London: A century on, the instability of these former Turkish territories remains a lasting legacy. In Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Syria and Iraq, fighting continues, and only Jordan remains intact from the original post-war settlement. n 1914, the Royal Navy’s new Super-Dreadnought battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth was powered by oil-fired turbines, giving oil a strategic significance for the British. It had no oil of its own and instead acquired a controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in Persia — now Iran. The end of the company’s pipeline in the Arabian Gulf was overlooked by Turkish Mesopotamia.
To protect it, an Indian Army Expeditionary Force was moved to the Gulf to ward off any Turkish threat. Within hours of war being declared against the Turks on November 5, Indian troops landed near Fao and began to move the 90 kilometres towards Basra, covering the same ground captured by British forces in the 2003 Iraq War.
The city was secured in two weeks. By December 9, the Indians had taken Qurna, where the Tigris and the Euphrates divide. The force’s mission had been fulfilled, but the Indian troops continued to advance along the course of the rivers.
Under Maj Gen Sir Charles Townshend, the 6th Indian Division moved up the Tigris, setting their sights on Baghdad. By late November 1915, Townshend’s men were almost 40kms from Baghdad. But at the ancient city of Ctesiphon they met their first major reverse. Townshend fell back on Kut Al Amara, which he had captured on September 28. The Turks pursued him and on December 3 besieged his force at Kut. On April 29, 1916, he and 13,000 men surrendered.
In August 1916, the War Office in London took command in Mesopotamia. Under Lt Gen Sir Stanley Maude, using troops released from Gallipoli, a new British push on Baghdad began at the end of the year. Kut was recaptured on February 24, 1917, and Maude entered Baghdad on March 11. It was a remarkable turnaround in British fortunes that continued for the remainder of the war. Troops were pushed as far north as Mosul and threatened the eastern flank of the Turks in Syria.
While these events were under way, a British and imperial force also moved steadily out of Egypt into Palestine to threaten Syria from the south and to protect the Suez Canal. But once in Palestine, new goals were also set there and, despite setbacks at Gaza in March and April, 1917, under the renewed command of Lt Gen Sir Edmund Allenby, Jerusalem was taken at the end of the year.
But other moves were also in play. In 1916, British officials in Egypt had encouraged Sharif Hussain of Makkah to declare an Arab revolt against Turkish rule in the Hijaz. The Arabs, particularly those led by Hussain’s son Faisal and his close adviser TE Lawrence, moved out of Arabia to launch guerrilla attacks along the Hijaz railway into Palestine itself. On September 19, covered by an intensive bombardment, British infantry assaulted and broke into the Turkish positions. In one of the few instances of the decisive exploitation by cavalry in the whole of the war, Allenby released his mounted troops. British, Australian, New Zealand and Indian horsemen charged towards Megiddo.
By the end of the month, Allenby’s horsemen were approaching Damascus, ending Turkish rule.
