The United States and
now also Europe, are increasingly forced to confront the challenge it faces in
its interaction with the Islamic world. Of course this is not, a "war on
terrorism" because terrorism is merely a tool that certain, not all,
Islamic groups use to achieve their end result.
But while history
does not repeat itself, the similarities between U.S. excursions into the
middle East today, and the actions of Great Britain during the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, are remarkable and in context of our ‘History of
Globalization’ I find it worthwhile to take this a bit further.
In East Africa, the
U.N. and U.S. tried and failed to establish peace between warring clans in
Somalia. The British fought the Mahdi in the Sudan during the 1880s and, and
fought a twenty-year running battle against the "Mad Mullah" in
Somalia during the early twentieth century.
The British spent
over seven years fighting two wars in the Sudan and two decades fighting
another in Somalia. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, Egyptian rulers
began a territorial expansion south into the Sudan in an effort to control the
source of the Nile River. When the British exerted direct control of Egypt in 1882,
they utilized the tactic of divide and rule to control both the Arab Muslim
north and the Black non-Muslim south, where Western missionaries launched a
Christian proselytizing effort. The subsequent religious divide, combined
with the pre-existing racial and ethnic divisions, have yet to be
overcome.
In addition, a
British puppet regime, attempted to stamp out the Sudanese slave trade. Slavery
is sanctioned in the Koran and was a pillar of Sudan's nineteenth century as it
was also more recently again as it was also more recently again.
While eliminating
such a reprehensible practice was a morally positive cause, it was done without
attempting to educate the Sudanese and with no attempt to fill
the economic vacuum that resulted. An interesting comparison can be made
to the current situation in Afghanistan today, where viable alternatives for
impoverished farmers could be more of a priority in order to eradicate the
country's huge opium trade.
In 1881, a man named
Ahmad son of a boat builder in the Dongola province of northern Sudan, had
a pious charisma, and proclaimed himself "Mahdi," meaning Guided One.
The Mahdi preached that under the banner of jihad, he could "restore
the golden age of the Prophet Muhammad.” Case study 1: Important also in light of the current developments in
Iran today we cover this here.
Specific to the lands
of Islam, the Mahdi claimed that he would ultimately destroy the corrupt
governments of Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. This message would be repeated
by subsequent generations of jihadists. Case study 2: (including Osama Bin Laden today), covered extensively
here.
With each victory,
thousands of Muslims from throughout the Horn of Africa flocked to the Mahdi's
banner. Regardless of this basest of mercenary motive for fighting, the Mahdi
named his followers Ansar. This is the Arabic word for helper that the prophet
Mohammad first gave to the earliest Muslim converts of Medina. Ansar is a name
common among today's jihadists.
On November 5, 1883,
British commander Hicks Pasha and his army of 10,000 Egyptian soldiers were
massacred at the Battle of EI Obeid. The political backlash of this military
defeat, combined with little prospect for political and economic gain, led the
British to give up the
Sudan. Thus General
Charles "Chinese" Gordon "Pasha" was sent up the Nile to
evacuate the Egyptian officials, soldiers and their families who occupied
Khartoum and the surrounding
garrisons. General
Gordon despised the Egyptians, in his journal, he wrote, "A more
contemptible soldier than the Egyptian never existed. Here we never count on
them; they are held in supreme contempt, poor creatures. They never go out to
fight; it would be perfectly iniquitous to make them." (A. Egmont Hake,
The Journals of Major-General C. G. Gordon. C. B. at Kartoum,
Boston, 1885, p. 55.)
The only tools Gordon
had at his disposal were one British soldier, Lieutenant-Colonel J.D. Stewart,
and a number of indigenous troops for whom Gordon maintained a nearly spiritual
reputation as the savior of the Sudan.
He recommended that
the former Sudanese slave dealer, Zebehr Pasha, be
sent from Egypt to take the reins of power in the Sudan, and later wrote in his
journal:
I cannot too much
impress on you that this expedition will not encounter any enemy worth the name
in any European sense of the word; the struggle is with the climate and
destitution of the country. It is one of time and patience, and of small
parties of determined men, backed by native allies, which are got by policy and
money. A heavy lumbering column, however strong, is nowhere in this land.
Parties of forty or sixty men, swiftly moving about, will do more than any
column . . . Native allies above all things, at whatever cost. It is the
country of the irregular, not the regular. If you move in mass you will find no
end of difficulties; whereas, if you let detached parties dash out here and
there, you will spread dismay in the Arab ranks. The time to attack is the
dawn, or rather before it, but sixty men would put these Arabs to flight just
before dawn, which one thousand could not accomplish in daylight. This was
always (Zebehr's) tactics . . . It is this very same
warfare we will have to exercise if ever we would oppose Russia in her advance
on Afghanistan. (Hake, vol.4, p. 82-4. )
Gordon's insight
proves interesting when we consider subsequent tactics in Afghanistan,of
the Mujahidin in the 1980’s, plus US endeavors in Iraq today.
Gordon also wrote,
"My belief is that the Mahdi business will be the end of slavery in the
Soudan. The Arabs have invariably put their slaves in the front and armed them
is it likely that those slaves will ever yield obedience to those masters as
heretofore?" (Hake, p. 356.)
