The war brought the Ottoman Empire crashing down after more than five
hundred years. Stretching from southeastern Europe to the Arabian peninsula,
it now faced threats from within and without. Russian operations in
the Caucasus in 1915 were matched by the British assault at Gallipoli and
British offensives from the Persian Gulf toward Baghdad. In 1917 a revolt
of the Arab population brought the war home as the entire Arabian peninsula
threatened to break away from the control of Istanbul. The revolt, which
included the efforts of the charismatic British leader T. E. Lawrence, was
doubly dangerous because it corresponded with General Edmund Allenby's
offensive through Palestine toward Damascus, and from there toward the
heart of the empire.
The subsequent collapse of the Ottoman Empire, along with the West's
occupadon of Iran, was, in the words of historian Bernard Lewis, "the
culmination of the retreat of Islam before the advancing west."9 Under the
new mandate system established by the League of Nations, Britain and
France took the lion's share of the Ottoman Empire's former Arab lands,
such as Syria and Iraq, as well as establishing a home for Jews in Palestine,
while an independent country emerged in Saudi Arabia. The strains ofWorld
War II led to the end of direct European control of these regions, but the
area has remained one of the world's principal trouble spots. The degree of
stability maintained by the Ottomans has never been reestablished.
World History
