The Course of the Arab Revolt (II): The War in Transjordan, July 1917–September 1918

In southern Syria as in the Hijaz, the outbreak of war and the Allied naval blockade inflicted bitter hardship on the population. The memoirs of ‘Awdah al-Qusus record that the blockade brought shortages of sugar, rice, and kerosene, and that the choking off of imports “raised the price of cloth tenfold.” Matters were exacerbated by Ottoman requisitions. Draconian measures were envisaged that would leave cultivators with a minimal supply of seed and a meagre daily ration of three hundred grams of wheat per person. At the same time, grain, camels, and horses were purchased at unfavorable prices and with a paper currency that devalued rapidly in the face of wartime inflation.^[44] An additional burden was imposed by the general mobilization decreed by the Porte, threatening to conscript all men of military age.^[45]

A cycle of inclement weather and environmental disaster added to the burdens of war. Until the 1917–18 season, the war years were marked by drought and harvest failure. In 1914, al-Karak and southern Syria suffered an infestation of locusts “that destroyed all fruit trees and crops despite the governments best efforts to combat the plague.”^[46] The decline of cereal production was accelerated by the drain of seed, men, and, above all, draft animals to the war effort. Even in the face of soaring food prices, the result was a steady fall in the surplus marketed through official channels and a contraction of the area of grain cultivation.^[47] The greed of speculators and misguided attempts by the authorities to corner the grain market brought famine to the towns and coastal provinces of Syria by the winter of 1915–16.^[48]

Hunger and the exactions of the Ottoman war regime were the most likely cause of the deep well of Arabist sentiment revealed by T. E. Lawrence’s reconnaissance of the Hawran and Transjordan in May and June 1917.^[49] By then, most of the northern bedouin had established links with the Sharifian forces ensconced at Wajh under Faisal, and the Arabist party in Damascus counted such tribal shaykhs as Nuri al-Sha‘alan of the Ruwalla; his son Nawwaf, “the most advanced thinker in the desert”; and Talal al-Fayez and his son Mashhur of the Bani Sakhr as adherents.^[50] However, of all the Transjordanian bedouin, it was only a dissident section of the Huwaytat—in effect ‘Awdah abu Tayeh and his Jazi followers—who openly declared support for the revolt in 1917. ‘Awdah, together with individual tribesmen from the Shararat, the Sirhan, and the Ruwalla, was recruited into the Hashemite confederacy between February and July of 1917, and he spearheaded the advance through the Wadi Sirhan, which took Aqaba on the 6th of July 1917.^[51]

The occupation of Aqaba provided a base for expansion into southern Syria, and Arab forces under Zayd, the youngest of Hussein’s sons, occupied Wadi Musa and Tafila with the support of local villagers in the autumn of 1917.^[52] However, Zayd found himself overextended in trying to take al-Shawbak, where the Hishah forest had become a vital source of lumber for the Hijaz Railway, and Ma’an held out in the face of repeated Arab assaults until the end of the war.^[53] North of the Wadi al-Hasa, al-Karak, where “Sami Pasha’s energetic action in 1910 ha[d] not faded from popular memory,” remained firmly in the Ottoman orbit throughout the war.^[54]

Two British incursions were mounted across the Jordan with the aim of establishing Faisal in central Transjordan in the spring of 1918. The first “Transjordan raid,” launched in late March, briefly occupied al-Salt, but failed to take Amman. Outfought and out-thought by the Turks, the army was forced to retire across the Jordan on April 2. The second Transjordan raid (April 30–May 4, 1918) was compromised by poor intelligence and the failure of promised support from the Bani Sakhr to materialize. The failure of the two raids dealt a severe blow to British prestige—and consequently to the credibility of the Arab Movement. Moreover, Allenby’s forces were weakened further by the withdrawal of men and material to meet the Ludendorf offensives on the Western Front.^[55] As a result, the forces of the revolt made little progress north of the al-Hasa divide until the defeat of the Central Powers, and until Allenby’s victory at Megiddo brought about a general Turkish collapse in the closing stages of the war.

