natural borders (including Southern Syria or Palestine), and proclaimed Faisal the king of all Arabs. Faisal invited Ali Rida al-Rikabi to form a government. The congress also proclaimed political and economic union with neighboring Iraq and demanded its independence as well. On 25 April, the supreme inter-Allied council, which was formulating the Treaty of Sèvres, granted France the mandate of Syria (including Lebanon), and granted Britain the Mandate of Palestine (including Jordan), and Iraq. Syrians reacted with violent demonstrations, and a new government headed by Hashim al-Atassi was formed on 7 May 1920. The new government decided to organize general conscription and began forming an army. These decisions provoked adverse reactions by France as well as by the Maronite patriarchate of Mount Lebanon, which denounced the decisions as a "coup d'état". In Beirut, the Christian press expressed its hostility to the decisions of Faisal's government. Lebanese nationalists used the crisis against Faisal's government to convene a council of Christian figures in Baabda that proclaimed the independence of Lebanon on 22 March 1920. On 14 July 1920, General Gouraud issued an ultimatum to Faisal, giving him the choice between submission or abdication. Realizing that the power balance was not in his favor, Faisal chose to cooperate. However, the young minister of war, Youssef al-Azmeh, refused to comply. In the resulting Franco-Syrian War, Syrian troops under al-Azmeh, composed of the little remaining troops of the Arab army along with Bedouin horsemen and civilian volunteers, met the better trained 12,000-strong French forces under General Mariano Goybet at the Battle of Maysaloun. The French won the battle in less than a day and Azmeh died on the battlefield, along with many of the Syrian troops, while the remaining troops possibly defected. General Goybet captured Damascus with little resistance on 24 July 1920, and the mandate was written in London two years later on 24 July 1922. States created during the French Mandate Arriving in Lebanon, the French were received as liberators by the Christian community, but in the rest of Syria, they were faced with strong resistance. The mandate region was subdivided into six states. They were the states of Damascus (1920), Aleppo (1920), Alawites (1920), Jabal Druze (1921), the autonomous Sanjak of Alexandretta (1921, modern-day Hatay), and the State of Greater Lebanon (1920), which became later the modern country of Lebanon. The borders of these states were based in part on the sectarian