| Arab Revolt الثورة العربية | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Part of the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I | |||||||||
 Soldiers of the Sharifian Army carrying the flag of the Arab Revolt in southern Yanbu | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| Belligerents | |||||||||
Allies : Hejaz (and allied tribes) United Kingdom France |
Central Powers : Ottoman Empire Rashidi Emirate Germany | ||||||||
| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
| Strength | |||||||||
|
June 1916: 30,000 troops[2] October 1918: 50,000+ troops[3] |
May 1916: 6,500–7,000 troops[4] September 1918: 25,000 troops 340 guns[2] | ||||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| Unknown | 47,000+ total | ||||||||
The Arab Revolt (Arabic: الثورة العربية al-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya), also known as the Great Arab Revolt (الثورة العربية الكبرى al-Thawra al-‘Arabiyya al-Kubrā), was an armed uprising by the Hashemite-led Arabs of the Hejaz[9] against the Ottoman Empire amidst the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I.
On the basis of the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence, exchanged between Henry McMahon of the United Kingdom and Hussein bin Ali of the Kingdom of Hejaz, the rebellion against the ruling Turks was officially initiated at Mecca on 10 June 1916.[a] The primary goal of the Arab rebels was to establish an independent and unified Arab state stretching from Aleppo to Aden, which the British government had promised to recognize.[11]
The Sharifian Army, led by Hussein and the Hashemites with backing from the British military's Egyptian Expeditionary Force, successfully fought and expelled the Ottoman military presence from much of the Hejaz and Transjordan. By 1918, the rebels had captured Damascus and proclaimed the Arab Kingdom of Syria, a short-lived monarchy that was led by Hussein's son Faisal I.
Having covertly signed the Sykes–Picot Agreement with the French Third Republic, the British reneged on their promise to support the Arabs' establishment of a singular Arab state.[12] Instead, the Arab-majority Ottoman territories of the Middle East were broken up into a number of League of Nations mandates, jointly controlled by the British and the French. Amidst the partition of the Ottoman Empire, the defeated Ottomans' mainland in Anatolia came under a joint military occupation by the victorious Allies. This was gradually broken by the Turkish War of Independence, which established the present-day Republic of Turkey.
- ^ "T.E. Lawrence on guerrilla warfare". Britannica. Retrieved 1 April 2022.
- ^ a b Murphy, p. 26.
- ^ Mehmet Bahadir Dördüncü, Mecca-Medina: the Yıldız albums of Sultan Abdülhamid II, Tughra Books, 2006, ISBN 1-59784-054-8, p. 29. Number refers only to those laying siege to Medina by the time it surrendered and does not account for Arab insurgents elsewhere.
- ^ Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt: The first modern intelligence war, Polly a. Mohs, ISBN 1-134-19254-1, Routledge, p. 41.
- ^ Erickson 2001, p. 238, Appendix F.
- ^ War Office (1922). Statistics of the military effort of the British Empire during the Great War, 1914–1920. London H.M. Stationery Office. p. 633.: 8000 prisoners taken by the Arab insurgents in Syria-Palestine in 1918, joining 98,600 taken by the British.
- ^ Parnell, p. 75: 6,000 prisoners taken by the end of 1916
- ^ Süleyman Beyoğlu, The end broken point of Turkish-Arabian relations: The evacuation of Medine, Atatürk Atatürk Research Centre Journal (Number 78, Edition: XXVI, November 2010) (Turkish). 8000 Ottoman troops surrendered at the end of the Siege of Medina and were evacuated to Egypt afterwards.
- ^ Matthew Hughes (2013). Allenby and British Strategy in the Middle East, 1917–1919. Routledge. p. 73. ISBN 978-0-7146-4473-8.
- ^ The Arab Movements in World War I, Eliezer Tauber, Routledge, 2014 ISBN 978-1135199784 pp. 80–81
- ^ McMahon, Henry; bin Ali, Hussein (1939), Cmd.5957; Correspondence between Sir Henry McMahon, G.C.M.G., His Majesty's High Commissioner at. Cairo and the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, July, 1915–March, 1916 (with map) (PDF), HMG
- ^ Sykes and Picot (1916). . UK Foreign Office – via Wikisource.
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