Oxford Professor Eugene Rogan: World War I Completely Transformed the Middle East, and It Will Always Be Remembered That Way (Part 1) | Interviews

This interview runs in two parts. This is the first, mainly about World War I and the Ottoman Empire.

2018 marked a century since the armistice that ended World War I. People in many countries marked it: the British held a torch relay at the Tower of London; The Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson said he would make a documentary about the war; a Belgian artist made 600,000 ceramic sculptures for the dead. The grandest of all was the ceremony France held on Armistice Day, November 11, which drew 84 leaders, among them German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and US President Donald Trump.

Look closely at these commemorations, though, and you find that most were mounted by European countries. The Middle East was an important theater of the war too, but only Turkey commemorates much of anything — the Battle of Gallipoli — and Arab countries hold almost no ceremonies at all, treating it as someone else's war. The First World War did begin as a war among European states, and only later turned into a world war.

Eugene Rogan, professor of modern Middle East history at Oxford University and director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony's College, believes it was the Ottoman Empire that turned it into one — and that the war completely transformed the Middle East.

In his book The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, 1914–1920, he writes: "The Ottoman entry into the war was the single most important reason the conflict widened from a European quarrel into a world war. Unlike the smaller conflicts in the Far East and East Africa, the Middle East was one of the main theaters for all four years of the war, and the armies that fought there were the most international of any. ... The Ottoman front was a veritable Tower of Babel, an unprecedented struggle between two multinational armies."

"If the Ottoman Empire turned a European quarrel into a world war, it is no exaggeration to say that the war completely remade the modern Middle East. Almost no corner of the region escaped the fighting. The soldiers came from the Turkish and Arab provinces under Ottoman rule and from the colonies of North Africa, while civilians suffered the economic hardship and rampant epidemics the war brought with it. The fighting reached what are now Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. Most of these countries owe their existence directly to the fall of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War."

But Rogan found that the Western world knows very little about the war in the Middle East. Even where the history is told, it is told from the Allied side. "After a century of study, we have a full picture of the war as the Allies fought it. But we are only just beginning on the other side — the Ottoman soldiers who fought to the death against foreign invaders in order to survive." East Asia's grasp of the Middle Eastern war, of course, is no better than the West's.

So he set out to fill that gap and tell the story of the war in the Middle East. "My aim was to weave the military history of the Ottoman war effort together with social and economic conditions and with political and diplomatic history, and so to narrate the Ottoman front. I believe these different faces of the Great War are inseparable, and that only by setting wartime diplomacy in the wider context of the war can a reader make sense of it. I also wanted to break with the tradition of narrating through generals and statesmen, and to try to capture what ordinary soldiers and junior officers felt, since they were the ones who did the fighting. Finally, I wanted to follow the men in the trenches on both sides through Turkish and Arab accounts of the war. In short, I hoped to write a balanced history of the Ottoman front, and to commemorate the First World War of 1914 to 1918 together with the rest of the world," Rogan wrote in his preface to the traditional-Chinese edition of The Fall of the Ottomans.

A hundred years on, why commemorate the war at all?

There are at least three reasons.

First, the world of a century ago has a great deal in common with the world now. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the Paris ceremony: "In my view, some elements of today have a great deal in common with the early 20th century and the 1930s, giving us reason to worry that a series of unpredictable events could occur."

Second, China fought in that war too, sending more than 100,000 Chinese laborers to Europe. And without the Paris Peace Conference that followed it, there would have been no May Fourth Movement — the movement that remade modern China.

Third, and more broadly, the world we live in was in fact shaped by the First World War, and many of the problems societies face today are what it left behind. "Some of the most intractable problems of the modern world stem from decisions made right after the First World War ended: the four Balkan wars fought between 1991 and 1999; the crisis in Iraq, whose borders today are the product of an Anglo-French tug-of-war and crude map-drawing; the long-unresolved question of Kurdish autonomy; the disputes between Greece and Turkey; the endless struggle between Arabs and Jews over land, each believing themselves to be the people to whom it was promised." So wrote the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke in his preface to Canadian historian Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World.

Most of those leftovers lie in the Middle East. That is what Professor Rogan cares about most. "The borders drawn by the postwar settlements have proved remarkably durable, but so has the conflict those borders provoked... To this day, the legacy of the First World War weighs on the Middle East far more heavily than on any other part of the world."

