End of the campaign against the Senussi

On 8 February 1917 Brigadier-General H. W. Hodgson’s column of armoured cars returned to Mersa Matruh after its raid on the oasis of Siwa. In a week it had twice crossed over 300 kilometres of desert, broken up the order’s camp at Girba and taken Siwa, losing only three slightly wounded officers and one lorry with broken springs. The British chronology of the war closes with this date the operations against the Senussi order, begun in November 1915. The British official history of the operations in Egypt states that from this moment the western frontier of the country disappears from the scene of the war.

An incomplete success

The raid did not achieve its main objective. Sayyid Ahmad al-Sharif and his commander-in-chief, Muhammad Salih, escaped with most of their men to the oasis of Jaghbub, the order’s holy place, which London had not allowed to be attacked. The official history admits that the expedition cannot be considered a complete success. It did, however, show the order and all the inhabitants of the Western Desert how far the arm of the British now reached, finally removed the threat from that quarter and raised British prestige. The prestige of the sheikh, who had been defeated once again and was struggling through heavy dunes to Jaghbub, fell in the same measure. According to General Archibald Murray, his men lost about 40 killed and 200 wounded, and the British took or destroyed 220 rifles and stocks of ammunition, killed 40 camels and burned the tents and huts of the camp.

The balance of the campaign

The war with the order began in November 1915 when, after raids on Sollum and other posts, the British withdrew from the coast to Mersa Matruh. Sayyid Ahmad, persuaded by the Turks and paid by the Germans, was to stir up a holy war in Egypt and tie down in the west troops that the British needed on the Suez Canal. For the first few months this worked. The Western Frontier Force, cobbled together from what had remained in Egypt after the departure of troops for Gallipoli, had to fight well-led detachments trained by Turkish officers in the actions at Wadi Majid and at Halazin in January 1916. The turning point was the Battle of Agagia in February 1916, after which the British retook Sollum. The war then moved to the chain of oases of the Western Desert, from which the order threatened the densely populated Nile valley. The British took them back one by one: Bahariya and Dakhla in October 1916, and Siwa in February 1917.

The expected rising in Egypt did not break out. Some Bedouin of the Aulad Ali tribe and over a hundred men of the Egyptian Coastguard joined the order, but the people of the Nile valley remained quiet. Technology was decisive. The British official history stresses that it was the internal combustion engine that changed the situation completely: light car patrols in Fords and batteries of armoured cars covered hundreds of kilometres where camels covered tens, cut the oases off from the Nile and from one another, and finally made it possible to reach the sheikh in his last stronghold. By April 1917 there were six light car patrols and three batteries of light armoured cars on this front. What the Turks and Germans gained from the whole enterprise was above all that for over a year it tied down British troops that could have fought elsewhere.

Idris instead of Ahmad

The raid on Siwa had a decisive influence on the negotiations that the British and Italians were conducting with the sheikh’s cousin, Sayyid Muhammad Idris. Idris, who by birth had a better claim to lead the order than Sayyid Ahmad, had opposed the war with Great Britain from the start and had dissociated himself from it in a letter to General John Maxwell. In July 1916 an Anglo-Italian mission met him at Zuwaytina, south of Benghazi, and London and Rome agreed to recognise him as the religious leader of the order, but not to give him land or autonomy. At the end of January 1917 talks were resumed at Tobruk, in eastern Cyrenaica, with Colonel M. G. Talbot as the British representative. They went slowly until the fighting at Siwa, fought while the talks were under way, proved that the British regarded Idris as head of the order and his cousin as a rebel. Wavering supporters of Sayyid Ahmad began to go over to Idris.

On 12 April 1917 Idris accepted the British terms, and on 14 April he signed an agreement with the British at Akrama near Tobruk and concluded a modus vivendi with the Italians, on the same day according to the British official history, two days later according to some sources. He undertook to hand over shipwrecked sailors and enemy officers and to keep no troops on Egyptian soil apart from 50 policemen at Jaghbub, in exchange for trade through Sollum. Sayyid Ahmad, by now almost powerless, remained in Libya for over a year, and in August 1918 sailed for Constantinople in an Austrian submarine. Idris kept his undertakings and after the next war became King of Libya.