By September 1918, when hostilities in Transjordan ceased, the northern tribes had played a relatively minor role in the revolt. While sections of the Ruwalla were involved in “minor disturbances” in the vicinity of Dera‘a as early as October 1916, the tribe as a whole extended only passive support to the Hashemites before May 1918.^[56] Both Nawwaf and Nuri continued to receive Turkish subsidies while enriching themselves from the contraband trade.^[57] The latter shifted decisively to the Sharifian side only after his camp at Azraq was bombed by the Turks in June 1918.^[58] The Bani Sakhr appear to have hedged. The paramount shaykh of the tribe, Fawwaz al-Fayiz, refused to supply camels for the Turkish attack on the Suez Canal in 1915 and signaled his allegiance to Faisal in January 1917.^[59] However, his brother Mithqal recruited three hundred men to the Turkish cause, and Fawwaz himself attempted to deliver Lawrence to the Ottoman authorities in Zizya in June 1917.^[60]

By agreement with Jamal Pasha, absolute ruler of Syria during the war, the tribes of al-Karak were exempted from conscription in return for supplying auxiliaries to the Ottoman forces operating in their vicinity. Reinforced by Ottoman cavalry and bedouin from the Bani Sakhr, the Matalqa Huwaytat, and the Ruwalla, al-Karak’s shaykhs raised five hundred horsemen for an attack on the forces of the revolt in July 1917. While the bedouin held back at the crucial moment, the Karakis engaged the Sharifians in a three-hour battle at Kuwayra, looting five hundred sheep in the process.^[61] The Turks found it necessary to exile a number of Christian notables from al-Karak (as well as from the related tribes of Madaba) in the latter half of the war.^[62] However, the loyalties of the Majali and prominent shaykhs such as Husayn al-Tarawnah remained Ottoman until the fall of Damascus.^[63]

In al-Balqa, the ‘Adwan and their tribal followers supported the Turkish cause. The memoirs of Fritz von Papen, then with the Fourth Army, record that the Ottomans “maintained excellent relations with . . . the nearby Arab tribes whose sheikhs often visited Es Salt to make their obeisances.” Al-Balqa’s Christians, however, were consistent sympathizers of the revolt throughout the war. After the first Transjordan raid occupied al-Salt, the town’s Christians (as well as tribal allies and supporters from the faction known as the Harah) chose to evacuate the district alongside the retreating British.^[64] By contrast, Transjordan’s Circassian minority under Mirza Pasha Wasfi was active in support of the Turks.^[65] Circassians in Wadi al-Sir fired upon British forces during the second Transjordan raid, and a “tribal brawl” broke out between their kinsmen in Suwayleh and Salti Christians during the first Allied incursion.^[66]

From the perspective of the Hashemite historians, the stalling of the northward progress of the revolt until the last stages of the war is surprising. No doubt there is some truth to their contention that the Turks played on local differences and went out of their way to conciliate local shaykhs and notables. In Karak the Ottomans fanned a feud between the Christian clan of al-Halasa and the Yusuf section of the Majali. The latter’s shaykh, Rafayfan al-Majali, who had succeeded Qadr as the most influential figure in the district, was made an Ottoman mutasarrif after the Ottoman garrison withdrew in the fall of 1918.^[67] Once the Sykes-Picot Agreement was made public by the victorious revolutionaries in Russia, the Turks also played effectively on fears that Allied victory would bring rule by Christian powers and cast doubt on the motives of the Hashemites.^[68] Finally the shaykhs of the Bani Sakhr and the ‘Adwan, as well as less significant figures among the Ruwalla, were recipients of Turkish honors and subsidies that kept them from openly siding with the sharif.^[69]

