The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire (45 page)

Inevitably, as the conflict began to drag out far longer than had been anticipated, individual CUP leaders began to assert an increasing independence of the Porte. Mustafa Rahmi, one of the
three members of that first Young Turk deputation received by Sultan Abdulhamid in July 1908, was appointed
vali
of Izmir in 1915 and became such a powerful warlord in his province that he
was able to protect both Armenians and Greeks from Muslim fury, occasionally putting out peace feelers to allied agents in Athens. Later in the war the Ottoman military commander in Syria, Ahmed
Cemal Pasha, also showed an inclination to arrange separate terms with the Entente allies, but in the summer of 1915 he was still a pillar of the ruling triumvirate, convinced that the enemy would
soon make a seaborne invasion in support of an Arab rebellion at some point between Iskenderun and Haifa. Cemal therefore resorted to drastic repressive measures, intent on liquidating the Arab
secret societies and other dissident groups. Eleven Arabs were hanged in Beirut on 28 August 1915 and arrests, executions and deportations continued in the Lebanon for eighteen months. The whole
community suffered. Cemal saw no reason to distinguish too precisely between the likely treason of Arabs, Jews and Christians. As Lawrence wrote a few years later, Cemal ‘united all classes,
conditions and creeds in Syria, under pressure of a common misery and peril, and so made a concerted revolt possible.’
³³

Cemal was correct in assuming that an Arab rebellion was imminent. It had long been brewing. Shortly before the outbreak of war Emir Abdullah, the second son of the Sherif of Mecca, Hussein ibn
Ali el-Aun, twice sounded out the British authorities in Egypt to see if he could win London’s backing for a rising against Ottoman rule. Abdullah was familiar with political life in
Constantinople as both he and his brother, Emir Feisal, sat in the Ottoman Parliament. Lord Kitchener, British Agent and Consul General in Egypt from 1911 until the coming of the war, met Abdullah
in Cairo and was impressed by evidence of the mounting
Arab hostility towards the Young Turk regime. The Emir’s father was not a natural rebel. He was an elderly
conservative, alarmed by the coming of a westernized Ottoman governor to the Hejaz. As head of the Hashemite dynasty and thirty-seventh in direct descent from the Prophet, the Sherif of Mecca
deserved the high respect with which Kitchener treated him and his emissaries. But the British may have exaggerated the status of the Sherif within Islam; they may, too, have attributed to him a
desire to see the Ottoman Empire swept away, which he never possessed. After Kitchener became War Secretary in August 1914 he kept in touch with the Hashemite princes. ‘It may be that an Arab
of true race will assume the Khalifate at Mecca or Medina and so good may come by the help of God out of all the evil that is now occurring,’ Kitchener wrote to Abdullah six days before
Britain declared war on the Sultan.
³⁴

The jihad proclamation prompted the British to revive the idea of a Hashemite Caliphate. But by now Hussein was thinking of a crown. During the summer of 1915 Hussein exchanged letters with Sir
Henry McMahon, Britain’s High Commissioner in Egypt, seeking Cairo’s support for the Caliphate, and for a Hashemite kingdom of Arabia, too. It would extend southwards from Cilicia
(roughly the modern frontier of Turkey and Syria) down to the Yemen, and from the Mediterranean to the eastern limits of Mesopotamia. Ultimately, in a letter to Hussein dated 24 October 1915, Sir
Henry McMahon agreed that Britain would ‘recognise and support the independence of the Arabs within the territories included in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of
Mecca’, but with important reservations, notably the exclusion of regions considered not entirely Arab in composition or character. In the north both Mersin and Iskenderun fell into this
category. So too did ‘portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Hama, Homs and Aleppo’ (in effect the eastern Mediterranean littoral). Other reservations
included insistence on the acceptance of ‘special measures of administrative control’ throughout the vilayet of Baghdad and Basra to protect British interests, observance of British
pledges to protect other Arab rulers, and a reminder that these promises concerned only ‘those portions of the territories wherein Great Britain is free to act without detriment to her Ally,
France’.
³⁵

McMahon’s letter remains one of the most disputed documents in twentieth-century diplomacy. The weakness of his message lay not so much in its stated terms,
imprecise though wartime conditions required them to be, as in its discreet omissions, and in particular its lack of any reference to Palestine, Jerusalem or the Jews. For several months Sherif
Hussein continued his correspondence with McMahon, hoping to clarify the British offer and the meaning of that emotive word ‘independence’. He had no success. But in December he
received one more pat of encouragement: the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, favoured ‘Arab independence of Turkish domination’, Hussein was told—provided, of course, that the
Arabs themselves achieved it in revolt.
³⁶

