Arab Revolt

The Arab Revolt was the war that the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, and his sons waged against the Ottoman Empire from June 1916 until the end of the war in the Middle East. It began in the Hejaz, the part of western Arabia with the holy cities of Islam, where within a few months the rebels took Mecca, the ports on the Red Sea and Ta’if, but failed to take Medina. Then the war moved north. The army of Emir Faisal, with British advisers, the most famous of whom was T. E. Lawrence, took Wejh and Aqaba, spent two years wrecking the Hejaz Railway, and in the autumn of 1918, as the right wing of General Edmund Allenby’s army, entered Damascus and Aleppo. It was a guerrilla war over a vast area, fought by Bedouin tribes and a small regular army, paid for with British gold and supplied by the British fleet. Its political fate, however, was decided not in the desert but in London and Paris.

Name and dates

In Arabic literature the rising is called the Great Arab Revolt (al-Thawra al-Arabiyya al-Kubra), in English the Arab Revolt, and in Turkish the revolt of the Arabs or the revolt of the Sharif. The British official history of the campaign in Egypt and Palestine, written by George MacMunn and Cyril Falls, calls it “the Arab campaign”, and in its account of September 1918 remarks that “the so-called Hejaz Revolt” had by then spread far beyond the Hejaz.

We use the dates 10 June 1916 – 30 October 1918. At dawn on 10 June Hussein himself gave the signal to fight in Mecca. Hashemite tradition and many Arab works regard this day, 9 Sha’ban 1334 AH, as the start of the revolt, and in Jordan it is celebrated as the anniversary of the Great Arab Revolt. The British chronology of the war and the official history start the revolt five days earlier: on 5 June the Sharif’s sons, Ali and Faisal, proclaimed the independence of the Arabs near Medina, and the next day attacked the city without success. The siege of Jeddah also began on 9 June. We treat these first days as the prelude to the rising of the Sharif himself.

We take as the end 30 October 1918, the day the Armistice of Mudros was signed, which ended the war between the Entente and Turkey. The last action involving the rebels, the capture of the Muslimiya junction near Aleppo, took place two days earlier, and the English Wikipedia ends the revolt as early as 25 October, at Aleppo. The fighting did not end everywhere, however. The garrison of Medina under General Fahreddin Pasha (Fakhri Pasha in British sources) did not accept the armistice and held out for more than two months longer. It surrendered only in early January 1919, on 9 or 10 January according to different sources, when its own officers handed their sick commander over to the Arabs.

Background

Hussein had been Sharif and Emir of Mecca since 1908, the guardian of the holy cities, from the Hashemite family, descendants of the Prophet. He got on badly with the Young Turks ruling in Constantinople, because they wanted to curtail the old autonomy of the Hejaz, and the Hejaz Railway from Damascus, which had reached Medina in 1908, made it easier for them to send troops deep into Arabia. The British had sought contact with him since the start of the war. As early as the autumn of 1914 Lord Kitchener promised him protection if the Arabs sided with Britain, and in November the Turks proclaimed jihad, to which, to their disappointment, the Sharif did not respond.

In July 1915 Hussein sent a letter to Cairo that began his correspondence with the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon. By March 1916 they had exchanged ten letters. The Sharif demanded recognition of Arab independence within borders that took in the Arabian Peninsula, Syria and Mesopotamia. In the letter of 24 October 1915 McMahon promised to recognise and support this independence, but with reservations: he excluded the lands “to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo” and areas where Britain could not act without detriment to the interests of France. What exactly these words excluded, and above all whether they covered Palestine, is disputed to this day. At the same time the British and the French were agreeing on the division of Turkey’s Asian possessions. In the spring of 1916 Russia accepted the Sykes-Picot agreement, and on 16 May the British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, approved it. Under it the interior of Syria with Damascus and Aleppo was indeed to go to an Arab state, but under French influence, while the coast and Mesopotamia were to be placed under direct French and British rule. Hussein knew nothing of this.

The outbreak was hastened by events in Syria, where the commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, Djemal Pasha, was crushing the Arab nationalists, and by the arrival in Medina of a fresh Turkish force that was to cross the Hejaz to Yemen. In May, at the Sharif’s request, British warships blockaded the ports of the Hejaz. The forces were very unequal. According to the British official history the Turks had more than 15,000 soldiers with artillery in the Hejaz, mainly from the 22nd Division. The Sharif could count on tribal fighters who came and went as they pleased. By the end of June there may have been as many as 50,000 of them, but only a small part had modern rifles, and they had no guns or machine guns at all.

