Egyptian military history
The history of the armed forces of Egypt spans approximately 7,000 years. The modern armed forces of Egypt are the strongest army in Africa today.
Old Egypt
Little is known about the military from the Old and Middle Egyptian Empire. Only from the time of Thutmose III. and Ramses II , who helped Egypt to become a great power, there is more information about the Egyptian military system. The Egyptian pharaohs had standing armies . The typical armament consisted of a club and sword . The long-range weapons used were spears , slingshots and bows and arrows . During the Hyksos reign , chariots and horses were also madeand other innovations in weapons technology such as helmets , shields and battle axes were introduced.
Mamluks
In 1250, the Mamluks , former military slaves , succeeded in gaining power in Egypt and, ten years later, extending it to the Levant . The Arabic word mamluk goes back to the Semitic root mlk "king" and is a reduplicated participle that can be translated as "king", but in a figurative sense stands for "possession of the king". So it is not a question of simple slaves, but of royal slaves, which were used exclusively for military service and who often sold themselves voluntarily. Saladin's bodyguard also consisted of soldiers who were mostly bought in childhood and adolescence on the slave markets of northern Anatolia or the Caucasus and then prepared for their service through training to become horse soldiers and an Islamic education. They were mostly devoted to the ruler. They could gain freedom and then in turn acquire mamluks and bind them to themselves. In 1260 the Mongols conquered Syria , but were defeated by the Mamluks under Qutuz and Baibars in the battle of ʿAin Jālūt . This made the Mamluk Empire in Egypt the only country in the Middle East that could assert itself against the dreaded Mongolian warfare . The Mamluks consolidated their rule in Egypt and Syria, began with the expulsion of the Franks, including the conquest of Antioch (1268), and had Nubia subdued. In 1517 the Egyptian Mamluks were subjugated by the Ottomans , but continued to rule Egypt until the Battle of the Pyramids .
Dynasty of Muhammad Ali
After Napoleon's Egyptian expedition and the withdrawal of the last French troops in 1801, violent power struggles broke out in Egypt. In these, Muhammad Ali Pasha asserts himself as the Ottoman governor in Egypt. Under the rule of Muhammad Ali Pasha, the Egyptian army was modernized by the French Colonel Sève (Suleyman Pasha) .
Mainly by soldiers of this newly formed army, the Wahhabis in Arabia were defeated in the Ottoman-Saudi War (1811-1818) . Along the Nile , the Egyptians pushed further and further south in 1820–1823 in order to conquer Sudan . In 1821 the Sultanate of Sannar was defeated by Egyptian troops led by Ismael Kamil Pasha, the son of Muhammad Ali . After the conquest, black slaves began to be recruited immediately. On June 13, 1821, the capital of the Fung Sannar was conquered. Khartoum was founded and became the capital of the country. Military bases were built along the White and Blue Nile.
Egyptian fellahs were later recruited and the army enlarged. At its peak it was 277,000 strong, of which 130,000 were regular troops. During the uprising in Greece (1822–1827) , after three unsuccessful campaigns, the Ottoman Sultan Mahmut II was forced to summon the already too powerful Pasha of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, for his support. The disciplined Egyptian army, supported by a well-organized fleet, quickly achieved what the Turks had failed. By 1826 the Greeks were practically subdued on land, and Ibrahim Pasha , the son of Muhammad Ali, was preparing to conquer the Greek islands. However, when a British-French fleet intervened in the Battle of Navarino , the Ottoman Empire had to give Greece its independence in 1830.
In order to secure the political and economic rise of Egypt, the invasion of Palestine and Syria began in 1831 , with the Egyptian army under Ibrahim Pasha advancing through Anatolia on Istanbul after several victories over the Ottoman army . Ibrahim Pasha had to withdraw again after the peace of Kütajeh , but he was able to maintain Syria and Cilicia . Only an intervention by the European powers (1840) forced Muhammad Ali Pasha to withdraw from Syria and Palestine.
With the outbreak of the Crimean War (1853), the Egyptian viceroy Abbas I supported the Ottomans with the fleet and provided 15,000 men to the Egyptian army.
In the course of the Urabi uprising , British troops under General Wolseley were sent to Egypt to ensure further economic and financial penetration of the country and, above all, control of the Suez Canal . The Anglo-Egyptian War ended with the defeat of Ahmed Urabi Pasha in the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir on September 13, 1882 and ushered in British rule in Egypt .
British rule in Egypt
On December 20, 1882, the Egyptian army was disbanded. To suppress the Mahdi uprising , 10,000 men in Urabi's army were reactivated, placed under the command of William Hicks and defeated by the Mahdists on November 5, 1883 at the Battle of Sheikan . The Egyptian army was then rebuilt under the command of a British commander in chief, the Sirdar . The first sirdar was Evelyn Wood from 1883 to 1885 . In January 1883, £ 200,000 was given to Wood to raise an army of 6,000 fellahs to defend Egypt. 26 officers, some of them British, trained the army. At the end of 1883 the army consisted of eight infantry battalions, four of them with British commanders. Ten years later the Egyptian army was 12,500 men and in 1898 18,000 men. The army was divided into Egyptian and Sudanese battalions.
The Mahdi uprising broke out in the Turkish-Egyptian Sudan in 1881 . The turmoil in Egypt in the course of the Urabi movement and the occupation of Egypt by Great Britain favored the spread of the idea of Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad . The Mahdist force was finally able to take the provincial capital El Obeid on January 19, 1883 after four months of siege . In September 1883 all available Egyptian troops under the British General Hicks Pasha were dispatched to retake El Obeid. The entire army was destroyed on November 5th in the Battle of Sheikan .
