Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was an Ottoman and Turkish army officer and statesman who served as the first President of Turkey. He led the Turkish War of Independence against the Allied powers and established the Republic of Turkey in 1923. Atatürk introduced radical political and social reforms to modernize Turkey by establishing a secular democracy and adopting the Latin alphabet to replace the Arabic script. He served as Turkey's president from 1923 until his death in 1938.