The British
government's inability to make a decisive decision in countering the Mahdi
would however cost them the life of Gordon and would lead to a
humiliating exit from the Sudan. And maybe this episode demonstrates how it is
often better to make a bad decision that can be adjusted at a later
date, such as putting a questionable leader in power, rather than make no
decision at all and allow the attacker to make it for you.
Ultimately,
General Wolseley, a combat veteran, was dispatched with a British military
expedition to rescue Gordon and his forces. Dooming the defenders from the
outset, Wolseley chose to take the easiest, cheapest and safest way to Khartoum
via the 1,600 mile route along the Nile as opposed to the faster 450 mile
route via ship down the Red Sea, then inland to Khartoum. Meanwhile, in March
of 1884, the vanguard ofthe Mahdi's army began
forming around Khartoum. In his journal, Gordon wrote, "The people are all
against us and what a power they have; they need not fight, but have merely to
refuse to sell us their grain. The stomach governs the world, and it was the
stomach which caused our misery from the beginning." Hake, 12-3.)
While striking at the
heart of the enemy is necessary in ultimately winning any war, staying
unpredictable during the conflict is an important ingredient to success in
combat. In mid-October of 1884, as the Mahdi's forces closed around Khartoum,
his forces ineffectively bombarded Gordon's positions with artillery. Gordon
did not allow his men to respond in kind. Not only did this conserve
ammunition, but also not causing random casualties on Mahdi-held territory led
many af the Mahdi's forced conscripts to cross
over to the British lines. Gordon wrote, "For my part, I hope they will
all run away, for they are only dupes ninety-nine out of every hundred; it is
the leaders who are the prime movers." (Hake, 174,216.)
In fact winning the
support of the general population in any type of insurgency or
counterinsurgency campaign is a must, plus intelligence is a key. As the
Mahdi's forces grew around Khartoum, a man named Rudolf Baron von Slatin, an Austrian soldier of fortune converted to Islam,
infiltrated the Mahdi's inner circle and was privy to several key pieces of
information. For example behind the scenes, the supposedly pious Mahdi
handpicked the prettiest captured slave girls, and kept them for his own sexual
pleasure. This was one of several inconsistencies that led some of the Sudanese
sheikhs to secretly support Gordon and the prospect of a less
"fundamentalist" Sudan. Slatin attempted to
inform Gordon of these feats, and there is a chance that General Gordon may
have succeeded in arranging the Mahdi's assassination or hold the
Mahdi at bay until Lord Wolseley's expedition arrived.
However Gordon
refused to help Slatin escape from the Mahdi’s
camp, "Politically and morally, it is better for us not to have anything
to do with the apostate Europeans in the Arab camp. Treachery never succeeds,
and, however matters may end, it is better to fall with clean hands, than to be
mixed up with dubious acts and dubious men," so Gordon wrote in his
diary. Thus to discard intelligence, would lead to the grisly death of
Gordon and his men.
By mid-January, the
Khartoum garrison's food stocks were depleted and they were forced to kill and
eat dogs, donkeys and rats. Dysentery became rampant, and when in the early
morning hours of January 26, 1885, the Mahdi sent tens of thousands of his
forces over the weakly defended muddy ridge, his followers burst into the
city. Based on the Qu'ran, the Mahdi in fact had promised those that
fought could keep 80% of any booty they found. Slatin
later described the scene as follows:
"Whoever was
suspected of having concealed money was tortured until the secret was disclosed
the unfortunate people were flogged until their flesh hung down in shreds from
their bodies... Even women of an advanced age were tormented and the most
sensitive parts of their bodies were subjected to a species of torture which it
is impossible for me to describe here Young women and girls only were
exempted from these abominable tortures, for no other reason than that such
atrocities might interfere in some manner with the object for which they had
been reserved. All such were put aside for the harem of the Mahdi, who, on the
actual day of the conquest, made his selections, and turned over the rejected
ones to his Khalifas and principal Emirs."
Gordon was
decapitated and his body and head, after first being presented to the Mahdi,
were mutilated and all, 6,000 of the garrison's soldiers and 4,000 of the
city's 30,000 civilians were massacred. Women and girls were divided and
distributed as slaves. For the “Mahdi”, the defeat of the British at Khartoum
was only the beginning. He now laid plans to pursue jihad throughout the Muslim
world, starting with Egypt to the North and Abyssinia, now known as Ethiopia,
to the east.
When less than six
months later, on June 22, 1885, the Mahdi died of typhus, plus in response to
Italian and French intrigue in the region, in 1896, the British government
decided to re-conquer the Sudan. But while colonial competition may have been
the driving factor, British bankers with a substantial investment in Egypt just
to the north, and the British public's desire for revenge over the catastrophic
failure at Khartoum doubtlessly played their roles in the decision. Niall
Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the
Lessons for Global Power, 2003 p. 264)
On the day of the
ensuing Battle of Omdurman, wave upon wave of Muslim 'Dervishes' fell dead at
the combined firepower of British artillery and Maxim machine guns. But most
importantly, after the battle, commanding General Kitchener pursued the
remnants of the Muslim-Dervish leadership for a year until they were completely
destroyed.
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