The Hejaz in 1916

On 10 June the Sharif’s men attacked the garrison of Mecca, weakened by the summer move of most of the troops to Ta’if in the mountains. In three days they took the city, but the Ajyad fort above the Great Mosque and the Jirwal barracks held out for almost a month and shelled the city. The issue was decided only by Egyptian mountain guns, which Sir Reginald Wingate, Governor-General of the Sudan, sent from Port Sudan. The fort fell on 4 July, and the barracks surrendered on 9 July. Earlier, on 16 June, after shelling by British warships and a seaplane raid, Jeddah capitulated, the chief port of the Hejaz, which from then on was the base of British aid. The rebels took further ports on the Red Sea: Rabigh, and on 27 July Yanbu, the old port of Medina. Ta’if, strongly fortified and defended by about 3,000 soldiers, was besieged by the Sharif’s second son, Abdullah. He did not attempt an assault, and when the Egyptian artillery had mastered the Turkish guns, he waited. On 22 September the garrison surrendered unconditionally, and the Turkish Governor-General of the Hejaz, Ghalib Pasha, was taken prisoner. According to the official history the Sharif by then held more than 5,000 prisoners.

At Medina things went badly. Fahreddin, sent there by Djemal just before the outbreak, made a sortie from the city on 3 July, defeated Faisal and sacked the suburb the Arabs had occupied, and in August drove Ali back. The Bedouin, unused to artillery fire, could neither take fortifications nor defend themselves against a trained enemy. The Turks combined their troops in Medina into the Hejaz Expeditionary Force and brought up reinforcements by rail, so that by the autumn they had about 13,000 soldiers in the Hejaz. They also declared Hussein deposed, appointing his rival, Ali Haidar, as the new Emir of Mecca. It seemed that they would soon march on Mecca by the road through Rabigh. In Cairo and London there was argument all autumn over whether to send a British brigade to Rabigh. General Archibald Murray, the commander in Egypt, was against it, believing that Christian troops so close to the holy cities would alienate the Arabs. In the end no troops were sent, because the Sharif would not take responsibility for their arrival.

Help took other forms. The British supplied rifles, ammunition, food and gold, and the Sharif’s adviser in Jeddah was Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Wilson. In September a French military mission under Colonel Édouard Brémond arrived with a small detachment of Muslim soldiers from North Africa. A successful pilgrimage to Mecca at the beginning of October raised the Sharif’s prestige in the Muslim world. At the end of October the scholars of Mecca proclaimed Hussein king of the Arab lands, but in December Britain and France recognised him only as king of the Hejaz. In October a young intelligence officer from Cairo, Captain Lawrence, came to the Hejaz. He visited Faisal in his camp in the mountains and decided that he was the leader the revolt needed. From the end of the year he was the liaison officer at his headquarters.

From the Hejaz to Aqaba

In December 1916 the Turks struck again. They routed the Arabs in the mountains south-west of Medina, and Faisal’s forces fell back in disorder to Yanbu, where they held out with the help of Royal Navy ships. The way out of the crisis was a plan that Faisal had proposed as early as the autumn and that Lawrence and Wilson supported. Abdullah was to take up position by the railway in Wadi Ais, north of Medina, and threaten the Turkish rear, while Faisal with his whole army, about 10,000 men according to the official history, was to march 300 kilometres north along the coast to the port of Wejh. On 23 January 1917, before Faisal’s army arrived, an Arab landing party from British ships took the town. The official history writes that the march “acted like a charm”. From then on there was no more talk of a Turkish attack on Mecca, and the garrison of Medina, never besieged in the strict sense, became in practice an invested one. The Turks had to post ever larger forces along the railway: separate groups at Tabuk and Ma’an numbered several thousand men each by the end of 1917.