On the centenary of the armistice, we met the 58-year-old Rogan in Beijing. Silver-haired, in black-framed glasses and a blue shirt, he talked with us about the war, the Ottoman Empire, nationalism, the transformation of the Arab states, and his own intellectual formation and life. There was too much to run at once, so we are publishing it in two parts. This is the first, mainly about World War I and the Ottoman Empire.

"It's now 100 years since the end of the conflict, and the Middle East can reflect on this war in different ways. But it's very clear that World War I completely transformed the Middle East, and it will always be remembered that way," he told QDaily.

Threats inside and outside pushed the Ottoman Empire into the war

QDaily: In The Fall of the Ottomans you draw heavily on the diaries and memoirs of ordinary soldiers to reconstruct the history. After reading through them, what struck you most?

Eugene Rogan: If you want to understand what the war was like for the Ottoman and British soldiers who fought it, diaries and memoirs are probably the best source. British and French archives hold a great many diaries by British and French soldiers, but diaries by Turkish soldiers are rare. One reason is that many Turkish soldiers were illiterate. During the war, literacy in the Ottoman Empire was below 10%, so most ordinary soldiers could neither read nor write, and could not set down their experience the way British and French soldiers did. That makes the diaries scarce. Until recently there wasn't a single archive in Turkey holding this kind of material. There is a national military history museum in Ankara — he means the Turkish Directorate of Military History and Strategic Studies Archive — but it holds no Turkish soldiers' diaries either.

In recent years, though, private collectors have gradually published diaries written by relatives who fought in the war. Most were kept by officers, some by lower-ranking men. But the diaries of these lieutenants and enlisted soldiers are fascinating to read. They describe life in the trenches alongside the other men. For a historian writing about the Ottoman Empire at war, I found them to be superb new material. And I was struck by how alike the trench experience was for British and Turkish soldiers.

They write about the same things — fear, the men they talked with at night, the terrible food. So as you read, you come to feel that for soldiers on both sides the war was a shared and terrifying experience.

QDaily: Specifically, what attitudes did these soldiers hold toward the war?

Eugene Rogan: Turkish soldiers' attitudes varied enormously. Many were deeply patriotic, wanting to fight off invasion and defend their homes. Others were critical of the war and of the government, and felt the two had dragged the Ottoman Empire into a quarrel nobody was even watching. The war was a conflict between two European alliances — Germany and Austria on one side, Britain, France, and Russia on the other. The Ottoman Empire was not part of it. So many soldiers were angry that their government had pulled them into a fight between European alliances, one that could only bring Ottoman soldiers danger and harm. That split was sharpest among soldiers from the Arab provinces. They felt separate from the Ottoman Empire in social order and in culture, and now these men — from Libya, Lebanon, and elsewhere far from home — had been forced into a war simply to hold Ottoman territory that was foreign to them. The land meant nothing to them. So they had little appetite for the fight. Others, though, genuinely wanted to drive the British out of Gallipoli and Iraq. Those soldiers were the real strength of the army; they were able to fight the enemy and hold on until the end of 1918. That was an enormously important contribution to the Ottoman Empire.

QDaily: Reading the book, I noticed that both Abdul Hamid II and the Young Turks tried to hold the empire together at the price of their citizens' political rights, moving from liberalism to authoritarian rule. In your view, was that a paradox for an empire beset from within and without?

Eugene Rogan: For the Ottoman Empire, I think the internal challenge — doubt about whether its own subjects were loyal — was as serious as the threat from foreign enemies. And the communities they worried about most were in many ways the ones closest to Britain, France, and Russia. That explains a great deal about the Armenian genocide. The Young Turk government believed that the Armenians, as a Christian community, were more loyal to Russia than to the Ottoman Empire. Armenians were also trying to establish an independent, sovereign territory, breaking away from the empire. The government had the same worry about the Arab provinces. Many Arab societies were pushing for Arab autonomy, separate from the empire. In 1916, Sharif Hussein declared that Mecca was joining the movement against the Ottoman Empire and called on all Arabs to revolt against Ottoman rule. They worked with the British. So many Ottomans concluded that the Arabs had drawn closer to the British and betrayed the empire.

Internal division did weaken the empire in wartime, and that led the Ottoman government to a whole series of repressive measures, including two massacres of Armenians and two trials of Arabs. In those trials, more than 20 Arab nationalists were hanged on government orders, as a warning to Arabs to stay loyal to the state.

