In September 1918, recognizing that the empire had lost the war militarily, Talat Pasha emphasized that he had completed the most important war aim: "transforming Turkey to a nation-state in Anatolia". Remaining CUP cadres organized the Turkish nationalist movement to fight against both native Christian minorities and foreign powers. Historian Raymond Kévorkian states that the Turkish war of independence was "intended to complete the genocide by finally eradicating Armenian, Greek, and Syriac survivors". Many supporters of the independence movement were perpetrators of the genocide or had profited from it, meaning that "a serious attempt to distance the republic from the genocide could have destabilized the ruling coalition on which the state depended for its stability", in the words of historian Erik-Jan Zürcher. In February 1920, after capturing Marash, Kemalist forces massacred thousands of Armenian civilians. Between 1922 and 1929, the Turkish authorities eliminated surviving Armenians from southern Turkey, expelling thousands to French-mandate Syria.