The Turkish Victory that the British Wishes to Forget: Kut Al Amara

The defeat the British suffered at Kut Al Amara was the second biggest defeat of the British during WWI after the Gallipoli battle. The Kurdish tribes in particular, as well as some Arabic and Shia Arabic tribes, contributed greatly to this phenomenal victory. Many leading Shia families cooperated with the Ottomans during the fight.

As the British were attempting to invade Gallipoli with their formidable military prowess, their plans to invade other parts of the Ottoman territory were also underway. However, after their humiliating defeat at Gallipoli, they shifted most of their focus to the Middle East, North Africa and Iraq fronts and particularly to Baghdad, the heart of the region.

In 1914 they invaded Basra and opened up the Iraqi front. On July 24, 1915, the army led by General Townshend began advancing on Baghdad. To counter the advance, Ottoman units under the command of Nurettin Bey, the commander of Iraq forces, retreated to Kut Al Amara on September 28, 1915. The British troops laid a siege to the city of Kut.

Soon after, the British troops resumed their advance on Baghdad, this time through two different routes. They were forced to stop at Salman Pak by the units led by Nurettin Bey, and had to retreat to Kut Al Amara. The Ottoman troops on their heels arrived at Kut Al Amara on December 5. Now trapped in Kut, the clashes between the British troops and Ottoman troops continued throughout December, until the Ottoman troops completely besieged the former.

On April 22, the British units staged another attack under the command of General Townshend with 5,000 troops but once again failed at the expense of 3,000 soldiers. As the events continued to unfold, the British deep state members were trying everything they could to end the siege and even shamelessly attempted to bribe Halil Pasha. They were perfectly aware that if the siege continued any longer, the British army, already exhausted and drained, would perish completely.

Townshend offered to give Halil Pasha a cheque for one million pounds in addition to their weapons only so that he and his army could walk free. Halil Pasha responded that the British weapons would be of no use to them and dismissed the one million pound bribe offer as 'a joke'. When the Turks captured a food and ammunition ship the British army sent to resupply their besieged troops, the British had no choice but to surrender. If the ship had reached its intended destination, the siege could have continued for another two months. Turkish soldiers renamed the aid ship to 'Kendi Gelen' (literally meaning 'the one that comes itself'). The ship had three operational machine guns and joined the Ottoman transport fleet.¹⁰⁴

After Townshend surrendered, Enver Pasha graciously hosted him and made sure that he lived in a villa in picturesque Heybeli Island until the war ended.

In an article on The Telegraph's website on December 2, 2015, Patrick Sawer published extracts from the diary of Lieutenant Henry Curtis Gallup who was at Kut Al Amara at the time and later taken as a prisoner of war by the Turks. Sawer explains at the beginning that the British had the intention of invading Iraq, as well as other Ottoman lands, and summarized the sly and double-faced policy of the British deep state and its outcomes:

What had begun as a mission to safeguard oil and liberate Iraq from the Turks ended in ignominy, with hundreds of British and Indian soldiers dying in captivity.¹⁰⁵

As this statement makes clear, the British deep state never refrains from deceiving innocent masses and starting large-scaled wars by means of ploys and ruses. In that period of history alone, 9 million people died, 30 million went missing or became disabled, due to the actions of the British deep state. Even today the British deep state maintains the same mentality. The 'mastermind' today, that martyrs and disables millions of Muslims in particularly the Middle East by dropping bombs on them, that creates millions of widows, orphans, refugees with the pretense of 'safeguarding' and 'liberating countries', introducing democracy and peace to them, is the British deep state.

The article goes on to elaborate the Kut Al Amara defeat of the British based on the diaries of Lieutenant Henry Curtis Gallup:

It [Kut Al Amara] was one of the British Army's worst defeats of the First World War, with starving troops forced to eat their own horses and thousands more killed during an ill-fated rescue attempt.¹⁰⁶

The piece reveals the existence of one of the most sinister British deep state methods: making Muslims kill one other:

Gallup's diary entries detail how the continuous Turkish offensives, and the appalling conditions endured by his comrades, eventually wore down the exhausted British forces. By December 1915 food supplies were desperately low and the prospect of starvation was looming – forcing the soldiers to begin eating their horses. Attempts to relieve the beleaguered troops ended in disaster, with two Indian divisions dispatched by the British halted by the enemy [Turks], with more than 23,000 Indian losses.¹⁰⁷

Referred to as the 'Indian losses' by the British, those people were all Indian Muslims. In other words, the British hadn't risked their own soldiers, but used instead unaware Muslim subjects from British colonies, which they made soldiers at gunpoint. This cruel and perfidious strategy of the British deep state is why tens of thousands of Indian Muslims were told to attack their Muslim Turkish brothers at Kut Al Amara and lost their lives. Finally, conceding defeat, the British surrendered to the Ottoman army, after a 6-month siege, on April 29. This historic victory, welcomed with jubilation at all Ottoman fronts, provided a great moral boost to the Turks, while causing great shock in Europe. The British newspapers would cover the Turkish victory on their front pages calling the incident 'the biggest humiliation for the British after Gallipoli...'

British historian James Morris would call the defeat at Kut 'the most abject capitulation in Britain's military history'.¹⁰⁸ Christopher Catherwood, another British historian calls this defeat 'the worst defeat of the Allies in World War I.'¹⁰⁹

Halil Pasha's words in the army diary of April 29, 1916 beautifully summarizes the Kut Al Amara victory:

To my army;

Lionhearts!