Nevertheless, an alternative explanation for the passivity of the tribes is needed, particularly as honor and subsidy were also available from the Sharifian side. The sanction of Ottoman repression must have been of key importance in the first phase of the war in Transjordan. The Turkish hold on Transjordan had been reinforced since 1914 by the presence of the Ottoman Fourth Army, which had its supply center at Jiza some forty kilometers south of Amman. Together with the mobility bestowed by the Hijaz Railway, this allowed the Ottomans to police the Balqa and reinforce their hold on al-Karak and Ma‘an at the first sign of trouble. In the summer and autumn of 1917 both Faisal and Lawrence were reluctant to push on into the Balqa and ‘Ajlun for fear that Turkish retribution would fall on defenseless villages should an uprising prove premature.

The Bani Sakhr, as the second Transjordan raid illustrated, would have been the logical choice to form the next rung of the Hashemite ladder after the capture of ‘Aqaba. However, the concentration of Ottoman forces in the western part of the tribe’s dirah (tribal territory) placed severe constraints on its room to maneuver. While “unassailable” in the steppe east of the Hijaz Railway, the Sukhur faced “retribution . . . once the summer droughts force[d] them back into the pastures west of the railway.” Moreover, their estates at Jiza, Dulaylah, Natl, and elsewhere along the Hijaz Railway added to the tribes’ vulnerability, enabling the Turks, in the words of a British intelligence report, “to put a further turn on the screw” by denying them summer provisions and threatening the incomes of their shaykhs.^[70]

The plight of the Bani Sakhr illustrates the fact that, in contrast to the Hijaz, the logistics of food supply in the north Arabian desert (Badiyat al-Sham) worked against the revolt. An Arab Bureau report in the winter of 1917 argued that the various components of the great ‘Anaza tribal confederation that held the key to the revolt’s success in Syria (the Dhana Muslim—Ruwalla, Muhallaf, and Wald ‘Ali on the Shami side of Syrian Desert, and the Amarat to the east) would not join the revolt while the Ottomans controlled the settled areas and, therefore, the markets on which they relied for subsistence. Even the most powerful of the northern bedouin, Nuri al-Sha‘lan of the Ruwalla, would “not fight openly for the Sharif until his tribe of over 70,000 souls is secure, not only of arms, but of food.”^[71]

Moreover, the last year of war, when Allenby was well established in Jerusalem and could counterbalance Turkish power, brought ample rain. According to contemporary reports, the bumper harvests that resulted left “the bulk of the rural population in (the) grain producing districts of inland Syria . . . with enough grain in the summer of 1918.”^[72] With Ottoman resources stretched by the confrontation with Allenby and the need to supply Ma‘an, it is likely that cultivators in Transjordan were able to evade requisitioning agents and accumulate the grain surpluses documented by Damascene observers in the Jabal Druze. This was almost certainly true of those bedouin landlords who could harvest their crop and then follow their kinsmen into the steppe east of the Hijaz Railway, where the grain could be exchanged for contraband or Sharifian gold.^[73] As the grain flowed south to provision the forces of the revolt in Aqaba, Transjordanians could gain access to the guns and gold the revolt traded in without the risk of actually participating.

Once the minorities are excepted, the pattern of participation in the revolt in Transjordan seems to be of scattered initiatives in support of the Sharifian cause north of the Hasa divide, with collective action in its favor being confined to the Huwaytat and the villagers in the environs of Tafila and Wadi Musa. Variations in the power and reach of the Ottoman state and—as was the case in Hijaz—the incidence of food shortage and hunger best explain overt support for the Arab Movement. In the grain-deficient south, where the hold of the Ottoman state was both recent and unsure, the specter of hunger drove sections of the Huwaytat into the arms of Faisal. From al-Karak northward, the presence of the Fourth Army was a deterrent to opportunistic action in favor of the revolt before 1918. By then a good harvest and slackening Ottoman impositions may have left a surplus of grain in the hands of cultivators. Both fallah and bedouin could afford to straddle the fence until Faisal’s victory appeared inevitable.^[74]