Ahmed Izzet Pasha
In the months leading up to the end of World War I, the Ottoman regime had undergone major restructuring. The government ministers of the Committee of Union and Progress, which ran the Ottoman government between 1913 and 1918, had resigned from office and fled the country soon afterwards. Successful Allied offensives in Salonika posed a direct threat to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. Mehmed VI appointed Ahmed Izzet Pasha to the position of Grand Vizier and tasked him with the assignment of seeking an armistice with the Allied Powers and ending Ottoman involvement in the war. On 30 October 1918, an armistice was signed between the Ottomans, represented by the Minister of the Navy Rauf Bey, and the Allies, represented by British Admiral Somerset Gough-Calthorpe. The armistice ended Ottoman participation in the war and required the Empire's forces to stand down although there still remained approximately one million soldiers in the field and small scale fighting continued in the frontier provinces into November.