The Arab Revolt was an Arab uprising against Ottoman rule in the Middle East which occurred from 5 June 1916 to 30 October 1918 amid World War I. The British-backed Hashemites of Hejaz initiated a nationalist uprising which had the goal of overthrowing Turkish rule and creating a united Arab state stretching from Syria to Yemen. Support for the revolt wavered until December 1916, when Sharif Hussein's son Faisal, aided by British adviser Colonel T.E. Lawrence and a British warship, successfully defended the port of Yenbo from a Turkish attack. In July 1917 Faisal captured Aqaba, which became the base for operations north into Palestine. The Arab guerrillas operated in support of British regular forces commnded by General Sir Edmund Allenby, which broke through the Turkish Beersheba-Gaza line into Palestine in the fall of 1917 and occupied Jerusalem and following December. The Arab guerrillas carred out raids on Turkish road and rail communications and tied down large numbers of Turkish troops. In 1918 they carried out combined operations with British regular forces using armored cars as well as camels and horses. British and Arab cavalry occupied Damascus on October 1, 1918. Some isolated Turkish strongholds were still resisting Arab forces in 1919. Many Arabs felt betrayed by postwar arrangements in the Middle East, which saw Syria and Palestine come under French and British rule respectively (mandated by the League of Nations), rather than under Arab control.
Background[]
The Ottoman Turkish empire had ruled most of the Arab Middle East for four centuries, but by 1914 the Arabs were becoming restless under Turkish rule. When Turkey entered World War I in 1914, its sultan, Mehmed V, the Caliph (secular leader of Islam), called on the Ottoman Empire's Muslim subjects to join a jihad against the Christian enemy. Few Arabs responded to this call, and Britain was able to consolidate its hold on Egypt. Even before the war, the leader of Arabia's Hashemites, Sharif Hussein, had ambitions to assert the independence of the Arab lands. He had also explored the possibility of gaining British support for such aspirations.
Revolt[]
Sharif Hussein, head of Arabia's Hashemite clan, was a prestigious Islamic figure, claiming descent from the Prophet Muhammad and controlling Islam's holiest city, Mecca. His power base, the Hejaz region on Arabia's Red Sea coast, was part of Turkey's Ottoman Empire, its cities garrisoned by Ottoman soldiers. After Turkey entered the war in autumn 1914, relations with its Arab subjects deteriorated. Food shortages and growing hardship stimulated discontent, which was brutally suppressed. In October 1915, Hussein obtained a promise from Sir Henry MacMahon, the British high commissioner in Egypt, that Britain would broadly support Arab independence from Arabia north to Syria and east to Mesopotamia. Hussein proposed to rule this vast area as an Arab king.
Call to arms[]
Sharif Hussein launched his revolt in June 1916. Although it called for the support of "all brother Muslims," at first it seemed unlikely to be more than a local disturbance. Supplied with British rifles, the rebels overcame the Ottoman garrison in Mecca and seized the port of Jeddah with the support of Britain's Royal Navy, but they failed to take the second holy city of Medina. Meanwhile, an advance by British troops from Egypt across the Sinai Desert, timed to coincide with the revolt, made slow progress. Turkish reinforcements were sent to Arabia from Syria along the Hejaz railroad.
Lawrence of Arabia[]
In November 1916, Lieutenant Colonel T.E. Lawrence, a British intelligence officer, was sent to establish relations with Hussein's son, Emir Faisal, who was leading a force of chiefly Bedouin irregulars around the port of Yenbo (in modern-day Saudi Arabia). In December, with British naval support, Lawrence and Faisal repulsed a Turkish counterattack at Yenbo, and in January mounted a bold operation to seize the port of Wejh, 190 miles north.
Faisal and Lawrence understood the importance of spreading the revolt beyond the Hejaz region. Faisal's irregulars ranged across northern Arabia, carrying out guerrilla attacks on targets such as the Hejaz railroad and evading the Turkish troops sent to counter them. In July 1917, they captured the Red Sea port of Aqaba (in modern-day Jordan), overrunning the defenses with a camel charge. Aqaba became an important base for landing British supplies from Egypt. As the British Army from Egypt advanced to fight the Turks in southern Palestine, the Arab irregulars operated on their eastern flank, raiding northward into Syria.
Secret agreement[]
While militarily the Arab Revolt gathered momentum, political developments were running counter to Sharif Hussein's aspirations. From November 1915, two Middle East experts, the French diplomat Francois Georges-Picot and the British adviser Sir Mark Sykes, held discussions in London to define French and British spheres of influence in the region.
The secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 allotted Syria and Lebanon to France and the rest of the region to Britain, except for Palestine, which was to be shared between Britain, France, and Russia. Although the agreement allowed for the creation of Arab kingdoms in these spheres of influence, it clearly ran counter to Britain's understanding with Sharif Hussein. The situation was further complicated in November 1917 when British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour publicly declared British support for the Zionist project of "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine.
Sense of betrayal[]
The Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement, made public by the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power in Russia in November 1917, seriously shook Arab confidence in their alliance with Britain. Emir Faisal discreetly contacted the Turks to see if they would provide a better deal. However, further evolution of the murky political situation was preempted by Allied military successes in Palestine and Mesopotamia. Faisal's force,s continuing to operate beyond the right flank of the British Army in Palestine, captured the important rail junction of Dera in September 1918. With Australian cavalry, they occupied the Syrian capital, Damascus, before the war's end.
Aftermath[]
The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I only partially satisfied the nationalist aspirations of the Arabs, leading to further conflicts in the future. Emir Faisal attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 as the Arab representative, but returned frustrated. In March 1920, with popular support, he declared himself King of Syria and Palestine, but was deposed by French troops the following June. Britain and France were then authorized by the newly formed League of Nations to rule most Arab areas of the former Ottoman Empire, including Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Mesopotamia.
In 1921, Britain made Faisal king of the new state of Iraq, which roughly corresponded to the former Mesopotamia. The British also turned the eastern part of Palestine into the kingdom of Transjordan (later known as Jordan) under a Hashemite ruler. The rest of Palestine remained under direct British control. By the 1930s, it had turned into an arena of conflict between Jewish settlers, Palestinian Arabs, and the British authorities.