FREE FEATURE: A Very Arab Revolt, Pt.I 1916-17
In June 1916, gunfire resounded around the sacred city of Mecca and the Ottoman garrison there found themselves imperilled. Supply lines and communications had been cut, and the locals had been encouraged to evict the Turks from their city.
Now, if anyone could put a stop to all of this, it was Sharif Husein, the Emir, or governor of Mecca and, more importantly a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad. In his mid-sixties, he was a sly old bugger who rightly attracted suspicion from the new, ‘Young Turk’ authorities in Constantinople and knew that given his lineage, they could do little to get rid of him. He delivered a convincing performance as a grandfatherly figure, giving everyone cuddles and copious amounts of tea, whilst having some rivals murdered and others thrown into hellish cells underneath his palace.
Husein - not as cuddly as he looks (Wikipedia)
Husein was not inclined to help. In fact, he had incited the gunfire raging about the city himself.
He did so confident that he had the backing of the British. The Emir had been courting this support since before the outbreak of war. Turkey was still an ally at this point, so he didn’t get it, but it did sow the seed of future possibilities for inciting dissent at the back of pertinent British minds. In the meantime, Husein had watched warily in the direction of a virile Ibn Saud and his growing, puritanical, Wahabi form of Islam on his doorstep. Add a drought, demands from the Turks that he declared a Jihad against their enemies, demands for troops to participate in it, damage to the economy done by their Ottoman overlords, and perhaps the Emir of Mecca wasn’t quite so bonkers for venturing out onto a balcony with a gun and helping things along.
But ultimately, Husein was more about wafting around in silk robes and resplendent turbans than he was about getting on a camel and going out to get his hands dirty. For that, he had his sons, who referred to themselves as his ‘slaves.’
Now, park the film, because it bears absolutely no resemblance to reality. Husein had four sons. The first, Ali, was a nice enough man, but sickly. He wasn’t instilling fear into anyone. The second, Abdullah, was quite the opposite. If you’re wondering why you haven’t heard of him, it’s because Lawrence didn’t get along with him. Faisal, son number three, is Alec Guinness. Then there was Zaid, who was a chubby adolescent still and so of limited use.
Husein needed to buy time, and so he sent Faisal to Constantinople. This wasn’t ridiculous. Faisal was the equivalent of an MP, well educated and entirely qualified to go and spin a line of complete bullsh*t about a potential jihad with the government in line with their requests. He was also to discuss said jihad with the new Governor of Syria a Damascus, but to keep talks vague.
In July 1915, Husein wrote to Sir Henry McMahon, the High Commissioner in Egypt and so the senior diplomate in the region, and demanded that if they were going to be friends, the British would have to recognise Arab independence. Let’s be straight. Husein operated from a position of self-interest, but in doing so, he was willing to buddy up with Syria and embrace Arab nationalism, which would also see the yoke of the Ottomans thrown off. Husein demanded the entire Arab peninsula, expect for Aden, which Britain could keep. He also wanted for the Arabs: Israel, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria, capped off by a slip of land in southern Turkey. Britain could have preferential economic treatment over all of this, if she also agreed to an Arab caliphate.
McMahon thought Husein’s letter was bonkers. Nonetheless it was up to him to find a middle ground between promising to submit to these demands, and laughing the Emir out of the room and into the arms of the Turks. And so he did what any diligent diplomate would do, and procrastinated the living daylights out of having to give any definite response.
Luckily for Husein’s interests, the war had subsequently not gone so well for the British, especially where the Ottomans were concerned, and so his overtures didn’t look so absurd. Especially after the humiliation of evacuating Gallipoli with their tails between their legs, and then the misery of Kut. Both of these checks were delivered by Ottoman forces, and when Britain factored in the need to protect the Suez Canal and their imperial shortcut through to India and the likes of Australia, anything they could do to antagonise Turkish interests in the Hejaz and tie up their resources was of benefit to the wider war effort. It would be better if they could pull this off without the effort of having to send a military force to the region, and wrestle with the hideous optics among her Islamic subjects of white men shooting at muslims in the vicinity of a holy city. But primarily, it was imperative that they did not alienate the Arabs.