But we should be clear that many states turn authoritarian in wartime and treat their citizens' rights with contempt. The most important thing a government does when it orders its citizens into the army is to take away their choice. So one reason Ottoman authoritarianism took the shape it did during the war is the same reason it took shape in Britain and Germany. The point, though, is that threats from inside and outside really were what drove the Ottoman Empire into the war. They were too great, and too hard to answer.

The West's fear of Islamic jihad was largely groundless

QDaily: In the book you write: "Most Allied moves in the Middle East were driven by fear of jihad. That fear proved groundless. Ironically, it produced a stronger response to the caliph's call to jihad among the Allies than among Muslims themselves. Even a century later, the Western world still believes Muslims are capable of uniting in fanatical action against a common enemy." So do you think today's Western fear of Islamic jihad is entirely groundless? Why?

Eugene Rogan: One of the more interesting findings of my research has to do with jihad. The Germans believed the Ottoman Empire's greatest contribution to the war would be the religious fervor of colonized Muslims. They hoped those Muslims would rise against the Russians in the Caucasus, against the British in India and Egypt, and against the French in North and West Asia. Russia, Britain, and France, as three empires, ruled tens of millions of colonized Muslims. Germany hoped to use their anti-imperial feeling and religious fervor to touch off revolts against all three, which would weaken their fighting strength on the Western Front and let Germany defeat France and take its territory.

The difficulty was this: people in the Muslim world might be stirred by religion to act together in defense of their own homes, but it is very hard to move people far from the war to take up arms. The Ottoman sultan, who was also the caliph of Islam, called on Indian Muslims to join a jihad, but it was remote from them, their daily concerns mattered far more, and expecting a mass uprising was unrealistic.

The one moment when colonized Muslims might have joined such a movement would have been if they saw Britain, France, and Russia defeated by Germany. Then they might have tried to drive the British out of their own lands, because the British, French, and Russians were unwelcome in those countries. So the idea weighed heavily on the British. If they lost their contest with the Ottoman Empire, it would hand colonized Muslims their chance to revolt. That made them more anxious about jihad still, convinced that Indians and Egyptians were burning for it.

My conclusion in the end is that by the time British war planners grasped that the war would be won or lost on the Western Front — not on Ottoman soil but in France — they were already sunk deep in the fight against the Ottomans. And the Ottoman Empire's greatest contribution, I think, was to draw tens of thousands of British, French, and colonial soldiers into fighting it, men who would otherwise have gone to the Western Front to fight Germany. For Germany, the Ottomans turned out to be a far more valuable ally than expected.

But think what that means for us now: great powers still believe they can use religious fervor in the Muslim world to help bring another power down. From the 1970s into the 1980s, for instance, the United States backed the Taliban to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan, believing jihad could be turned to its own advantage. Ironically, the United States today backs the government in Afghanistan that opposes the Taliban. Using Islamic jihad is a Western misunderstanding. But I think it will go on.

Solving the Islamic State problem will take the West and the East together

QDaily: How do you see the problem of the Islamic State (ISIS) today?

Eugene Rogan: The Islamic State appeals to a small group of radical Muslims around the world. These are people who want Islam to have a larger voice in international affairs, who want a stronger Islamic state — one that could reach past the modern borders of Middle Eastern countries, borders they see as a colonial product. The Arab world does not accept the borders the victorious powers drew after the First World War as legitimate, because the victors treated them as a mark of colonial legitimacy.

So far, ISIS has tried by illegal means to build a territorial state in Syria and Iraq, but it has also urged Muslims elsewhere to "liberate" territory in the name of ISIS — in the Sinai, in Egypt, even in parts of Africa. In those places some groups have already declared their loyalty to the Islamic State and claimed the land they hold as the caliph's domain. So for radical Muslims scattered across China, Europe, Africa, the United States, and elsewhere, the prospect of a stronger Muslim state ruled by a caliph is attractive, and they are calling on Muslims everywhere to support it.

But I still think the leaders of the Islamic State movement overestimated how attractive such a state would be to Muslims worldwide. In a sense, ISIS made the same mistake as the Orientalist scholar — he means Max von Oppenheim — who advised the Germans in the First World War, hoping to use religious fervor to launch a jihad. Muslims around the world share the same hopes and ambitions as everyone else. They want a decent quality of life, better provision for their families, an education for their children. They never wanted to build an ideal Islamic state with force and violence.

