Affair of Imad

The British chronology of the war records under 22 October 1918 the Affair of Imad near Aden, at the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula. Imad was one of the forward posts on the line that British and Indian troops held north of the town, between the oasis of Sheikh Othman and Imad, covering the port and the water supply. Facing them at Lahij stood, since the summer of 1915, Ottoman troops from Yemen under Ali Said Pasha, which had then taken the town and advanced to the very outskirts of Aden.

From 1916 the front at Aden barely moved. The British did not have enough troops to recover the protectorate’s hinterland, and the Turks, cut off from the rest of the empire by the Arab Revolt in the Hejaz, lacked the strength to take Aden. Both sides waged a war of posts, patrols and raids, in which Arabs from the surrounding tribes allied to them often took part. Imad had been the target of such attacks before, among others in March 1916, when the Turks attacked it in greater strength and were driven off.

The available sources give no details of the engagement of 22 October 1918, neither the strength of the two sides nor the losses. It belonged to the same small positional war that had been going on at Aden for three years. It was also one of the last episodes of this campaign. Eight days later the Ottoman Empire signed an armistice that required the surrender of the garrisons outside Anatolia. The Turkish troops in Yemen did not submit to it at once. In December 1918 the garrison of Lahij surrendered and the British occupied the town without a fight, and the last Ottoman units in Yemen laid down their arms only in the spring of 1919.