1- Today the spirits of our martyrs are ascending happily and joyfully in the sunny skies under which Turks achieved a glorious victory while the British suffered a heavy defeat. I kiss you on your pure foreheads and congratulate you all.

2- Praise be to God Who helped us achieve a success, which has been unprecedented for the last 200 years. And God the Almighty gave you the glory to be the ones who for the first time recorded such a defeat in 1,500 years of British history.¹¹⁰ There has not been a similar achievement in the World War, which has been going on for two years now.

3- My Army has given its 350 officers and 10,000 privates as martyrs in both Kut and when facing the armies marched on to save Kut. But, in return, today in Kut, I am taking 13 generals, 481 officers and 13,300 under captivity. English forces, which came to save this now surrendered army, returned with losses of 30,000.

4- Looking at these two numbers, what one can see is an astonishing difference. History will have a great difficulty to find words in recording this episode.

5- We saw the first victory in Gallipoli and the second victory here where the Turkish have broken the stubbornness of the English.¹¹¹

6- This victory that we achieved only by the means of our bayonets and hearts is the beginning of our future successful ventures.

7- I declare this day the 'Kut Day'. May every member of my army recite prayers of blessings, Ya Sin and Fatiha for our martyrs and celebrate this day every year. As our martyrs live on in the Heaven, may our gazhis (injured heroes) stand guard for our victories in the future.

Brigadier General Halil

Commander of the 6th Army

29/April /1916- Baghdad¹¹²

Interestingly, until 1952 when Turkey became a NATO member, the Turkish Army celebrated 'Kut Day' on every 29 April. The British deep state must have not liked to be reminded of it though, because the Victory of Kut was suddenly removed from school curriculums upon the request of the British and the festival was no longer celebrated after that year. It was an attempt to keep the new generations from learning about this victory. This clearly shows how important it is to constantly remember and talk about Kut Al Amara, a massive defeat of the British deep state, and similar victories, with great zeal and determination.

Interesting Details in General Townshend's memoirs

The commander of the British forces at Kut Al Amara, General Townshend, wrote My Campaign in Mesopotamia, in 1920 to offer his view of the war in Mesopotamia.

According to Townshend, more than one million Indian soldiers –some combatants, some reinforcements- fought for the British army during WWI and of them, 74,000 lost their lives and 67,000 thousand were injured. The 6^th British Division included Indians, Sikhs, Bangladeshis, Gurkhas, and Muslim Pashtuns. Townshend explains how the Muslim soldiers amongst his troops didn't want to fight the Turks during the 'Battle of Qurna'. In his book he writes that in other battles Muslim troops in the Indian battalions acted in a similar way.¹

The historical sources reveal why the Indian Muslims were reluctant to fight Muslim Turks, whom they considered the soldiers of the Caliph. After the Iraq front was opened, Indian Muslims including Shia Indians, refused to fight the Turks. So much so, three Indian regiments refused to participate in the fight near Ctesiphon and instead chose to rebel against the British en masse.²

However the biggest Indian revolt against the British took place in Singapore. Refusing to fight the Ottoman Muslims with the British, Indian Muslims started a riot on February 15, 1915 in the 5^th Light Infantry Regiment that consisted of Pashtun, Moghul and Rajput Muslims. Muslim soldiers didn't want to be taken to Europe under the British flag and forced to fight against Ottoman soldiers. However, the riot proved ineffective, as the officer in charge wasn't experienced. As a result, the British colonial administration in Singapore clamped down on the rioters with the support of their French and Japanese allies in the region. A 'court-martial' was set up which gave its verdict with shocking speed. In the end, half of the Muslim regiment, which included 850 troops and more than 200 officers, were executed either by a firing squad or by hanging. The rest were either sentenced to penal servitude or dispatched to Cameroon and German East Africa to fight the Germans. In 1917, these units were forced to fight the Ottomans in Aden together with the Malay States Guides, who were known with their pro-Turkish stance. This grim incident alone is enough to show how the British deep state doesn't refrain from using force to make Muslims fight each other. Brave Indian soldiers who didn't want to fight Muslims preferred martyrdom rather than commit such treachery.³

At this point, it is important to note that many historical details have been carefully covered up by the British deep state. It is known that during WWI, many Muslims that were subordinated to the Caliph refused to fight the Turks and accepted martyrdom instead. However, the documents available today pertaining to those days are usually limited to the British sources. Therefore, riots against the British that took place during those days were carefully hidden in an attempt to erase the memory of Muslims' alliance and brotherhood.

1. "İngiliz General'in Kut Anıları" (British General's Memories of Kut), Al-Jazeera, http://appsaljazeera.com/interactive/kutul-amare/tr/ingilizin-anilari.html

2. İsmet Üzen, "Türklerin Kut'ül Amare Kuşatması Sırasında İngiliz Ordusunda Bulunan Hintli Askerlerin Tutumu (December 1915 - April 1916)" (The Behavior of Indian Soldiers within the British Army during the Turks' Kut Al Amara Siege), Akademik Bakış Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2008, p. 81

3. Emre Gül, "Hintli Askerler Singapur'da Osmanlı İçin İsyan Etmişti" (Indian Soldiers Revolted in Singapore in favor of the Ottoman), Dünya Bulletin, July 25, 2014