That last point galvanised Britain into action. The most straightforward path, it seemed, was to give some promise of Arab independence and a tangible route by which Husein could convince himself that they were going to let him attempt to redraw the map of the Middle East. Obviously it benefitted Britain to keep any promises as vague as possible, but on 24th October 1915 a letter was penned to Husein, conceding ‘most’ of what he had asked for. Bold, considering nobody had yet consulted the French, Britain’s ally, who were of the opinion in some (very shouty) quarters that as Frenchmen had stomped through Syria on the First Crusade several centuries before, it was defacto French soil.
Yes, really.
In any case, the letter was sent, along with £20,000 in December to make up for the vagueness of the reply.
Pressure on Husein was meanwhile increasing. In February 1916 he appealed for another £50,000 in gold, guns and ammunition, promising that Faisal would raise a revolt to occupy the Ottoman forces in the Arabian peninsula of at least 100,000 men. Another letter followed, raising that number to 250,000. By May, the British had shipped 5,000 Japanese rifles (we despatched these everywhere to satisfy allied requests) and more than two million rounds of ammunition to support a potential revolt in Arabia.
The governor of Syria later said: ‘It never struck me as possible that a man of Sharif Husein’s experience, a grey-beard with one foot in the grave, could be so egotistical and ambitious.’
Boy, did he read him wrong. At the last, Husein had Faisal scurry out of Damascus on a flimsy pretext about meeting the troops supposedly forming up in Medina to embark on the Ottomans’ holy war. Meanwhile, he was handing out money to bribe local tribesmen into backing him. Then came the British blockade of the Red Sea in May 1916.
On 6th June, a British official was carried ashore on a remote stretch of beach accompanied by two crates of gold and a supply of cigarettes for Abdullah and Feisal. He met with their little brother Zaid, by now twenty and ‘evidently attempting to encourage the growth of a somewhat backward beard.’ Sad as his facial hair was, he had precisely the news that the British wanted to hear. The Arab Revolt had begun.
Medina came under attack by Sherif’s eldest son, Ali. His force brandished ancient flintlocks and some of those Japanese rifles, which were prone to exploding when you fired them. The walled city was far from overwhelming in their support of Hussein, and this attack turned out to be a bit of a damp squib. Abdullah was not idle either. He made a move on Taif, above Mecca. By the time he arrived on 9th June, people were fleeing their homes and the Turks were digging in.
Abdullah (Wikipedia)
To the north, Faisal went for the Hejaz Railway. The railway owed its existence to Sultan Abdul Hamid. Construction began in 1900 and eventually it would run from Damascus, cutting right through the ancient desert to the holy city of Medina. This was a seismic development for the region. Hejaz literally means barrier, and now this barrier had been broken down. A journey that had taken more than a month by desert caravan, or involved an expensive voyage through the British-controlled Suez Canal, had been reduced to three days.
Politically, the British viewed the construction as a power play by the Ottoman Sultan. What better way to position himself as the leader of the Islamic world than by linking up his capital in Constantinople with Mecca, and with Medina, the resting place of the Prophet Muhammad? It was not lost on Britain, that one third of the world’s 300 million Muslims resided in the British Empire. They didn’t want them gravitating towards the Sultan.
But if the construction of the railway had political ramifications, for the people of the region, it threatened to derail the way they had lived for centuries. Those desert caravans were no longer needed, and so a vital part of the economy in the Arabian peninsula went up in a puff of steam, along with plentiful opportunities for protection rackets or even the opportunity to rob the pilgrims. The local Arabs were no fans of this development, and even prior to the war had engaged in acts of sabotage. Husein was not only complicit in this guerrilla campaign of destruction, he most probably had a had in organising it too.
And now Faisal was at it too, because cutting off the Turks in Medina, from their supply line and their only real escape route was the best plan. Unfortunately, they had no explosives, and so they had to settle for ripping up rails and piling rocks on the line. All of which could be rapidly dealt with by the Turks. Finally, two knackered Royal Navy ships, the Hardinge and the Fox were sent to Jeddah under ‘Ginger’ Boyle to support 4,000 men of the Harb as they attacked the town with a shore bombardment.
On 10th June, after a fraught period of tension within the city of Mecca, Husein walked out onto a balcony with a gun and fired off the shot that inflamed the city. The Arab Revolt was launched on a shoestring, out of necessity for Husein, rather than when he was ready. To give the illusion that he had men, Abdullah had fires lit all over the hills and his men kept up a continuous stream of noise to give the impression that they were full of rebels. At this stage, the revolt was so broke that Faisal was carting around a chest filled with stones that was under permanent guard to convince people he had money.
