During World War 1, over 9 million soldiers were killed and a total of 21 million people died. In Mount Lebanon, a semi-autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire, a third of the population died from famine and disease as a result of the war, with a higher proportional death rate than anywhere else in the world. The First World War was the first global conflict and pitted the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire against the Allied forces of Great Britain, the United States, France, Russia, Italy and Japan from 1914 to 1918.