From then on the rebels’ main target was the Hejaz Railway. Before, the Bedouin had torn up rails with their bare hands, and the Turks had repaired them in a few hours. Now British and French officers taught them to use explosives and led raids themselves, blowing up bridges, culverts and trains. In the spring of 1917, ill in Abdullah’s camp, Lawrence concluded that trying to take Medina made no sense. The garrison, tied to the city, did the Turks more harm than good, and the railway should be kept alive, but only just working. In April the Sharif’s youngest son, Zeid, routed a great convoy of the Emir Ibn Rashid of Hail, an ally of the Turks, near Hanakiya.

The boldest undertaking of the year was the expedition to Aqaba, a small port at the head of the Gulf of Aqaba, which the British had considered taking from the sea. Lawrence opposed a landing and wanted the Arabs themselves to take the port, from the land side. On 9 May only about 50 riders under Sharif Nasir and the Howeitat sheikh Auda Abu Tayi set out from Wejh. They went round the Turkish posts through the desert, recruited the tribes and at the end of June, now about 500 strong, came down into the hills above the road from Ma’an to Aqaba. On 2 July at Aba el Lissan they destroyed a Turkish battalion, and on 6 July they entered Aqaba with more than 600 prisoners. The Arabs now had a base only about 200 kilometres from the British front at Gaza, where British Empire troops had twice assaulted the Turkish line in vain that spring.

The Northern Army and the war on the railway

The capture of Aqaba was the first important news that greeted Allenby, the new commander in Egypt. It was decided that Faisal and his Arab Northern Army, operating north of Ma’an, would in effect come under the orders of the British Commander-in-Chief, while south of Ma’an Ali and Abdullah would remain in the care of Wingate, High Commissioner in Egypt since the start of 1917. In August Faisal moved to Aqaba. The Hejaz, the cradle of the revolt, faded into the background. Around Aqaba a regular army was formed under Ja’far al-Askari, made up mainly of Arabs, former prisoners and deserters from the Ottoman army, with mountain artillery and units mounted on camels and mules. Works give the strength of the Northern Army differently, from 2,000–3,500 to about 5,000 regular soldiers. Alongside them fought the tribes, paid, as Falls wrote, in “chinking golden sovereigns” while the whole world was already paying in paper. Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce Joyce’s British section gave the Arabs armoured cars, aircraft and transport, and Captain Pisani’s French detachment a mountain battery.

In the autumn of 1917 Lawrence blew up trains near Mudawwara, and on 21 October the regulars repulsed a Turkish attack from Ma’an near Petra. An attempt to destroy the bridge over the Yarmuk during the British offensive on Beersheba and Jerusalem failed. After the capture of Jerusalem in December Allenby wanted the Arabs to advance north along the eastern shore of the Dead Sea and join hands with him in the Jordan Valley. In January 1918 Emir Zeid’s forces took Tafileh, on 25 January they routed a Turkish column from Kerak in the field, and on 28 January the Bedouin sank a Turkish grain flotilla on the Dead Sea. Snow and quarrels, however, halted the advance, and in March the Turks briefly retook the town.

At the same time politics caught up with the revolt. At the end of 1917 the Bolsheviks published the secret treaties of tsarist diplomacy, among them the Sykes-Picot agreement. Djemal Pasha at once sent Faisal letters offering peace, and on 4 December in Beirut he announced publicly that the Entente meant to divide the Arab lands. The Sharif’s unease was deepened by the Balfour Declaration of November 1917, which promised the Jews a national home in Palestine. The British reassured him in January with a message from Commander David Hogarth, and in February 1918 with an assurance that they would keep their promise to liberate the Arabs. Faisal did not answer the Turks, but distrust of the allies remained.

In the spring of 1918 Allenby twice struck across the Jordan, at Amman and Es Salt, and twice withdrew. The Arabs meanwhile attacked Ma’an. On 11–20 April three columns, the regulars of Ja’far and Maulud with Auda’s horsemen, and the armoured cars and Egyptian Camel Corps of Lieutenant-Colonel Alan Dawnay, took several stations. The assault on Ma’an station itself on 17 April failed, but the line between Ma’an and Mudawwara, more than a hundred kilometres with seven stations, was destroyed so thoroughly that it was never rebuilt before the end of the war. Medina was finally cut off from the north, because the Turks had run out of spare rails. On 8 August the British Imperial Camel Corps took Mudawwara. The official history concludes that in this way well over ten thousand Turkish soldiers were tied down in the Hejaz and southern Transjordan, men who would have been very useful to Otto Liman von Sanders in Palestine in the summer of 1918, when Allenby’s army gave up most of its best divisions to France.

