leaders in the Turkish war for Independence, including Kemal. With an established, and experienced, military leadership, as well as veterans of WW1 that were in the new army, the Turks were able to wage a successful war.

In my opinion the Turks got lucky, the main powers (most notably Russia, France, and England) were to caught up with feuds among themselves to organize a combined force against the Turks. by the end of the war the Grand National Assembly had retaken all of Anatolia and parts of Thrace (mainland Europe) and the borders established then are pretty much what Turkey has today. The rest of the former Ottoman territories were divided up among the great powers.

Now, I know that this conflict is much more complicated than I am making it out to be, so hopefully someone can come in and shore up any thing I have left out.

as for sources I feel comfortable citing, check out: Atatürk: The Rebirth of a Nation by Patrick Kinross.

again, I don't feel comfortable giving you sources I have not read so I'm going to stick with those two books.

Aha, I can actually properly answer a question on here; I did my dissertation on exactly this topic!

Now pretty much all of my sources are primaries and are foreign office documents, but in my defence, this is not an area of history that is well-written about in the English-speaking World.

At the tail end of World War One, the Ottoman Empire surrendered to the Allies and on 13th November 1918, the British Empire occupied Constantinople. This marks the point upon which Anatolia and Eastern Thrace (European Turkey today) began to get partitioned between four Entente nations: Great Britain, France, Greece and Italy. Now the partition was thus: Britain would take Mesopotamia, Palestine, Cyprus and the South-East corner of modern-day Turkey. France would get Syria, Lebanon (a state crudely carved out to form a Christian majority) and Southern Central Anatolia. Greece would get the Western coastline and most of the Ottoman Aegean Islands, which were Greek-speaking and possessed Greek majorities. Italy claimed a whole swath of land in central Anatolia, but they were only alotted a few islands in the Aegean. The Ottomans would be reduced to a rump vassal state in the Northern centre of Anatolia, while Armenia would be expanded to encompass the provinces that possessed large numbers of Armenians prior to the genocide. Finally, Constantinople was planned to become an international zone, a la the Suez and Panama canals, with the caliph remaining in the city as a sort-of Pope-like figure. It is worth mentioning that Greece and France possessed conflicting claims and the Greeks attempted to claim pretty much all of Eastern Thrace, Constantinople and Western Anatolia.

Right, now that that first part is out of the way, allow me to actually answer your question. I apologise for the info-dump, but the rest of this won't make a lot of sense without any context.

Put simply, the Turks survived because out of the 5 partitioning powers (Greece, GB, France, Italy and Armenia), the first four lacked the political will to properly pursue any war in Anatolia and Armenia lacked the capacity to defend itself, let alone occupy parts of Anatolia. As a consequence, they spent most of their time trying to pass the buck and get one of the other powers to fix everything. Britain and France were both seriously war-weary and over-stretched at the end of WWI and had to decide whether to pursue their claims in Anatolia, or consolidate the gains they had already made in the Middle East. In the end, they both opted for the latter. Thus France and Britain only pursued fairly limited operations against the Turkish nationalists and instead relied upon the Greeks to do the heavy lifting.

However, Greece was very unreliable and was in near-constant disputes with the other Allies. There was continued agitation from the Greek PM, Venizelos, for Greece to be allotted Eastern Thrace and all of Western Anatolia. However, the other powers balked at allowing any nation, let alone a fairly volatile Balkan power, to control an area of such vital importance. The issue became so heated at one point that Venizelos attempted to intimidate the British out of Constantinople. They swiftly reminded him that the Royal Navy controlled the Aegean and could easily cut-off Greece's army in Anatolia from its supplies and he backed off. Further complicating the situation was that the Greek army was pretty shoddy and had a tendency to loot and evict Turks from the villages they captured, which did wonders in terms of encouraging the Nationalists. Meanwhile, the Armenians were basically dumped by the British and French, despite claims during the war that they would do otherwise, allowing Armenia to get overrun first by a pan-Turkish army column called the 'Army of Islam' led by Enver Pasha and then by the Bolsheviks. At the same time, all of the Allies were petitioning the USA to get involved in the hopes that they would take the burdens, but by that point isolationism had set in in America, so their involvement was limited to a few humanitarian efforts.

Despite all of these problems, it was still possible that the Western coast would be annexed to Greece- were it not for a single monkey. In one of those bizarre flukes of history, the King of Greece, Alexander, got bitten by a monkey (technically a Macaque, but, eh) and died when the wound contracted septicemia. Alexander was Venizelos's main backer and when he died, Constantine I took the throne. Constantine hated Venizelos and in the ensuing political chaos of the late king's death, the PM lost his seat. With him gone, Greece's support of the Anatolian campaign ebbed away. What made the matter worse was that the new government of Greece put Georgios Hatzianestis in charge of the army. Hatzianestis had never commanded anything larger than a division and proved to be one of the most spectacularly incompetent military commanders in history. As a consequence, the morale of of Greek army in Anatolia collapsed and a series of Turkish offensives pushed the Greeks out.

Even still, Constantinople may have become an international city. Except that the Bolsheviks won the Russian Civil War, which a) made control of the Bosporus a moot point and b) meant that Turkey could behave as a buffer state against Communist influence in the Middle East- but it would only be strong enough to do so if it controlled Constantinople (later renamed to Istanbul).

You may have notice that I have not mentioned Mustafa Kemal 'Ataturk'. While I am not denigrating his achievements in modernising Turkey, it is worth mentioning that he didn't so much win the war so much as the Allies lost it. Anatolia was a mess post-war; had the British and French seriously pursued their campaign there,it is very possible that they could have won.

In summary: None of the Allied powers could agree on a coherent strategy to deal with the Turkish nationalists and either couldn't be bothered or weren't capable of resisting them militarily

If anyone wants more information I would recommend The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire by Alan Palmer or any decent history book on modern Turkey. Equally, be very careful with Patrick Kinross. While Ataturk is a good biography, it is worth noting that Kinross was closely linked to Kemal and has a tendency to both whitewash his wrong-doings and exaggerate his accomplishments.

Sources: Ugor Umit Ungor, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia 1913-50 (Oxford, 2011) Taner Akcam, A Shameful Act: The Armenian Genocide and the Question of Turkish Responsibility (London, 2007) E. L. Woodward and Rohan Butler (eds.), Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919-39 Volume IV (1st Series, London, 1952)

Any number of Foreign office documents concerning Anatolia 1918-23

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire following the end of World War I, there was the Turkish War of Independence. The war was fought on three different fronts, against the Armenians, the French, and the Greeks. The independence movement formed a political organization called the Grand National Assembly, and following the end of the conflicts on the 'three fronts', this organization founded the Republic in Turkey.

Why I believe another commenter is saying that the Turks got luckier than the other modern states that were part of the Ottoman Empire (Syria, Iraq, Arabian Peninsula) is because Turkey had the significant advantage of being the center of the former Ottoman Empire. The political infrastructure necessary for a strong government was already in place when the Republic was founded.

This factor is magnified greatly when you consider Ata Turk (literally 'Father of Turks' his full name is Mustafa Kemal Ataturk). Ata Turk proved extremely effective at being a figure for which the newly independent Turks could rally behind. He put several successful cultural, political, and economic reforms into place, which together with the already strong political foundations, made Turkey much less susceptible to any further attempts of the allies to colonize.

Additionally, the case might be made that other countries suffered from having oil, a sort of 'curse of plenty'. A lot of the involvement of the allies in the Middle Eastern region immediately following the fall of the Ottoman Empire was originally for oil. British Petroleum for instance, was founded following the a deal brokered between Iran and Britain.