Mecca was finally wrested from the Turks on 10th July, but unsurprisingly in these circumstances, the revolt started to unravel quickly. In fact it descended into farce, despite the fact that supplies now poured in to the Arabian peninsula. Faced with outcry from India and all manner of angry telegrams, the British sent in a poor sap named Colonel Cyril Wilson to find out what was happening. He rocked up in Jeddah and declared that Husein had jumped the gun. Not only that, but the sheer amount of back-stabbing and intrigue amongst his people was undermining the revolt. The capture of Mecca meant that the pilgrimage route south could be reopened. In fact, the annual trek was just a few weeks away, and so Wilson was named ‘Pilgrimage Officer,’ a job title designed not to pique the interests of the French, and installed in the city to keep an eye on things. So it was this little man, perennially suffering from dystentery and old before his years, beat Lawrence to Arabia.
But whilst regionally those British officials placed a priority on activity in the Hejaz, for those further afield it rather looked like getting sucked into a backwater that would have no discernible impact on the outcome of the war. Don’t forget, the Arab Revolt was launched a couple of weeks before the Battle of the Somme began. In terms of overall strategic priorities, it was a long way down the list.
What the British Government needed now, was for someone to file a report telling them what they wanted to hear; that there was no need to send a m military force to the Hejaz. Cyril Wilson was sent to Yanbu, where Faisal was holed up, to assess whether or not specifically Muslim British troops would be welcomed. He bullishly rode there in his army uniform, refusing to don an Arab disguise. He liked the Sherif’s son, who was furious when he found out that his father’s procrastination had meant bombs were sitting on a warship waiting to be unloaded when he could have been using them on the railway. But he was nothing if not loyal. He sighed, and said: ‘My father tries to do everything, but is not a soldier.’ He was resolved to stay at Yanbu until he had sufficient bombs, men and money to destroy the railway.
The British scraped up muslim, Arab troops from amongst their Ottoman POWs and sent them to participate in the revolt, but they were not crack troops, if they agreed to take up arms against their former masters at all. Meanwhile, the Ottoman government figured out that this was not just another flare up of violence that punctuated life in the Hejaz, and despatched a new Emir down the railway line to Medina. This galvanised the Turks in the city, who were set on breaking out and striking north to despatch the fledgling revolt. British officials assumed that there would be an attempt to take back Mecca before the Pilgrimage in October.
Clearly, something needed to be done to prevent the Arab Revolt from complete collapse, but no amount of discussion about where the troops to use might come from yielded a solution. To add to a long list of political and military complications, the French had now arrived on the scene too. Troops, Muslim troops, they would be happy to provide, but at a political cost. One that the British did not necessarily want to entertain.
In London Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, pondered the situation. Launching men into the Arab Revolt was a leap into the unknown. What he precisely wanted to know, is what the consequences would be if the Arab Revolt failed. From Mesopotamia, General Maude said minimal. From Cairo, General Murray said no worse than bombing at Gallipoli or surrendering at Kut. From India, the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford urged against sending troops. Dissenting voices sounded weak by comparison.
What none of those assessing the situation banked on though, was that the situation would deteriorate in the immediate future, and this is precisely what happened. The Ottoman forces broke out along the road from Medina. Nobody knew where Abdullah was, and Faisal was away to the north. Suddenly Rabegh, held by the Arabs and with an abundant fresh water supply, was under threat.
And this, is where one Thomas Edward Lawrence comes into the picture.
At this point, Sir Reginald Wingate was put in charge of the region and decided that he needed to see Rabegh for himself. He was banned from going, but in October 1916, Ronald Storrs, a political operative evidently more expendable, was sent instead. He set off on the Lama, and as he sailed along, a bored, a 28-year-old officer; too short for the job officially, scruffy but with distinctive blue eyes, amused himself by shooting bottles balanced along the ship’s handrail.
Lawrence had been working for the Arab Bureau in Cairo. He was well-travelled in the region, a bonafide expert on crusader castles whose thesis was so astute they couldn’t find anyone at Oxford to judge it. Suffice to say, he moved through the Arab world fluently, and with a degree of local knowledge that was hard to match. Also, he’d already dressed up as an Arab a lot prior to the war. The film lied. Again.
