Arabs capture Aqaba

On the morning of 6 July 1917, in a sandstorm, several hundred Arab camel riders came down the valley of Wadi Itm into Aqaba, a small Ottoman port at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba. That same morning, a few kilometres inland, the Turkish garrison, which had withdrawn from the town into the hills, surrendered to them. The force was formally commanded by Sharif Nasir, a trusted officer of Emir Faisal; its finest fighter was the sheikh of the Howeitat tribe, Auda Abu Tayi; and the plan had been drawn up by Captain Thomas Edward Lawrence. Lawrence wrote that they “splashed into the sea on July the sixth, just two months after our setting out from Wejh”. According to the British official history of the campaign in Egypt and Palestine (MacMunn and Falls), the victors brought more than 600 prisoners into Aqaba, including 20 officers and a German NCO who had been supervising well-boring. Lawrence later counted 700 prisoners, including 42 officers.

A port from the desert side

Aqaba was the only port from which the Turks could threaten the right flank of the British in Sinai or support tribal movements on the Red Sea coast. British and French warships had shelled it from the first day of the war with Turkey, and in February 1915 a landing party from the French cruiser Desaix drove the Turkish post there into the hills. From the sea, however, the town was difficult to hold. Behind the beach rose bare mountains, and the only road inland ran through the narrow gorge of Wadi Itm, which was easy to close. The Turks fortified this gorge and set up posts facing the sea, but from the east, from the desert and the Hejaz Railway at Ma’an, Aqaba was almost unprotected.

In Cairo and London the capture of Aqaba from the sea had long been considered. The head of the French military mission in the Hejaz, Colonel Édouard Brémond, proposed a joint Anglo-French landing. Lawrence was against it. He believed a landing would get stuck on the beach as at Gallipoli, under fire from the hills, and that the port should be taken by the Arabs themselves, so as to keep the initiative and extend the revolt northwards, towards Syria. When in March and April 1917 the British fought two battles for Gaza and were held up on the border of Palestine, the port, only about 210 kilometres from their line on the Wadi Ghazze, became a natural objective for the Arabs. According to the official history the task was entrusted to Lawrence. Lawrence himself wrote of the expedition as a private venture: Faisal provided the money, camels and explosives, while the head of intelligence in Cairo, General Gilbert Clayton, still regarded the march on Aqaba as inadvisable at the time.

The march through the desert

On 9 May 1917 a party which, according to the official history, numbered no more than about 50 riders set out from Wejh, Faisal’s new base. Alongside Nasir, Auda and Lawrence rode the Damascene activist Nasib al-Bakri. They crossed the railway between Tabuk and Mada’in Salih, blowing up track on the way, and crossed the desert to Wadi Sirhan, in the country of the powerful Ruwalla tribe. Its sheikh, Nuri al-Shalan, had no intention yet of breaking with the Turks, because his main market was Damascus, but he agreed to let the rebels use his pastures and roads. According to some accounts he was paid 6,000 pounds in gold for this. Auda meanwhile recruited his Howeitat, and Lawrence, as the official history records, made a solitary journey north, as far as the neighbourhood of Baalbek, where he met sheikhs who promised to rise when the time came. On 19 June he was back in camp, and he then also attacked the railway south of Amman, to make the Turks believe that the Arabs’ objective lay in the north.

At the end of June the party, by now reinforced to about 500 men, moved west. On 28 June the Arabs cut the railway south of Ma’an and took a gendarmerie post on the road from Ma’an to Aqaba, while a local Howeitat clan attacked the blockhouse at the pass of Aba al-Lisan. The Turks sent an infantry battalion from Ma’an to the rescue; on 1 July it camped by the spring at Aba al-Lisan, and the rebels occupied the hills around it.

Aba al-Lisan

Throughout 2 July the two sides exchanged fire, and the Turks fired off all the ammunition of their only mountain gun to no effect. At sunset Auda gathered 50 horsemen in a hollow about 200 metres from the Turkish positions and suddenly charged. As the Turks began to break, Nasir and Lawrence swept down on them from the hills with several hundred men on camels. According to the official history the fight lasted five minutes. Lawrence, firing his pistol at the gallop, accidentally shot his own camel in the head and fell to the ground, while Auda was hit by several bullets, which smashed his field glasses and pierced his holster and scabbard without wounding him. Lawrence counted about 300 dead Turks on the field and, together with Nasir, saved 160 prisoners from massacre only with difficulty. The Arabs lost two killed and several wounded. The official history notes that the rebels, with nothing but surprise on their side, had destroyed an equally strong or stronger force of trained infantry, which gave them new faith in their own strength.

The road to the sea lay open. The post at Guweira, halfway to Aqaba, surrendered with about 120 men to one of the Howeitat sheikhs before the main force arrived. On the night of 4–5 July, during a partial eclipse of the moon, the Arabs took the post at Kethira. The last obstacle was the Aqaba garrison, about 300 men, which had withdrawn from the town to an entrenched camp at Khadra, at the mouth of Wadi Itm. The local hillmen wanted to storm it, but Lawrence was anxious that word should spread that the Arabs took prisoners. After negotiations the Turks agreed to lay down their arms at dawn. On the morning of 6 July there was still some shooting with newly arrived tribesmen who knew nothing of the agreement, but when Nasir came down the valley with his men the surrender passed off peacefully. Soon afterwards the victors were on the beach.

A new front for the revolt

The victory very nearly ended in starvation. In Aqaba there was no food for the hundreds of prisoners and the thousands of Arabs who were flocking in from all sides. Lawrence and eight companions rode on camels across Sinai to Suez in under 50 hours. He secured the immediate dispatch to Aqaba of a ship with food, which took off the prisoners on the return voyage, and went on to Cairo. There he learnt that General Edmund Allenby had been in command in Egypt for a few days. The official history says that the capture of Aqaba was the first important news to greet Allenby, and that he at once understood how it would change the war in the desert. Lawrence put to him a plan to stir up the tribes of eastern Syria and asked for arms, money and gold to pay off debts incurred on the way. Allenby promised to do what he could.

The Arabs now had a base more than 300 kilometres north of Wejh and little more than 200 kilometres from the British front at Gaza. They could destroy the railway far to the north and hope to bring the tribes of Transjordan with them in the event of a British offensive. The Hejaz, the cradle of the revolt, receded into the background. It was soon decided that Faisal and his Northern Army, operating north of Ma’an, would in practice come under Allenby’s orders. In August Faisal moved to Aqaba, and the port became the base from which the Arabs fought until the end of the war. For the Turks the loss of Aqaba meant that they now had to defend not only the railway in the Hejaz but also the road to Damascus.