During the British Gordon Relief Expedition , to rescue Governor Gordon Pasha and to relieve Khartoum from the Mahdists, the new Egyptian army only took on administrative tasks. It merely secured the British withdrawal. After the departure of the British troops, however, she took on the main role in the defense against the Mahdists. In the fall of 1885 an army of Mahdists under Muhammad el-Kheir reached the Egyptian border. On December 30, 1885 there was a battle with Egyptian troops under Sir Frederick Stephenson. The Egyptian army, without the support of British troops, won its first victory and stopped the advance of the Mahdists.
In June 1889, an army of Mahdists from Sudan attacked Wadi Halfa, the southernmost base of the Anglo-Egyptian troops. The second Sirdar Sir Francis Grenfell himself took command on the Sudanese border and concentrated his troops at Toski (Tushkah). There it came to the battle of Toski on August 3rd , in which the attacking force of the Mahdists was destroyed. This was the first victory of the newly formed Egyptian army.
Since his appointment in 1892 as the third sirdar of the Egyptian army, Horatio Herbert Kitchener had worked on preparing the Egyptian troops for the reconquest of Sudan. In 1896 the Anglo-Egyptian Nile Expeditionary Force , under his command, was finally put on the march. This initially carried out the occupation of northern Sudan in the Dongola campaign . The battle of Firket took place on June 7, 1896, and Dongola fell on September 23 . After the problem of the long supply routes was resolved by building a railway line through the desert from Wadi Halfa to Abu Hamad between January and October 1897, the Anglo-Egyptian army was able to advance further. From 1897 to 1898 the British marched further south in the Nile campaign . After several skirmishes, Kitchener defeated the Mahdists on September 2, 1898 at the Battle of Omdurman . The reclaimed land was not returned to Egypt, but was constituted in 1899 as an Anglo-Egyptian condominium with Kitchener as the first governor-general .
After Kitchener became Chief of Staff to Lord Roberts in the Boer War in December 1899 , Francis Reginald Wingate took over the role of Governor General of Sudan and the Sirdar. On January 1, 1917, Wingate became High Commissioner for Egypt .
During the First World War , the Palestine Front with the Sinai as the border area to Ottoman Palestine was a combat zone until October 1918.
Kingdom of Egypt
In 1922, Egypt was granted independence from Great Britain. Fuad I. accepted the title of king . However, British troops remained stationed in the country.
In 1928 the Egyptian parliament decided to build an air force . More than 200 Egyptian officers applied for pilot training , but only three passed medical and technical exams.
Through the alliance treaty of August 26, 1936, Great Britain renounced certain reserved rights in Egypt and withdrew its troops to the Suez Canal zone, whereby it secured the right to access the Egyptian transport and communication system in the event of war. The office of Sirdar of Egypt was abolished.
During the Second World War , Great Britain relied on the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936, regardless of an Egyptian declaration of neutrality , which allowed the occupation of the country if the Suez Canal were threatened. The north-west of Egypt became the battlefield of the German and Italian armies under Erwin Rommel and the British under Bernard Montgomery , while the Egyptian army itself remained neutral. British troops remained in the country until 1946.
In the Arab-Israeli War of 1948 , Egyptian troops were able to invade Israel . Despite military and financial aid from Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, they were driven back with heavy losses in 1949.
Republic of Egypt
After King Faruq was overthrown by officers of the Egyptian army in 1952, the new government changed its policy, which had been cooperative with the European powers, to a nationalist, pan-Arab and anti-Israel course. The nationalization of the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956 led to the Suez Crisis and the attack by France, Great Britain and Israel. Gamal Abdel Nasser suffered a military defeat in this, but thanks to the intervention of the superpowers, he won a political victory that made him the undisputed leader of the Arab world.
The six-day war between Israel and its Arab neighbors Egypt, Jordan and Syria lasted from June 5 to 10, 1967. The war began on June 5 with an attack by the Israeli air force on Egyptian air bases. At the end of the war, Israel controlled the Gaza Strip , the Sinai Peninsula , the Golan Heights and the West Bank .
From 1968 to 1970 Egypt, with Soviet help , waged the so-called war of attrition against Israel in order to retake Sinai. The war ended with a 1970 armistice ; neither party was able to record territorial gains.
In the 1973 Yom Kippur War (or “October War”), Egypt and Syria achieved initial successes against Israel through a surprise attack on the highest Jewish holiday. Parts of the Sinai are occupied by Egyptian troops. However, after a few days, Israel succeeded in repelling the Egyptian troops. On October 16, the Egyptian army was surrounded and the Israelis were on the other side of the Suez Canal, just 101 km from Cairo. The war was ended by massive pressure from the USA.
In 1977 there was a four-day Libyan-Egyptian border war .
literature
- John P. Dunn: Khedive Ismail's Army (= Cass Military Studies). Abingdon and New York 2005, ISBN 978-0415645959 .
- Khaled Fahmy: All The Pasha's Men. Mehmed Ali, his army and the making of modern Egypt. Cairo and New York 1997, ISBN 978-9774246968 .
- Michael Barthorp: Blood-red Desert Sand. The British Invasions of Egypt and the Sudan 1882–1898 , Cassell Military Trade Books, ISBN 0-304-36223-9 .
- Sword, W.Dennistoun, Alford, Henry SL: Egyptian Soudan. Its Loss and Recovery , London 1898, ISBN 1-84342-100-3 .