PART I
An Arab State in Syria
Chapter 1
Damascus: Enter the Prince
Monday, September 30, 1918. Night fell in Deraa, a small town at a major railway junction sixty miles south of Damascus. âHow wonderful to be happy,â wrote Rustum Haidar in his diary. Haidar was personal assistant to Prince Faisal, leader of the Northern Arab Army, which had waged armed revolt against the Ottoman Empire for more than two years. The wartime Ottoman regimeâs desperate measures had combined with the Alliesâ blockade to starve and brutalize Syrians. That was why, earlier that day, the people of Deraa had cheered the Arab armyâs arrival.1
Haidar had just come from a meeting with Faisal at the local train station. The two-story stone structure stood in lonely vigil along the tracks of the Hijaz Railway, which stretched 820 miles south to the holy city of Medina. The revolt had followed those tracks northward from its starting point, in Arabia, in June 1916.
Outside the station, darkness shrouded the grim underside of victory. Wounded soldiers of the retreating Ottoman army groaned in alleyways. The dead lay strewn across the land, incompletely buried. Abandoned horses roamed the town. Desperate peasants, starved in the last years of the Great War, had plundered the Serail, the governorâs palace, and ripped off its wooden doors and window frames for fuel. The Serailâs forlorn shell symbolized the end of the Ottoman Turksâ four-hundred-year rule in this land.
Inside the station, the two men lit scented candles to ward off malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and took stock of their situation. Faisal spoke with the hard accent of his homeland in the Arabian Peninsula. At age thirty-five, he had the lean look of a desert warrior, with a neatly trimmed goatee. Only thirty years old, Haidar had the shorter and broader build of Mediterranean peoples. He looked at Faisal with intense, deep-set eyes and spoke with the soft lilt of his hometown near Mount Lebanon. A scholar, not a soldier, Haidar had attended a top college in Istanbul and studied political administration in Paris. He spent the war as principal of elite schools in Jerusalem and Damascus. Faisal was a sharif, a Sunni descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, and third son of Hussein, king of the Hijaz and caretaker of the holy city of Mecca. Haidar came from a prominent family of the opposing Islamic sect, Shiism. Despite the long history of conflict between Sunnis and Shiites, the two men bonded in their mission to claim an independent Arab state from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire.
The revolt sprang from Arabsâ discontent with the rule of the Young Turks, who had betrayed the hopes for local autonomy, democracy, and rule of law that had been raised in the 1908 Ottoman constitutional revolution. The Young Turksâ 1912 coup had effectively suspended the constitution. They had purged the government and reorganized the military to privilege Turks over Arabs. Early in World War I, even as many Arab soldiers fought on the side of the Turks in the victorious battle at Gallipoli, the Ottoman governor of Syria had executed a dozen prominent Arab leaders and exiled many more on suspicion of treason for their earlier political dissent.
Within his family, Faisal remained the most loyal to the empire and especially to the Ottoman sultan who also reigned as the caliph, or spiritual leader, of Sunni Muslims. Faisal had grown up in Istanbul and served in the parliament at the outset of the war. He considered the Ottomans the best protection against Europeansâ long-standing desire to partition and colonize the empire, as they had already done in Egypt and the Arabic-speaking countries of North Africa. Ottoman defeats early in the war, at Basra in Iraq and at the Suez Canal in Egypt, cast doubt on that protection.