Last week I wrote about Aubrey Herbert, and his role, with Lawrence, in trying to end the siege of Kut. Well, Lawrence arrived back in Cairo after that miserable expedition in May 1916, and set about making a complete, pedantic nuisance of himself so that someone might send him somewhere more exciting again. By the time he boarded the Lama, everyone was glad to see the back of him. His role at the other end was to prove that it was a bad idea to send any troops to the Hejaz, and in doing so undermine the French. For that last part, arguably, never did the British Government find a more willing servant.
Needless to say, the Arabs were unimpressed when it transpired that no troops would be coming and that neither would aeroplanes that they had been promised. Abdullah was convinced that the revolt was finished. Faisal was somewhere on the road to Medina being bombed by Turkish aircraft, and Husein resorted to begging on the telephone to Storrs, ‘pitilessly without intermission… till I had to remind him that we had not, unfortunately, got the British Army drawn up in the consulate back garden.’
It was agreed that Lawrence would visit Faisal to assess the situation. He was of the opinion that the revolt would be better served if they circumvented Husein and got funds directly to his sons, who were on the ground. However, nobody knew enough about any of them to start ploughing crates of gold in their direction, and so Lawrence managed to finagle being the one to provide a better assessment of the quartet.
The thing about Lawrence, is that he was a consummate self-publicist and controlled the narrative so effectively, that you have to be careful. Ali’s cause was not helped by the resurgence of his TB, and when Lawrence met him he was ailing. Too old and knackered was his assessment. Which is fair. Abdullah, however, has been hard done by by Lawrence. He said he couldn’t be trusted. Actually, the reason Lawrence did not pick him as the poster boy for the revolt is because Abdullah was suspicious of this little Englishman himself. Therefore Lawrence thought that they might struggle to control him, and if the British were going to put their stock in one brother and ply him with arms and money, they didn’t want him going rogue.
Feisal with his pet leopard. Because why not?
He famously said of Faisal afterwards, more than once, because he left the original manuscript on a train and had to start again, ‘I felt at first glance, that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek.’ Not because he was a warrior and Abdullah was not, or because Abdullah was weak, or stupid, but because Faisal, when Lawrence met him, as well as having more charisma, seemed rather more pragmatic and inclined to listen than this brother.
The outlook worsened as the Ottoman forces pursued Faisal back towards Rabegh. Battling the enemy, as well as French interference, the British were under pressure lest they become the identified cause of the revolt’s collapse.
As Lawrence pointed out, Britain found herself in a different position to the norm. This time, they were on the side of the scrappy insurgent, fighting an imperial machine which outnumbered and outgunned them. Usually this shoe was on the other foot. Lawrence returned to Cairo determined to convince the authorities that this was the kind of warfare they needed to invest in. Which was a welcome revelation. Because for that, you don’t need brigades and divisions and a flow of troops to keep yet another front supplied. You need a few selected maniacs to instruct the eminently capable Arabs, with a sense of adventure and possibly a death wish. Lawrence had both, and was back with Faisal by December.
He found chaos. At Yanbu, they were preparing for a siege. More Brits had arrived at the head of Egyptian troops: Herbert Garland, a chemist who liked to make things go bang and Pierce Joyce, a fierce giant of an Irishman and a Boer War veteran. But as well as money, explosives, and weapons, the Arab Revolt needed unity if it was to get on track. At the top, removing Husein from interfering with proceedings from Mecca was one way of moving towards this cohesion, but more importantly, at this juncture, the loose coalition of Arabs under Faisal was disintegrating. The Juhaynah didn’t trust him; they may well come to blows with the Harb. Men were drifting off to return to their homes and their families. There were two tribes, if push came to shove, that Faisal believed would stay with him to the end. And the enemy was still probing towards them. They were all, it seemed, doomed. Faisal was soon to give the revolt three weeks, at most, to live.
And yet, the tide was about to turn. A projected expeditionary force that would bolster the Ottoman presence in the Hejaz was abandoned. The Turks had no cash on hand to pay local tribes, and they certainly didn’t have the seemingly endless supply of gold that the British were sending across the Red Sea. Food supplies began to run out. Under these circumstances the fighting quality of the Turkish troops suffered, through malnutrition and disease. By Christmas, the enemy had withdrawn towards Medina,, which itself was beginning to starve.
