He attended the medical academy of the Ottoman military and during the Turco-Italian war he was deployed to Tripolitania where he met Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) in 1911. While preparation towards World War I were met, he was assigned the Deputy Chief of the Health Department of the Ottoman Army in 1914. He was promoted to Colonel in June 1915. As such he served in Çanakkale and Sedd el Bahr, later he stationed in the city of Diyarbakır where he met Atatürk again in 1916. He was shortly assigned as the Medical Inspector to the Ottoman Army in the Caucasus but upon his return to Istanbul, he became the Inspector for the Ottoman soldiers in treatment in the German Empire. In Germany he attended a medical congress on infectious illnesses, representing the Ottoman Empire. He became an adherent to the Kemalist ideology, was one of the military officers who supported Mustafa Kemal from the start of the Turkish War of Independence and accompanied Atatürk on his journey to Samsun in 1919. During the Turkish War of Independence he was deployed to the Eastern Front where the Kemalist forces launched an offensive against Armenia.