Even though Arabs were fighting in the Ottoman army, the Young Turks worried that Arab politicians might waver in their loyalty. When Faisalâs father learned of a Turkish plot to remove him from power, he chose Faisal, his most pro-Ottoman son, as his envoy to Istanbul. What Faisal saw on his trip in the spring of 1915 broke his faith. He arrived in Istanbul just as two hundred Armenian leaders were arrested; from his train windows he saw the first mass deportations of poor Armenians. Stopping at Damascus, he learned of similar arrests among Arab leaders. The Ottoman commander in the city, Jemal Pasha, greeted him coldly. Faisal secretly joined the Fatat nationalist organization that Rustum Haidar belonged to, and met the men who were now poised, in 1918, to build a Syrian state: General Ali Rida al-Rikabi, also known as Rida Pasha al-Rikabi and General Yasin al-Hashimi both assured him of military support; Dr. Ahmad Qadri and Dr. Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar pledged political support. In June 1915, Faisal carried the Damascus Protocol back to his father. It set the terms of a potential alliance with Entente powers against the Ottomans, primarily the promise of an independent Arab state stretching from Anatolia to the Gulf and Red Sea.2
On the basis of support in Damascus, Faisalâs father, Sharif Hussein, opened negotiations with the British high commissioner in Egypt in the summer of 1915. The British, who were then fighting a losing battle against the Ottomans at Gallipoli, desperately sought a prominent Muslim ally to wage a counter-jihad. They feared that the millions of Muslims under their rule, in Egypt and India and beyond, might otherwise rebel. But it was a risky move to rebel against the Ottoman caliph in wartime. Hussein could do so only by justifying the revolt as a means to defend the sovereignty of the Arabs and Islam. He therefore proposed to High Commissioner Henry McMahon in Cairo that Britain promise the Arabs an independent state covering the territory of Greater Syria, Iraq, and the Arabian Peninsula. In October 1915 McMahon responded in the affirmative, with the exception of territories along the Syrian-Lebanese coast claimed by the French and in southern Iraq and along the Persian Gulf occupied by the British and their clients. Hussein rejected French claims and insisted that the Iraqi lands be evacuated after the war. The alliance was sealed in March 1916, but the vague wording of McMahonâs promises, unknown to Faisal in 1918, would haunt British-Arab negotiations at warâs end.3
The Arabs launched the revolt after Jemal Pasha ordered a second round of hangings of prominent Arabs, conducted in the main squares of Beirut and Damascus on May 6, 1916. By then, food shortages had already begun to starve the Syrian population. Jemal Pasha deported five thousand Syrian families to exile in Anatolia and transferred all Arab troops from the region. The Arab Revolt could no longer depend on internal Syrian support. The British alliance was now critical to its success. On June 10, 1916, Hussein launched the revolt with the conquest of Mecca. Arab forces moved northward and by the following summer liberated the key Red Sea port of Aqaba. The British spy T. E. Lawrence, who met Faisal in October 1916, masterminded the sabotage of the Hijaz Railway, crippling Ottoman troop movements. Faisal proved to be Husseinâs most militarily skilled son. His Northern Arab Army battled through todayâs Jordan in coordination with the British-led Egyptian Expeditionary Forces, which conquered Jerusalem in December 1917. On the eve of the final push toward Damascus, Faisal commanded 8,000 regular troops and 4,000 irregulars, fighting alongside 69,000 troops under the British general Allenby, facing 34,000 Ottoman troops. By then, Faisalâs Northern Arab Army consisted of mainly Syrian soldiers and tribal units. Hijazi tribes who had launched the revolt two years earlier remained in the south as local Syrians deserted the retreating Ottoman army to join Faisal. Syrian-Arab troops played a critical role in disrupting the Ottoman communications hub at Deraa, disabling 25,000 enemy soldiers, and diverting Ottoman troops from British forcesâ advance along the coast. General Allenby sent Faisal a thankful note crediting his Arab army as a key factor in the Alliesâ success.4
Rustum Haidar had been the revoltâs contact behind Ottoman lines. In August 1918, as Ottoman fortunes sank, he and other Fatat members escaped Damascus to join Faisalâs army for the final push. The day before the Arab army entered Deraa, Faisal and Haidar had raised the Arab flag at nearby Busra, an ancient Roman town built on dark volcanic rock. The flag had three horizontal stripesâgreen, black, and whiteârepresenting the three ancient Arab caliphates. A red triangle represented the Hashemite dynasty of Faisal and his father. Busraâs support was crucial because the town controlled food supplies and roads needed for the march to Damascus.
At the same time, the approaching forces sent an open letter to the cityâs Ottoman commander, announcing that they had come in judgment against the Young Turk regime that had heedlessly dragged their subjects into the Great War on Germanyâs side in 1914. The Arab Revolt would avenge the victims of their war crimes. The letter read as follows:
God protect humanity from you and your Genghis-like evils. You destroyed the houses of the orphans with the intention of doing good and cut down the trees to burn in your trains which carry the sons of the country to destruction and death. You declared your unjustifiable war legal and you shattered the city of the Muslims [Mecca] and borrowed millions for your own benefit and burdened the people whom you did not even consult about the war and [who] had no will for it.5
The Arabsâ triumph now lay within reach. The next day, the army would enter Damascus.6 But, now, at the eleventh hour, a new obstacle arose. Faisal and Haidar heard rumors that the British aimed to reach Damascus first and place it under their own military command. Britainâs leaders appeared to have conflicting policies. Whereas in 1915 they had promised the Arabs an independent state simply for joining the Allies, the previous summer they had altered that promise: the Arabs would command only the territory that they themselves directly liberated from the Ottomans. It was therefore vital that the Arabs reach Damascus first, Haidar advised Faisal. Everything hinged on speed.
