End of the fighting in the Dakhla Oasis

On 22 October 1916 the British finished combing the Dakhla Oasis (Dakhla) in Egypt’s Libyan Desert. For three days the units that had entered the oasis on 17 October searched it village by village. The main forces of the Senussi order had already left westwards, towards Siwa, and most of those who had stayed behind were taken prisoner. The British chronology of the war closes operations in the Dakhla Oasis with this date.

On 19 October the light cars that had been the first to reach the oasis were joined by a Camel Corps detachment from Kharga. The British official history calls its forced march across the desert remarkable. The cameliers reached the well of Bir Sheikh Muhammad, almost at the western edge of the oasis, about 8 kilometres beyond its main settlement, El Qasr, and took 40 prisoners there. From 20 to 22 October the units systematically searched the villages. According to the report of General Archibald Murray, another 50 enemy men were captured, as well as many political prisoners, that is, local people suspected of collaborating with the order. Together with the prisoners from Budkhulu, the British thus detained more than 130 men in Dakhla. According to the official history, by the end of October the oasis, with about 20,000 inhabitants, was free of the enemy and of his influence.

At the same time the British took from the order the Bahariya Oasis, from which Sayyid Ahmed al-Sharif had withdrawn at the beginning of October. On 19 October a Camel Corps detachment entered its villages, and by 21 October the whole oasis was in British hands. On the same day the railway that had been under construction since the summer from Samalut on the Nile reached the oasis, and on 23 October the first transports ran on it. According to Murray, about 300 men who had not left with Sayyid Ahmed were taken prisoner in the two oases. There was almost no fighting.

In November permanent garrisons were stationed in both oases, and in time the Egyptian civil administration returned to them. Murray wrote that the inhabitants, clearly pleased to be rid of the order, welcomed the soldiers. Major-General William Watson, commander of the Western Force, held ceremonial gatherings with the local sheikhs and elders in both oases in November and December. On 19 November a patrol from Bahariya reached distant Farafra and took 18 prisoners there. The threat to the Nile valley from the west had passed, so Murray could begin transferring some of his troops east, to the Sinai front. Sayyid Ahmed with the rest of his forces still held out in Siwa, near the border with Italian Libya. The order lost it only at the beginning of 1917, after a British raid by armoured cars.