And for most Muslims, I think, the methods the Islamic State uses run against their values. They are frightened by what it has done. Most of the people it has killed were Muslims. So the violence of the movement holds no appeal whatever for the great majority. It does appeal to a small number of radicals, though, and that idea will persist strongly.

The Islamic State has now been driven out of nearly all the territory it held in Syria and Iraq, but I expect the idea to survive, and new movements to appear later trying to make it real — a new Islamic state under a caliph, a powerful Islamic presence in the world as it is. It will come back.

QDaily: Is there any way out?

Eugene Rogan: In my view, people join extremist movements like ISIS because the international community and the Western world — Europe and the United States above all — are hostile to Islam and show Muslims no respect. They treat the Muslims who live among them unfairly, they oppose Islam, they hold it in prejudice. So Muslims who want to keep their faith and live with dignity feel the only way is to build an Islamic state.

The best way to solve the ISIS problem, I think, is for Western and Eastern countries to work together: to bring Muslim communities into their societies on more equal terms, to respect their religion and their values, and to treat them under equal law and equal civil rights. Get Muslim communities integrated into the countries where they live in a way that respects them, and the resentment will fade; no Muslim, and no radical, will want to take up arms against the society around him. But right now they feel disrespected and shut out. So I think it is very hard at the moment.

The integration of Muslims is not the problem of one region — it is a global problem. The last time I came to China was four years ago, for a conference on the Middle East in Shanghai. Many Chinese scholars were talking anxiously about the number of Chinese citizens who had joined the Islamic State movement. The number was small, but they saw it as a threat to China's security. China has a large Muslim population. China and the countries of Europe face much the same difficulty in integrating Muslims. It isn't only Britain, France, Germany, and Hungary — many European countries today do not portray Muslims as a community but see them as a problem inside their societies.

QDaily: Some argue that Europe's refugee crisis is, to some degree, the fault of the "victim" countries themselves, which carry a share of historical responsibility. What do you make of that?

Eugene Rogan: Europe now faces waves of refugees and migrants coming in across the Mediterranean and from eastern Turkey. I think several groups have to be told apart: sub-Saharan migrants crossing the Mediterranean from Libya; people fleeing economic hardship; people leaving home because of war, from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. European policy has been trying to deal with the rights of refugees, but it has not faced the wave of labor migrants who have a legitimate right to seek a better life elsewhere. Europe is still recovering from the financial crisis of 2008. Europeans feel their economic well-being threatened by tens of thousands of refugees and migrants, so many have developed an extreme nationalism and a fear of outsiders, which has made it easier for far-right parties to win European elections than at any time since the 1930s. That is worth watching.

I would say most Europeans still believe they have a duty to care about people fleeing conflict, people trying to keep their families out of danger. The EU has clear rules on how such refugees should be treated. The greater difficulty is the tens of thousands who risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean in search of a better life. The countries on the southern shore of the Mediterranean face very large challenges of their own. Their economies are still troubled and fragile. At the same time — have they met their humanitarian obligations to these vulnerable people? In hard economic times, have they listened to their own citizens asking for work and for social protection?

Secular nationalism is still a major force in today's Arab world

QDaily: A review in the Times Literary Supplement argues that the roots of the modern Middle East's problems are not as simple as borders — the deeper cause is the region's tangled relationship with modernity, and above all its stubborn attachment to a thousand-year-old, religion-based imperial legacy, which is why force is still the main instrument of political dialogue there. What do you think of that?

Eugene Rogan: Many Western analysts make the mistake of thinking that politics in the Arab world is driven by religious belief. Across several hundred years they seem to have missed the importance of 20th-century secular nationalism. Secular nationalism is still a major force in the Arab world today. I do think the borders of the Middle East expose serious problems. Over all four years of the war, Britain, France, and Russia negotiated their way to the borders we have now.

Then there was wartime alliance diplomacy. How do you divide up Ottoman land and still keep a balance of power with the other empires? Assuming they won the war and defeated the Ottomans, Britain, France, and Russia each wanted a share of Ottoman territory of roughly equal size, so that after the war the balance would hold and the empires would stay at peace with one another. The British acknowledged that Britain and France were allies during the war. But after it, France, Britain, and Russia became rivals.

