Asymmetrical Warfare, cont.

To move the Arab Revolt north into the political hot zones would require a port to supply the Revolt. The place

Aqaba today. Note mountains behind town.

was obvious--the Ottoman port of Aqaba, at the tip of the Red Sea Gulf of Aqaba, at the extreme south of what is now Jordan. The problem was two-fold--Aqaba was in Turkish hands, and it was, in a sense, impregnable. The Arabs could request the Royal Navy to land an assault force at Aqaba, and they could probably have taken it. But again, the problem was two-fold. The British had no geopolitical vision of the Arab Revolt extending to the north of the Arabian Peninsula. And more practically, the lone track that led over the mountains and into the inland from Aqaba was heavily fortified, much more of a tactical challenge than the town of Aqaba itself, and liable to exact prohibitively high casualties from anyone who tried to force the way. After the apocalypse of Gallipoli, the English people has no more taste for attacking Turks in fortified positions, especially in the name of some exotic sideshow like the Arab Revolt.

But Lawrence and Feisal had just been given something better than the British Navy, if they played their cards right. For into Feisal's camp at Wejh had just ridden Auda abu Tayi, sheik of the Howeitat bedouin. Auda, in Lawrence's estimate, was "the greatest fighting man in Northern Arabia." The Howeitat were known wide and far for their belligerence, deriving much of their tribal wealth from raiding their neighbors. Auda was placing himself and his tribe at the service of the Revolt.

Now Lawrence happened to have seen some recently shot aerial photography taken by British reconnaisance planes, that included views of Wadi Itm, the mountain pass that led inland from Aqaba. From it, Lawrence could see that the Turkish fortifications in the pass were much more vulnerable to a force going down the pass from the inland, rather than one ascending it from the sea. Especially if said force could materialize by more or less complete surprise at the top, inland mouth of the pass.

And where could one typically find the black tents and the home pastures of the Howeitat? Why, in southern "Transjordania" as the British called it--a few day's ride, as it happened, from the mouth of Wadi Itm. But where were the Howeitat now?

The Howeitat were somewhere in Wadi Sirhan, the great dry watercourse that connects the northern Arabian Desert with the arable lands of the coast, the pasage from the nomadic to the settled. Reaching the Howeitat in Wadi Sirhan involved crossing some of the least hospitable country in northern Arabia, cutting through an outlier of the Great Nefud desert, and making it across something the Arabs called el Houl, the Terror. All told, it was a desert journey of abot 600 miles -- a huge loop from their current base on the Hejaz coast deep into the Arabian desert, and then back around again down to the sea at Aqaba.
They set off in May, 1917, with Auda, Lawrence, Sherif Nasir, the official Hashemite leader appointed by Feisal, and about forty bodyguards. The crossing was terrible, especially for an Englishman unused to Bedouin life. But they arrived intact at the tents of the Howeitat in their summer pasture in Wadi Sirhan. Auda succeeded in raising the Howeitat for the great raid, and they ultimately left the camp for Aqaba with about 500 of the most avid desert raiders in Arabia. After a string of diversionary raids and manouevers, they entered Wadi Itm, and found the Turkish fortifications falling like plums into their hands. No Turkish planner had anticipated a force of this size or organization to arise out of the disorganized, undisciplined Bedouin in their rear, who only made war on each other. One fort, at Abba el Lissan, held out until Auda, in a fit of pique, ordered an all-out, old-style camel charge. Lawrence, excitedly joining in, accidentally shot his camel through the head, and was sent hurtling head over heels into the sand. When he came to, the Turks had surrendered. The force then headed unopposed down the pass, through a driving sandstorm and entered Aqaba on July 6, 1917.

Hashemite/Howeitat forces entering Aqaba

From then on, the Arabs became a factor in the calculus of the great powers as they planned for the post-War East. And Lawrence's theories about the potential of the Arab Revolt became more than the fevered musings of one lone English eccentric in a black tent.