quality:corruption, information:classification, structural:scholar_edition, linguistic:translation, linguistic:paraphrasing
Republic of Turkey

After the First World War and Armistice of Mudros, Gaziantep was occupied by the United Kingdom on 17 December 1918, and it was transferred to France on 5 November 1919. The French Armenian Legion was also involved in occupation. In April 1920 irregular Turkish troops known as Kuva-yi Milliye besieged the city, but the 10-month-long battle resulted in French victory. Around 6,000 Turkish civilians were killed in the process.

The French made the last attempt to revive the Armenian community in the city during the Siege of Aintab, where the Armenians who fled the genocide were promised their homes back in their native lands. However, on 25 December 1921, the Treaty of Ankara was signed, and as a result, the French evacuated the city.

According to Ümit Kurt, born in modern-day Gaziantep and an academic at Harvard's Center for Middle East Studies, "The famous battle of Aintab against the French … seems to have been as much the organised struggle of a group of genocide profiteers seeking to hold onto their loot as it was a fight against an occupying force. The resistance … sought to make it impossible for the Armenian repatriates to remain in their native towns, terrorising them to make them flee. In short, not only did the local … landowners, industrialists, and civil-military bureaucratic elites lead to the resistance movement, but they also financed it to cleanse Aintab of Armenians." The same Turkish families who made their wealth through the expropriation of Armenians in 1915 and 1921/1922 continued to dominate the city's politics through the one-party period of the Republic of Turkey.

In 2013, Turkey, a member state of NATO, requested deployment of MIM-104 Patriot missiles to Gaziantep to be able to respond faster in a case of military operation against Turkish soil in the Syrian Civil War, which was accepted.

On 6 February 2023, the city and nearby areas were devastated by catastrophic earthquakes. Around 900 buildings collapsed and 10,777 other buildings were heavily damaged in the city, which have been slated for demolition. Historic buildings including the Gaziantep Castle, the Şirvani Mosque and the Liberation Mosque were also heavily damaged.