Turks repulsed at Petra

On 21 October 1917 an Ottoman force from Ma’an, a junction on the Hejaz Railway in southern Transjordan, attacked the Arab rebels in the valley of Wadi Musa, at the entrance to the rock city of Petra. According to the British official history (Cyril Falls, Military Operations: Egypt and Palestine, vol. II), four weak infantry battalions and the 7th Cavalry Regiment with four guns came out of Ma’an. They struck the position of the regular troops of Emir Faisal’s Northern Army at the village of Elji, near the ruins. It was the Turks’ first serious attempt to push the Arabs out of the mountains west of Ma’an. It ended in failure.

Since July, when the Arabs had taken Aqaba, the Turks had feared for Ma’an while at the same time preparing to retake the port. According to the official history, at the beginning of September they had about 6,000 men and a dozen or so guns in Ma’an and to the west of the town, and on the shortest road to Aqaba, at Aba al-Lisan, they had set up a camp. The Arabs chose another route: through the valley of Wadi Araba and then Wadi Musa, from where they could harass the Ma’an garrison. Major Thomas Edward Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillars of Wisdom that the Turks were deliberately provoked into attacking precisely here, because the steep rocks defended the position by themselves, even with weak defenders. Mawlud Mukhlis moved to Petra with mule-mounted infantry and camped among the ruins. The local Arabs of the Liyatna tribe made forays onto the plateau and carried off Turkish pack animals. At the beginning of October the Arabs occupied Shobak, north of Ma’an, for a few days and tore up the tracks of the light railway on which the Turks carried firewood for their locomotives.

Mawlud Mukhlis, an Iraqi born in 1886 and connected with Tikrit, was an Ottoman cavalry officer. In 1915, as Lawrence writes, he commanded the Turkish horse at Shaiba and was taken prisoner there by the British. When the Arab Revolt broke out, he volunteered to the Sharif as one of the first professional officers. According to the official history, however, the regular troops in Wadi Musa were commanded by Jafar al-Askari, a former Ottoman officer who headed Faisal’s regular army. The Arab forces were small: two companies of camel troops, two companies of mule-mounted infantry, two quick-firing mountain guns and four machine guns, about 350 men fit for action in all. They were supported by fewer than 200 Bedouin.

According to the official history, the Turks shelled the position with their guns for an hour, while an aircraft dropped bombs on it. Then the infantry went in to the assault and took the outer defences. At that point the Bedouin struck the Turks in the flank. In the evening the Turks withdrew, leaving prisoners in the defenders’ hands. The poorly trained camel troops performed badly, but Mawlud’s infantry held on. Lawrence described the battle more colourfully: Mawlud supposedly deliberately opened his centre, let the Turks in right up to the sheer rocks, and then, when they were surprised and battered, struck both their flanks at once. The losses of the two sides cannot be established. Lawrence wrote only that the Turkish losses were heavy. Some modern studies give 400 Turks killed and 300 taken prisoner, and another date, 23 October, but this is not confirmed by the official history. According to some studies the expedition was led by General Cemal Pasha (Mersinli), known as “Little Djemal” to distinguish him from Djemal Pasha, commander of the Fourth Army.

The fight in Wadi Musa was not a great battle, and Falls elsewhere even admits that the Turks achieved a certain minor success. Arab raids on the railway and roads around Ma’an did not stop, however. Lawrence claimed that the Turks never again attacked a prepared Arab position, and that the loss of faith in their own strength cost them more than their losses. Aqaba could be at ease about its security. Soon snow fell in the mountains and frosts set in, which halted operations on both sides for a long time. On 24 October, three days after the battle, Lawrence set out from Aqaba on a raid against the railway bridges in the Yarmuk valley. It was meant to cut off the Turks in Palestine when General Edmund Allenby struck the Gaza – Beersheba line.