Some serious issues with historical accuracy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

So they're supposed to be at Alexandretta (Iskenderun) in the late 1930s. It's portrayed as some kind of Arab banana republic. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

France had ambitions in the Levant. As early as the 1860s it's obvious that France is backing the Maronites, Russia the Orthodox Christians, and Britain the Druze.

By ww1 the frogs were demanding all of greater Syria plus a huge chunk of Anatolia. Kids, back then nobody had played EU4 so the concept of core provinces didn't exist yet. So the French invade Turkey, and this gets mixed up with the Armenian genocide in complex ways and I don't really know the details tbh. But the Turks win. France has the best army in the world but Britain is trying to cockblock them and America is against the whole imperialism thing in general.

So the French get Syria but not Turkey. There is a dispute over the area around Alexandretta (Iskenderun). This is across the mountains from Syria but still very much tied into it. The League of Nations actually did something right and had a referendum done there (1936 iirc but I'm phoneposting from bed and y'all don't deserve me looking it up ).

Turkey won and got the land. It's now called Hatay province.

Thanks for coming to my exercise in distracting myself from not having children at Christmas.