Deraa, Damascus and Aleppo

For September Allenby was preparing a great offensive by the sea, at Megiddo. From the Arabs he wanted above all that, a few days before it, they should draw the Turks’ attention across the Jordan. A mobile column, about 450 regular soldiers on camels, a French mountain battery, armoured cars, Egyptians and Gurkhas, assembled at the oasis of Azraq in the desert. It was joined by Auda’s horsemen, the Ruwalla tribe of Sheikh Nuri al-Shaalan and peasants from the Hauran. On 16 and 17 September the Arabs blew up a bridge and stretches of track south, north and west of Deraa, the junction where the Palestine line met the Hejaz Railway. The Turks sent reinforcements there, and Liman concluded that something dangerous was happening there. On 19 September Allenby’s infantry broke through the front by the sea.

When the Turkish armies in Palestine fell apart and the Fourth Army began to retreat from Transjordan, Faisal brought up all his forces, about 4,000 men, three-quarters of them irregulars, and threw them onto the lines of retreat. On 27 September a Turkish column passed through the village of Tafas and massacred its inhabitants. The Arabs, regulars and peasants, destroyed it and in revenge took no prisoners. That evening Bedouin burst into Deraa, abandoned by the Turks. Then the Arabs covered the right flank of the British cavalry and harried the columns fleeing towards Damascus. Across the Jordan the garrison from Ma’an, cut off after the capture of Amman, preferred to surrender to the Australians rather than to the waiting Bedouin.

On the morning of 1 October Australian horsemen galloped through Damascus, and after them came Sharif Nasir’s Arabs and Lawrence. Who was first was a political question: Lawrence at once set up an Arab administration in Faisal’s name. On 3 October Allenby told Faisal that he recognised Arab administration east of the Jordan and in Damascus, but not on the coast, which was to go to France. Lawrence soon left for England. The Arabs went on north with the British cavalry. During the night of 25–26 October they entered Aleppo, and on 28 October they took the Muslimiya junction, cutting the railway from Constantinople to Mesopotamia. Two days later Turkey signed the armistice.

Casualties

There are no complete figures for either side. The tribal forces kept no records, and Arab losses are known only from individual actions: usually small in the raids, but heavy in the defeats at Medina in 1916 and in the attack on Ma’an, which according to the official history cost about 250 men. By the end of August 1918 the Arabs had sent about 6,000 prisoners to Egypt from the area between Tafileh and Medina, and according to Arab figures, which the official history says should be treated with caution, they had killed or wounded 5,500 Turks. Many Turkish soldiers died of disease. Falls estimates that even before the final offensive the Arab campaign killed, wounded, captured or contained well over 25,000 enemy troops. To this must be added thousands of prisoners from September and October 1918, including more than 4,600 from the Ma’an garrison. After the surrender of Medina, according to Falls, 491 officers and 7,545 men were sent to Egypt, and more than a thousand men of the garrison had died of influenza in the last months.

Significance

Militarily the Arab Revolt was a war on the margins of Allenby’s great campaign and depended on it, on the British fleet, arms and gold. Falls compared the Arabs to the Spanish guerrillas of the Napoleonic Wars: they gave the British invaluable help, though they largely owed their opportunities to them. The revolt wrested the holy cities of Islam from the Turks and undermined the jihad proclaimed by the Sultan, and for a long time it tied well over ten thousand Turkish soldiers to Medina and the railway. Lawrence’s war, which he described in “Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, became a classic example of guerrilla warfare and the source of a legend in whose shadow the Arab leaders of the revolt themselves often disappeared.

Politically the revolt ended in disappointment for the Hashemites. Faisal governed in Damascus and in March 1920 was proclaimed king of Greater Syria, but in July French troops defeated his army at Maysalun and occupied the city, in line with the division foreseen by the Sykes-Picot agreement. The British compensated the Sharif’s sons elsewhere: in 1921 Faisal became king of Iraq, and Abdullah emir of Transjordan, today’s Jordan, which his descendants still rule. Hussein, who refused to accept the post-war settlements, lost the Hejaz to Ibn Saud in the mid-1920s. The dispute over what the British promised in the correspondence with McMahon, and whether they kept their word, has remained one of the most important questions in the history of the modern Middle East.