Faisal was no longer content to sit and wait to be attacked. He proposed a jump up the coast to Wejh, and might have been surprised when Wilson backed him. He offered to put as much naval strength off Rabegh as possible to dissuade the Turks from venturing forwards, while Faisal marched nearly 200 miles north.
The advancing Arabs moved in two wings, singing to each other. For the first time, they did not resemble a gaggle of tribes on the same road, but a homogenous force to be reckoned with. They arrived late, thanks to a necessary stop to celebrate Abdullah’s capture of a Turkish column, their artillery and a pile of money near the railway; and not before a bombardment infuriated the locals by wrecking their town, but when Faisal rode into Wejh, he did so at the head of 10,000 men. That, at least, looked impressive.
It was about this time that Lawrence also broke the news to Faisal, that the French intended to have Syria and suggested that in order to stop this from happening, they would need to take the revolt far to the north. If they got to Damascus first, what could the French, or even the British with their shared, Sykes-Picot agreement, do about claiming it for themselves?
A base at Wejh gave the destructive likes of Herbert Garland license to roam a long stretch of the railway stretching almost up to the modern Jordanian border. The opening months of 1917 were studded with the beginning of this sustained campaign of sabotage. On 20th February the first train was wrecked, and as the months passed, where and when an attack might happen had as much of an impact on Turkish morale as it did physically on the railway.
But this was a tactical question. What of the strategy guiding the revolt? Word was beginning to spread of Faisal’s northward progress. Men of the Bali rode south to join him. The Aida, Fuqarah and Wuld Suleiman would follow. This was all good news, as it showed mounting allegiance from the northern Arab tribes, and suggested that eventually, perhaps even Nuri Shalaan of the Rwala might arrive. He was in his seventies, and savage, but he had history with the Turks, who had locked him up before the war and executed one of this best friends, and was worth the inevitable bribe if he could be brought onside.
In order for any of this to pay dividends, Faisal was going to have to do much better than his belated appearance at Wejh. Numbers were still increasing. Nuri Shaalan’s son, Nawaf arrived; but more importantly, so did my absolute favourite character of this whole story, Auda abu Tayi. Journey through southern Jordan today, and nigh on every Bedouin you meet will tell you he was their grandad. They might not all be lying, because he claimed to have many wives. He also claimed to have cheated death on multiple occasions, and even to have eaten the still beating heart of one of his enemies in an impressive feat of savagery. Apparently, lots of people did this in the region and it’s not as impressive as it sounds, but I watched Daenerys Targaryen chowing down on a horses heart on Game of Thrones and it looked grim enough. Auda viscerally disliked Turkish attempts to tax him, (fair) and a warrant for his arrest was issued in 1908 after he shot two Ottoman officials. So by 1917, he had been living as an outlaw for nearly a decade. Apparently, he so hated the Turks that when he found out they had manufactured his false teeth, he bashed them to pieces with a stone.
Auda was one of the Huwaytat, and until then had been presumed dead, so the fact that he wasn’t thrilled Lawrence. Auda’s tribe would be key in the push north, and Lawrence harboured dreams of using him to attack the line around the city of Ma’an. He had time on his hands to formulate these grandiose plans, bitterly. Stranded in Wejh, Lawrence had to listen to tales of Garland, Newcombe and Abdullah blowing up the railway whilst he carried out admin. When more urgency was demanded in this sabotage campaign, he seized the opportunity and formulated a plan for destroying the water supply in key locations along the railway as well as the rails themselves. This, he reasoned, would isolate the Turks to the south and leave them stranded in Medina.
But none of this helped Faisal on the way to Damascus. Egged on by Lawrence, he’d lost interest in Medina completely; his brothers could handle that. He only cared about advancing north. To this end, in May the British were landing supplies and setting up operations in the region of Tabuk.
Lawrence was about to go off on a side quest at this point. No doubt encouraged greatly by Auda, with whom he was completely star struck, the pair of them intend to go off on a cross-desert ride to find camels and food. Some of this would inevitably go to Auda’s tribe, which had fallen on hard times, but supplies were also to be sent further north for future operations.
But at present, Faisal didn’t have the range to strike that far north. Any cursory look at a map shows you just how significant Aqaba was if the drive to Damascus was to succeed. The town itself was a squalid backwater with a sad looking, dilapidated fort, but it sits at the very tip of the Red Sea and unfettered access to this port would leapfrog Faisal miles closer to Damascus, and open up supply lines for his force, not least the starving Huwaytat.