So they were extremely keen to keep Europe at peace by balancing power among the European empires. Which meant they never thought of the Middle East as a region whose people had national ambitions of their own. It never occurred to them to let independent governments in the Middle East produce regional stability, because they imagined the Middle East would remain part of the empires that came out of the war — and that the arrangement would last a long time, that their empires would last a hundred years or more.

We know now that their empires lasted less than 30 years, but they did not know it then. For them, the European peace they had in mind meant a balance of power among their several empires. So they drew borders to show reciprocity between empires, rather than through a process of negotiation or any agreement with the people who had lived on that land for a very long time. The borders Europe left behind in the Middle East have produced a lasting state of tension and conflict.

Syria and Lebanon, for example, have been under strain for decades; Syria never truly accepted the separation of Lebanon from Greater Syria. Syria occupied Lebanon for as long as 30 years during the civil war, and was most reluctant to accept Lebanese independence — much as France was when it occupied Syria in 1920. We see it in the unending conflict between Palestinians and Israelis over how to divide the territory the British created in Palestine. And we see it again with the Kurds. Their national ambitions were never respected when Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey were created. Each of those countries holds a small Kurdish community fighting for a state of its own, in a struggle with its ruling state that goes back a long way.

So I think it is a mistake to describe local problems as some thousand-year religious preoccupation. What I do believe is that nationalist forces, secular values, and the imperial legacy of borders were used to achieve a balance among the European empires, not to protect the people who lived there.

QDaily: On modern Middle Eastern history, the book Chinese readers know best is probably the journalist Scott Anderson's Lawrence in Arabia. But from what I've read it is quite contested — some say it overplays one man's legend, and that some of the history is shaky. I'm curious how you see that, and how you rate the book.

Eugene Rogan: I like Scott Anderson's book; it's a pleasure to read. He writes it through four formidable characters, and they cover every side — Americans, British, Germans. Their fates overlap across different parts of the war in the Middle East. As a piece of narrative construction, I think it makes for very engaging reading.

But that is not how I personally wanted to come at the war in the Middle East. I really wanted to avoid focusing on political leaders as far as I could. I was more interested in writing a social history of what ordinary soldiers and civilians went through. The war they were caught up in brought violence and destruction on a scale never seen before. In many ways it changed, or destroyed, their lives.

So I tried to avoid emphasizing Lawrence of Arabia. He is a very interesting figure, and he has inspired a great many books, but to me it would be wrong to make too much of him. He plays a part in my book — placing him in the history matters — but that doesn't mean he drove the history.

So the structure of my book is about how the tides of war shifted and how people were swept into them, rather than about great men, whose experiences and mistakes have in many ways been overplayed. I think there is another way of presenting the First World War. I tried to present it from the position of all the combatants — Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and the rest.

World War I completely transformed the Middle East, and it will always be remembered that way

QDaily: One view holds that the Turkish government keeps moving closer to the Ottoman legacy and further from Kemal Atatürk's, and that Erdoğan's rule grows steadily more authoritarian. Do you agree? Any thoughts on Turkey's present and future you'd like to share?

Eugene Rogan: I think Turkey under President Erdoğan is quite distinctive. I don't think it has much at all to do with the Ottoman past. Many analysts have drawn the comparison because Erdoğan has helped restore Islamic values to the Turkish government, which is a major change from before. Beginning with Kemal — the father of the Turkish nation — Turkey insisted on keeping religion and public life apart in a particular way, making the country a secular republic.

You could say that Turkey under Kemal was very secular and did not give enough respect to the Islamic culture most Turks held. That may well be what encouraged many people to support this kind of politics — Erdoğan, and the more Islamic-leaning parties that came before the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in modern Turkish history. I'm thinking of the Justice Party before Erdoğan came to power, or the other Islamic parties that appeared in the 1990s. When they gave Islamic values back to Turkish political life, some people also read it as a restoration of the Ottoman past, but it wasn't. It is contemporary Islamic politics, not Ottoman Islamic culture.

Another reason people link Erdoğan with neo-Ottomanism, I think, is Turkey's role in the Arab Spring in 2011. Many of the Arab Spring revolutions were led by the Muslim Brotherhood. The movement began in Egypt, but there were significant movements elsewhere too. Tunisia, Syria, and Libya were led by the Brotherhood, and Palestine by Hamas, which is very like the Brotherhood. And Brotherhood politics closely resembled the politics of Turkey's AKP; they saw the Islamic democracy Erdoğan championed in Turkey as the model they wanted at home. Islamic parties could stand in democratic elections alongside secular ones. And like Erdoğan, if they won, they could govern.

