Arab Revolt against the Ottomans

The Arab Revolt began in June 1916, when Sharif Hussein bin Ali, the Ottoman-appointed ruler of Mecca and the Hejaz, proclaimed an uprising against the Ottoman Empire. His sons Faisal and Abdullah led the fighters, mostly tribesmen from the Hejaz, who took Mecca and other towns, and then fought alongside British forces in a guerrilla campaign against the railway that ran from Damascus to Medina. Their forces took the port of Aqaba in July 1917 and entered Damascus in October 1918.¹

The revolt was bound up with World War I. The Ottoman Empire entered the war on Germany's side in late 1914, and Britain looked for Arab allies against it. In the McMahon-Hussein correspondence of 1915 and 1916, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, made vague promises of support for Arab independence in exchange for Hussein's rebellion. The Ottomans, meanwhile, had been tightening central control and had executed Arab nationalists in Beirut and Damascus in 1915 and 1916, which increased resentment.²

The British liaison officer T. E. Lawrence became famous through the revolt, but the main work was done by Arab commanders and fighters. The promises made to Hussein collided with other British and French deals, above all the secret Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, which divided the region between them, and the Balfour Declaration of 1917. After the war, France drove Faisal out of Syria in 1920, and Britain and France ruled the region under League of Nations mandates. Faisal became king of Iraq and Abdullah emir of Transjordan, whose line still rules Jordan, but the dream of a single Arab state was not fulfilled.¹²