Aqaba’s sits at the end of a long, fifty-mile canyon called Wadi Itm. The Turks guarded against a land attack the entrance to that, but all of their defences in Aqaba itself pointed towards the sea, to deal with an amphibious landing. Auda had a plan to deal with this. He was going to surprise them and come down the canyon. First the run to secure men and equipment, then Aqaba.
Auda set of for Wadi Sirhan on 10th May with Lawrence and about 20 others in tow to secure supplies and camels for future, northbound operations. They were all under the nominal command of Sharif Nasir, a 27-year-old put in charge by Faisal. The journey, which would take catapult them the other side of Ma’an, was going to take weeks, and that was before they had to stop to let Lawrence partially recover from another fever en route. By 19th May, they had crossed the railway at a point 600 miles north of Jeddah. Here, the party turned east and passed into an area referred to as ‘the Terror’. Utterly featureless, not even a shrub in sight, hot wind blasted them in the face as they inched across endless white mud-flats that reflected the sun upwards. Auda passed the time by bragging about the amount of rivals he had dispensed with - 27, he said, since he started keeping track in 1899. This is the bit in the film when Lawrence goes back for the servant, Gasim, who gets left behind. It did happen, and Auda was angry at such a pointless waste of effort. They finally reached the first Huwaytat tents, and at this point, Auda went off with £6,000 in gold to attempt to find Nuri Shaalan. The wily old Sheikh still declined to publicly thrown his lot in with Faisal, and in the meantime Lawrence went off roaming like a madman into Syria and Lebanon, far beyond Damascus, trying to recruit disparate Arab tribesmen.
When he returned, the remaining part of the expedition had recruited 560 Huwaytat and their camels. After a spot of railway raiding, the time had come to move on Aqaba. By the beginning of July, Sharif Nasir’s force had crossed the railway to the south of Ma’an, and mounted a ridge known as Jabal al Batra. They could now see the entrance to Wadi Itm. Fifty miles away, at the other end of canyon, sat Aqaba.
This is where the film diverges muchly from reality. The real fight for Aqaba took place here, not in the town itself. Here, the sizeable Turkish garrison was clustered around a water supply in a perilously exposed outpost. By 2nd July Auda’s men were sniping at them. Here, the weather interfered with operations. It was so hot, that the men could hardly hold onto their rifles. The impetus fell out of the attack, and Lawrence took a moment to pause under cover. Nasir, turned up, and then so did Auda, who promptly told Lawrence he was a slacker. Lawrence, never one to miss a bitchy opportunity, replied that Auda’s Huwaytat brethren were useless. ‘They shoot a lot and hit a little.’
Well. Auda was enraged. He stomped back up the hill and summoned his men. Lawrence was perturbed by what was about to happen. Perhaps he had pushed the Arab too far. Like a complete lunatic, Auda then led a mounted, suicidal rampage with fifty men on their camels straight down the hill towards the Turks. The defenders panicked, and ran. Suspend any impression of Peter O’Toole riding all the way into the sea in a fit of glory, because not only was that fifty miles away, but Lawrence was unconscious. He’d accidentally shot his camel in the back of the head as he was waving a revolver around, been pitched over the front of it and onto the ground.
Auda was on brand. His horse was killed underneath him, and his equipment was riddled with bullet holes. He, however, had not a scratch on him. At a cost of precisely three casualties to the Arabs, the Turkish garrison was decimated. For each Arab casualty, they had suffered a hundred.
More importantly, the road to Aqaba was now open. Those defending it were all facing outwards ready to defend an attack from the Red Sea. That night, Auda and Lawrence sat down to craft several letters to the remaining outposts urging them to throw in the towel unless they wanted to end up like their friends. By 4th July the Huwaytat were halfway down the Wadi, then the last outposts were convinced to surrender. Only now did Nasir, Auda, Lawrence and their men ride their camels out the other side of Wadi Itm, through Aqaba and into the sea; but the Arab Revolt had reached a significant turning point. Now, it was Damascus or bust.
If you’d like to join me in Jordan next year to run around where all of this happened and play in the desert with the Bedouin, I’m leading a tour in October 2026. Click on the photo below for more details