General Edmund Allenby, commander of Britainâs Egyptian Expeditionary Force, ordered his troops (mostly Australians) to move in on Damascus from the coast. British airplanes dropped leaflets warning the Turks that their ally Bulgaria had just surrendered. General Liman von Sanders, the German-Ottoman commander in Syria, ordered a full evacuation northward to Aleppo.7 That very night, September 30, the last Ottoman train pulled out of Damascus under a rain of rebel bullets fired from roofs and balconies. The last to depart were German soldiers, who exploded stockpiles of ammunition.
From a ridge overlooking the city, a British intelligence officer named T. E. Lawrence watched the geysers of flame and bursting shells. âThe roar and reverberation of the explosions kept us all awake,â he recalled.8 Lawrence, also just thirty years old, had fought alongside the Arabs for almost two years. How many nights he and Faisal had talked of this moment! As the sun rose, he descended toward the fabled city with Faisalâs chief of staff, Nuri al-Said, a former Ottoman officer from Iraq. Peasants were already tilling their fields. âThe silent gardens stood blurred green with river mist, in whose setting shimmered the city, beautiful as ever, like a pearl in the morning sun.â9
The cool Barada River had watered Damascus and its surrounding orchards since ancient times. At the heart of the city towered the seventh-century Umayyad Mosque, built on the site of a former Roman temple and church. Next to the mosque was the tomb of Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders five hundred years later. Since then, the faithful had gathered every year outside the mosque to launch the pilgrimage to Mecca. Damascus was already a center of religious faith and learning when the Ottomans conquered it in 1516. It was now also a center of the modern Arab cultural renaissance. Losing Damascus broke the Ottomansâ four-hundred-year hold on the eastern Arab world.
On the morning of October 1, the Arab army entered Damascus from its southern borders. Hundreds of soldiers marched through the Midan neighborhood of grain merchants and rural migrants toward city center, passing buildings festooned with the striped Arab flags.10 âBy the thousands, people gathered on the side of the road ⌠clapping, calling, and singing and ululating and tossing flowers. Rose water showered upon us,â a soldier wrote in his diary. âMy tears poured down and my heart nearly stopped beating.â11 âMany were crying, a few cheered faintly, some bolder ones cried out our names: but mostly they looked and looked, joy shining in their eyes,â Lawrence later wrote.12 âPandemonium reigned,â recalled William Yale, an American intelligence agent who witnessed the scene. âWe were invited into peopleâs homes and had wine and sweetmeats pushed upon us. It was a wild, hectic day, the like of which a man is fortunate to experience but once in a lifetime.â13
Behind all the smiling faces, however, lurked fear and anxiety. Many Damascenes had not slept the night before, fearing that the Germans might torch the city before leaving. They also feared the wild-looking Bedouin in the Arab army, who were known to plunder. The city had been without streetlights since 1917, when the cash-strapped Ottomans had shut down its electric plant.14
In the previous two weeks, Damascus had descended into chaos. The police department shut down. Most of the cityâs ruling elite, who usually provided additional security, were absent, either dead or in exile. Only the prominent Jazaâiri family had stepped into the void. At the request of the departing governor, they deployed their private militia to patrol the streets. They then proclaimed a Syrian Arab state under the authority of Faisal and his father, Sharif Hussein of Mecca. They even raised atop the Ottoman Serail an Arab flag, which they claimed to have carried from Mecca on Faisalâs orders.15
This was not, in fact, the official plan. Faisal had commanded the revoltâs agents in Damascus to form the Arab government immediately upon the Turksâ departure. Other leaders of the revolt were suspicious of the Jazaâiris because the family had long been clients of France, which had designs on Syria. These leaders believed the Jazaâiri brothers aimed to grab power for themselves.
âWe couldnât tolerate this situation,â recalled Dr. Ahmad Qadri, a close associate of Rustum Haidar.16 On October 1, he and Lawrence expelled the Jazaâiris from the Serail. One of the brothers was killed. That night, in response, the family unleashed hundreds of their militiamen onto Damascus streets and made violent speeches against Faisal.17 The Northern Arab Army crushed them in a few swift street battles that night, claiming control of the city. But the incident portended future resistance by old city notables against the government of the young rebels.
William Yale, the American agent, obtained a copy of a new Arabic newspaper published that same day to proclaim independence. âHail to these O Arab arms that spread peace and cheerfulness in these unhappy countries, which oppression and persecution have destroyed and laid waste,â read its lead editorial. It pledged loyalty to Sharif Hussein, king of Syria and the Hijaz. âO Ar...