Attack on Medina

On 6 June 1916, the day after the outbreak of the revolt, the Arab forces of Emir Faisal attacked the defences of Medina, the second holiest city of Islam and the terminus of the Hejaz Railway. The assault failed. The Turkish garrison, commanded by General Fahreddin Pasha (Fakhri Pasha in British sources), drove the rebels off, and their attempts to cut the railway line to Damascus brought only a short interruption in traffic. The date of 6 June is given by the British official history of the campaign in Egypt and Palestine; the fighting outside the city, however, lasted several days.

The Turks had been warned

Faisal returned from Damascus to Medina in the second half of May. Officially he was to prepare volunteers from the Hejaz for an Ottoman expedition there; in reality, together with his elder brother Ali, he was preparing the revolt. The Turks, however, suspected something. A special detachment was stationed in the city, which was to go on to Yemen and escort the German mission of Baron Othmar von Stotzingen, and at the end of May Fahreddin, until then deputy commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, arrived there on the orders of Djemal Pasha. According to the account that Thomas Edward Lawrence later took down from Faisal, Medina was full of Turkish soldiers and the hope of surprise was gone. The brothers nevertheless decided to act. As George Antonius writes, at sunrise on 5 June they rode to the tomb of Hamza, the Prophet’s uncle, where about 1,500 recruits were encamped, proclaimed Arab independence in the name of Sharif Hussein bin Ali, and joined the tribes gathered south-east of the city.

The failed assault

British reports from those days spoke of about 30,000 men gathered against Medina, but of only about 6,000 rifles. The rebels had neither guns nor machine guns. The sources give the strength of the garrison very variously, from several thousand to more than ten thousand soldiers, but the Turks had artillery and strong fortifications. According to the British official history, on 6 June Faisal attacked the city’s defences without success, while Ali moved north to cut the railway. The Bedouin tore up the rails with their bare hands and threw them down the embankment, but without explosives they could not do lasting damage, and Turkish gangs quickly repaired it. According to some studies, on 8 June a small Arab detachment attacked the strongly held station of Muhit, about 14 kilometres north of Medina, and was also repulsed.

Lawrence described the course of the fighting outside the city dramatically. At the critical moment the men of the Bani Ali tribe gave way, and the Arabs were driven back from the walls. When the Turkish artillery opened fire on them, the Bedouin, unused to it, were terrified, and Faisal and Ali rode in vain up and down before them in the open field to show that the shells were not as dangerous as they sounded. Lawrence also claims that when some of the Bani Ali offered submission in exchange for sparing their villages, Fahreddin used the lull to surround the suburb of Awali and had it taken by storm, and hundreds of its inhabitants were killed. This was the account of one side, written down later and hard to verify today. In Turkish memory Fahreddin remained above all the heroic defender of the holy city.

What came next

After about three days the Arabs broke off their attacks and withdrew into the mountains along the road to Mecca, and Fahreddin sent his troops after them. The Ottoman authorities long kept silent. As late as 26 June Turkish communiqués denied that any revolt had broken out in the Hejaz, and on 29 June the Damascus newspaper “Al-Sharq” admitted only that “certain sections of the tribes have attacked a few posts in the neighbourhood of Medina”. In the summer Fahreddin took command of the new Ottoman Hejaz Expeditionary Force, and reinforcements reached him by rail. Although the rebels soon took Mecca and the Red Sea ports, they never captured Medina. Fahreddin held it until January 1919, more than two months after the armistice between Turkey and the Entente.