At the time, Erdoğan, then prime minister, and President Abdullah Gül visited Egypt and other countries. The Turkish prime minister had great influence in encouraging the revolutionaries of the Arab Spring, especially those tied to the Brotherhood. So during the Arab Spring, Turkey's influence over the Arab world was so great that it looked like a revival of the leading role Turkey had played in Ottoman times.

But after 2013, when Egypt's military coup overthrew President Mohamed Morsi and destroyed the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the Brotherhood's influence — already fading ever since the 2011 revolution — was wiped out entirely. In the end, Turkey's influence in Egypt was erased completely; it has none left. Egyptian President Sisi adopted policies deeply hostile to Erdoğan's Turkey.

Many people, I think, saw Erdoğan's authoritarianism emerge after the Arab Spring was over. In Turkey, many people — secular Turks above all — describe Erdoğan as a sultan. They mean the enormous presidential palace he built in Ankara. But they are not praising him with the word; it is sarcasm, a criticism. He looks to them like a man dragging Turkey back to the failed Ottoman past. Using Islamic culture to try to become an authoritarian ruler is exactly what the Ottoman sultans did. His critics believe it has damaged Turkish democracy and Kemal's values. A great many people in Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir agree with that criticism deeply.

So I think there is very little in Erdoğan's politics that is genuinely comparable to the Ottoman past. The moment when Turkey dominated the Arab world is over. For many Turks, comparing Erdoğan to the Ottoman past is a criticism of him, not a compliment.

(Note: according to press reports, Erdoğan's presidential palace is called Ak Saray. Work began in 2011 and finished in 2014. It is the largest palace built anywhere in the world in more than a century, with a floor area of 150,000 square meters — roughly 30 times the size of the White House. It cost more than US$600 million and has 1,100 rooms, 250 of them for Erdoğan's family.)

QDaily: 2018 was the centenary of the end of the First World War. Looking back over that century, beyond what you've already said, what strikes you most? How do you see the war's effect on world history, and what can we learn from it?

Eugene Rogan: That's a big question. Different regions caught up in the conflict feel very differently about it. Every part of the world had a different war, so each commemorates it differently. We've talked a lot about how the war changed the Middle East. Those changes were built on British and French state institutions and imperial rule, which are themselves an important legacy for the Arab world.

What interests me, though, is that the Arab world does not really commemorate the First World War. Tens of thousands of Arabs took part in it, and many Arab countries served as battlefields, but can you expect people in the Arab world to commemorate this war? To them it feels like someone else's. It was not their choice; it was imposed on them. A hundred years on, they have not reflected on it much.

In Turkey it matters a great deal. I think the Turkish government tries to use the commemoration of the war to glorify Turkey's success and prove it. Which is interesting in Turkey's case, because President Erdoğan is trying to surpass Kemal's legacy and prove himself the greater leader. So he does not glorify the battles that made Kemal famous, such as Gallipoli. He tries instead to glorify battles Kemal had no part in — the Ottoman victory at the Siege of Kut al-Amara in Iraq, for example. That is a battle Turkey has tried to celebrate together with Iraqis, but Iraqis have shown little enthusiasm. And inside Turkey many people don't even know about the victory at Kut, so it doesn't work very well there either.

But Turkey always honors and commemorates the soldiers who died at Gallipoli. The war Ottoman soldiers fought was not really a war for their own rights; it was a war that ended in the empire's breakup. It was also, of course, Turkey's war of independence. Between 1919 and 1922 they drove foreign armies — French, Italian, and Greek in particular — off the territory of the Turkish Republic. So in Turkey the experience of the First World War has, oddly, been folded into the experience of the War of Independence. It reads like one continuous struggle that turned a declining Ottoman Empire into a successful Turkish Republic.

So now, 100 years since the end of the conflict, the Middle East can reflect on this war in different ways. But it's very clear that World War I completely transformed the Middle East, and it will always be remembered that way.

The cover image shows Ottoman camel troops, via: Wikipedia; the long cover image shows the victorious Ottoman army being presented with a regimental flag after the First Battle of Gaza in March 1917.