There was good reason for this Foreign Office evasiveness. Doubts had arisen over what the ‘French ally’ would and would not regard as detrimental to her interests. In November 1915
François Georges-Picot, a former French consul-general in Beirut, arrived in London. Throughout December and well into the following year Georges-Picot held discussions with the much
respected Arabist, Colonel Sir Mark Sykes. Together the two experts on the Middle East thrashed out proposals for the partition of the Ottoman Empire in the Levant, which in May 1916 were accepted
as the ‘Sykes-Picot Agreement’.
³⁷
It envisaged the creation of two Arab states, one under French protection around Damascus, and another
under British protection from Baghdad to Aqaba. The French would administer the Lebanon from north of Beirut to south of Tyre; the British would control Acre and Haifa; and Palestine would become
the joint responsibility of France, Britain and (Tsarist) Russia. The Agreement has frequently been criticized as incompatible with the pledges already given to the Sherif of Mecca. It could,
however, be argued that the Sykes-Picot Agreement amplified, clarified and complemented McMahon’s proposals rather than invalidated them, and that later disputes arose rather more from the
obligations assumed by the British in 1917 to the Zionist movement. Yet, whatever their importance for subsequent decades, within the context of the First World War the historical significance of
the McMahon letters and the Sykes-Picot discussions is clear and unequivocal: they show that by 1915 the Entente allies were agreed on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, with help from a
controlled explosion of Arab nationalism.

On 5 June 1916 Sherif Hussein began the Arab Revolt with a symbolic rifle shot fired at the Ottoman barracks in Mecca and a proclamation which was to serve as an Arab
manifesto in the Islamic world. He denounced, in particular, the impiety of the Young Turks who had curbed the religious prerogatives of the Sultan-Caliph, having ‘taken the religion of God
as an amusement and a sport’.
³⁸
At first the rhetoric was matched by deeds of arms, at least in the Hejaz. Mecca was soon cleared of Turks; the
port of Jeddah was attacked on 9 June and, with offshore support from the Royal Navy, passed into Arab hands a week later; the town of Taif, an oasis forty miles south-east of Mecca, swiftly fell
to Emir Abdullah, although Turkish troops continued to resist from behind the solid walls of the adjoining fort. Medina, however, could not be taken. The city housed not only the Prophet’s
sacred tomb, but the headquarters of the Twelfth Army Corps, commanded by the formidable and devout Fakhri en-din Pasha. Rather than see rebel Arabs in infidel pay enter Medina, Fakhri committed
his garrison to a thirty-month siege. He was still defiant in January 1919, ten weeks after every other Ottoman army commander had accepted an Armistice.

Kitchener, who was drowned on his way to Russia on the day the Arab Revolt began, had always insisted on the need to prepare for a general insurrection, not simply an uprising in a particular
vilayet. But other Arabs were slow to respond to the Hashemite call, and for several months it was questionable whether the fighting in the Hejaz posed a real military challenge to the Ottoman
Empire. Not until the end of the year did Hussein’s British sponsors, the ‘Arab Bureau’ in Cairo, begin seriously to co-ordinate the Revolt: Captain T. E. Lawrence, as head of the
British mission to the Hejaz, secured the acceptance of Emir Feisal as effective leader of the Bedouin guerrillas, while the Ottoman veteran Major Aziz al-Masri trained regular Arab troops at
Rabegh, where he was assisted by his fellow-Iraqi officer and conspirator, Nuri as-Said, allowed back from India.
³⁹
Even during these essentially
preparatory months, Enver, Talaat and Cemal could not ignore the threat to the Empire’s southern flank, to the uncomprehending chagrin of their German advisers. For as long as the Hashemite
rebel army was in the field—or, more accurately, in the desert—at least 30,000 Turkish
troops were retained along the route of the Hejaz Railway and in Medina
and the Yemen.

In the summer of 1917 the Hashemites went over to the offensive. On 6 July the Arabs captured the important port of Aqaba which, with British assistance, became the Emir Feisal’s base for
raids on the railway, seventy miles inland, and for an advance into Syria. Even before Aqaba fell, Ottoman complacency was shattered by a Bedouin raid on Baalbek, fifty miles
north
of
Damascus, where on 11 June a bridge was damaged on the strategically important railway linking Syria with the heart of the empire. A British Intelligence assessment, reaching London from
Switzerland some five weeks later, quotes a Turkish source as reporting that this revelation of unrest among the northern tribes caused the immediate transfer of six front-line battalions to
Baalbek in order to stamp out the embers of revolt in so sensitive a region.
⁴⁰

