During the war, the Ottoman state waged genocidal campaigns against the Armenian and Assyrian minorities, which attracted much unfavorable publicity around the world. The favourable treatment of Townshend was largely because he served the public relations needs of the Ottoman state as Enver cannily manipulated Townshend's obsessive need to have the great and mighty pay attention to him for his own advantage. Townshend's willingness to praise Enver Pasha in public for his generous hospitality and to issue press statements attacking the British for alleged mistreatment of Ottoman POWs in Egypt served to distract attention from what the Ottomans were doing to the Armenians and Assyrians. At the war's end Townshend, as the most senior British imperial official in Istanbul at that moment, was involved in the negotiations for the Ottoman Empire's military surrender to the British Empire's advancing Egyptian Expeditionary Force in October 1918. Townshend's claim made on his return to Britain that the entire Armistice of Mudros was all his work led to an annoyed Field Marshal Allenby issuing a corrective statement saying that Townshend did indeed play a role in negotiating the armistice, but he had greatly exaggerated his role by claiming that it was all his work.