Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Mahdist War [b] (Arabic: الثورة المهدية, romanized: ath-Thawra al-Mahdiyya; 1881–1899) was a war between the Mahdist Sudanese, led by Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdullah, who had proclaimed himself the "Mahdi" of Islam (the "Guided One"), and the forces of the Khedivate of Egypt, initially, and later the forces of Britain.
The Battle of Omdurman was fought during the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan between a British–Egyptian expeditionary force commanded by British Commander-in-Chief major general Horatio Herbert Kitchener and a Sudanese army of the Mahdist State, led by Abdallahi ibn Muhammad (the Khalifa), the successor to the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad.
The Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan in 1896–1899 was a reconquest of territory lost by the Khedives of Egypt in 1884–1885 during the Mahdist War. The British had failed to organise an orderly withdrawal of the Egyptian Army from Sudan , and the defeat at Khartoum left only Suakin and Equatoria under Egyptian control after 1885.
During World War I, the British invaded and incorporated Darfur into the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan in 1916. This policy was internalised within Sudan itself, with the British determined to exacerbate differences and frictions between Sudan's numerous different ethnic groups.
The British Prime Minister, William Gladstone, and his War Secretary, Lord Hartington, did not want British troops to become involved in Sudan. If Egypt fought the war itself, they were concerned that the expense would prevent Egypt from paying the interest on its extensive debts to Britain (and France).
The British, meanwhile, were engaged in the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of Sudan, moving upriver from Egypt. On 18 September a flotilla of five British gunboats arrived at the isolated Fashoda fort. They carried 1,500 British, Egyptian and Sudanese soldiers, led by Sir Herbert Kitchener and including Lieutenant-Colonel Horace Smith-Dorrien. [7]
Southern Sudan's remote and undeveloped provinces—Equatoria, Bahr al Ghazal, and Upper Nile—received little official attention until after World War I, except for efforts to suppress tribal warfare and the slave trade. The British justified this policy by claiming that the south was not ready for exposure to the modern world.
Before the declaration of war, the British detected increases in the number of Italian troops on the Sudan border and assumed that if the Italians attacked Sudan, the objectives would be the capital Khartoum, 300 mi (480 km) to the west of the Eritrean frontier, Atbara, the junction of railways to Khartoum, 200 mi (320 km) from the border and ...