The Turkish concern was understandable, for the character of the war in the Middle East was changing rapidly. By carefully developing Basra as a military base and modernizing the port, General
Maude had by January 1917 been able to concentrate an army four times as large as the forces of his Ottoman enemy; and on 11 March Baghdad was captured, for at least the thirtieth time in the
city’s long history. Enver, however, was unwilling to write off Mesopotamia as yet. With German backing, a new and powerful army group—code-named
Yildirim
(Lightning)—was
concentrated in southern Anatolia during the summer months. General Erich von Falkenhayn, former Chief of the German General Staff and more recently the conqueror of Roumania, came to
Constantinople and planned an offensive which would recover Baghdad and carry the Germano-Turkish Army through Persia and beyond, thus reviving the simplistic strategic goal of depriving
‘England’ of India. But ‘Lightning’ was soon forced to strike elsewhere. While Falkenhayn and Enver were planning
Yildirim
in Constantinople, General Allenby (newly
arrived from the Western Front) was completing preparations for an offensive in Sinai, where in March and April the first two battles of Gaza had failed to breach the main Ottoman–German
defensive system. By the autumn of 1917 Falkenhayn acknowledged that Palestine, rather than Mesopotamia and Persia, was the natural theatre of operations for
Yildirim.
⁴¹

Falkenhayn could oppose Allenby with fourteen Ottoman divisions and the nucleus of the German Asia Corps, some 6,500 specialist troops and staff officers. But
Falkenhayn’s army group was far less powerful than it appeared on paper. Mustafa Kemal—appointed to command the Seventh Army in Syria on 7 July—reported in September that in one
of his divisions half the troops were so physically weak that they could not even stand on parade, let alone march against the enemy. Moreover, the Asia Corps’ arrival in Syria was delayed by
sabotage at Haydarpaša where, on 6 September, a huge explosion in the railway sidings destroyed rolling-stock, stores and munitions. There was, too, a fundamental flaw in the command
structure: Falkenhayn himself despised and mistrusted all Turks. ‘He had a stubborn, selfish streak in his character,’ his best-known staff officer, Franz von Papen, was to
recall.
⁴²
So arrogant was the General’s manner that Enver had to travel down to Damascus and seek to mediate between Falkenhayn and the two
experienced Ottoman army commanders, Cemal and Kemal. Enver failed. Rather than attempt to carry out the German’s battle plans, Mustafa Kemal obtained permission to go on long sick-leave
early in October. Ahmed Cemal retained his command in Syria, but he remained incensed against Falkenhayn.

Allenby, with twice as much infantry as his opponents and ten times their cavalry, opened his Sinai offensive on the last day of October 1917, and gained all his immediate
objectives.
⁴³
The Ottoman advanced base at Beersheba fell to a surprise attack on the first day. Jaffa was entered a fortnight later, and on 3
December Jerusalem was captured, Allenby’s victory ending nearly 700 years of Ottoman rule over the one city in the world sacred to Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. The coming of winter
ruled out any further advance, but by the end of the year it seemed, both in Constantinople and in London, as if the Sultan’s Arab lands would soon be lost to the Ottomans for all time.
Unless, of course, a new wave of Panislamic sentiment could turn the Arab Revolt against its infidel sponsors.

That possibility, discounted by the British, raised Ahmed Cemal’s hopes in Damascus. The Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917 was followed by the publication of wartime secret treaties
found in the Russian Foreign Ministry archives: the Sultan’s subjects thus learned
for the first time of the Constantinople Agreement of March 1915, by which the
Ottoman capital and the Straits were to be incorporated in the Russian Empire while Britain and France ‘achieved their aims in the Near East and elsewhere’; and they were told, too, of
the Allied pledge confirming Italy’s sovereignty over the Dodecanese and promising the Italians a foothold in Asia Minor by extensive territorial gains in the vilayet of Adana. But the
Ottoman authorities made most capital out of the Bolsheviks’ publication of the Sykes-Picot agreement, seeing in it a means of winning over the Arabs. The deposed Khedive Abbas II was sent to
Damascus, where the Germans set up an ‘Arab Bureau’ to rival the institution of the same name created by the British in Cairo some twelve months before. When secret overtures to Hussein
produced no response, Cemal Pasha delivered a speech at Beirut on 6 December 1917 in which he cited the Bolshevik revelations as proof to all Islam that the Sherif of Mecca was conspiring with the
Christian imperialists of the West.
⁴⁴
One month previously—on 2 November, before the Bolsheviks leaked details of the Sykes-Picot
agreement—the famous Balfour Declaration gave notice that the British Government viewed ‘with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’.
Cemal had already successfully opposed German Foreign Ministry proposals to win Zionist support by a joint German–Ottoman declaration; he maintained that any championship of the Jews would
force the Arabs into a closer dependency on the Entente. Now Cemal could cite the Sykes-Picot exchanges and the Balfour Declaration as ‘proof’ to the Islamic world that Arabs in British
pay were handing over their Muslim heritage to the Zionist imperialists.
⁴⁵