The 19th Century ‘Islamic State’

In the 1880s, a puritanical Islamic fundamentalist movement arose in the Sudan, under the banner of the Mahdi — The Expected One, the Redeemer of Islam. The Mahdi’s forces swept across the desert like a scorching windstorm. His conquering sword drove everything before it, routing a Western-trained Egyptian army sent to quell the movement. The Mahdi’s forces took the city of Khartoum, slaughtered its garrison, and beheaded a famous British general. For more than a decade, even after its founder’s death from typhus, the Mahdist State reigned supreme across thousands of square miles of desert and the upper Nile. Then it was utterly destroyed.

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At that time, Egypt was part of the decaying Ottoman Empire. In the interests of protecting the new Suez Canal and to collect on massive Egyptian debt, the British Empire had intervened heavily in Egypt’s affairs, including assiduous efforts to suppress the slave trade in the Sudan, which was under Egyptian control.

In 1880, Muhammad Ahmad ibn as Sayyid Abd Alla, a charismatic mystic, arose in the Sudan, preaching the expulsion of the corrupt “Turk” and westerners and a return to the purity of medieval Islam. Sound familiar?

Muhammad proclaimed himself the Mahdi — a messiah— and declared jihad. Thousands of “Ansar” (helpers) flocked to his banner, armed with spears and swords. With this medieval armament, the Ansar defeated two British-advised Egyptian armies — well armed and trained but with terrible morale — and captured their guns. Sound familiar?

In 1884, they laid siege to the city of Khartoum, at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile. A British relief expedition arrived too late. The Ansar had stormed into the city and butchered its garrison. The British governor-general, General Charles Gordon, famous as “Chinese Gordon” for his mercenary leadership of a faction in the terrible civil wars in 1860s China, was stabbed to death at his headquarters. The Ansar beheaded him and presented the grisly trophy to the Mahdi.

The Mahdi declared an Islamic state with its capital on the west side of the Nile near Khartoum at Omdurman. The Mahdiyah operated under Sharia law along military lines. When Muhammed died of typhus six months after taking Khartoum, his three deputies took over the fledgling state. Abdallahi ibn Muhammad ultimately took over leadership, naming himself the Khalifa (successor to the Mahdi). Abdallahi successfully held off an Ethiopian army, but failed when he attempted to invade Egypt proper. By the 1890s, the Mahdiyah was under severe economic strain. And the British were coming.

The British government was reluctant to commit the blood and treasure it would require to reconquer the Sudan (sound familiar?) , but in 1896, General Sir Herbert Horatio Kitchener headed up the Nile to sort out the Mahdiyah once and for all. Kitchener defeated a Mahdist force at the Battle of Atbara River on April 8, 1898, and Abdallahi fell back to Omdurman. On September 2, 1898, Kitchener’s force of 8,200 British troops and 17,600 Egyptian and Sudenese soldiers faced off with 53,000 Mahdist warriors. Among the British cavalry was a young Winston Churchill, who would vividly recount the battle in “The River War.”

Deploying overwhelming firepower — Maxim guns and Lee-Metford .303 rifles — Kitchener’s force mowed down the army of the Mahdiyah. Taking casualties of 48 dead and about 400 wounded, the British/Egyptian Army killed 12,000 Mahdist fighters, wounded 13,000 and captured 5,000 more, inflicting about 90 percent casualties on the enemy. The Mahdiyah was utterly crushed. Mop-up operations took a year, during which Abdallahi was hunted down and killed by British cavalry scouts.

The Islamic State of the Sudan was no more.

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What lessons can be learned from the story of the rise and fall of the 19^th Century “Islamic State”? Gleaning such lessons is a dicey business, for while there are many obvious parallels, much has changed since the 19^th Century. The current version of the puritanical Islamic state has global reach that the Mahdi could only fantasize about (and he did). Today’s jihadis, obviously, have the capacity to strike the West in its homelands in a way that was impossible for the forces of the Mahdi.

And destroying ISIS, the so-called “Islamic State,” is not as straight-forward as a colonial army marching to its capital, engaging it in a decisive battle and mowing down its fighters with vastly superior firepower.

Is it?

Some strategists argue for just that — a concerted assault by several thousand American and allied troops on the ISIS capital of Raqaa, Syria, backed by tactical airstrikes the ISIS fighters have little means to counter. In Iraq, the Kurds would need to take Mosul, again backed by massive tactical airstrikes.

Such an assault on the “Islamic State” would break its power, these strategists argue, and diminish its appeal to foreign fighters, who are drawn to the cachet of a winning team.

Skeptics argue that such action would merely “give ISIS what it wants”: an apocalyptic battle between the West and Islam. Certainly that’s how ISIS propaganda would spin such an assault. But Muslims have suffered more than anyone at the hands of this murderous cult, and it is doubtful that many would see an effort to crush it as an assault on their faith itself.

Such an assault would be vastly expensive, and would generate casualties, both for our forces and for civilians caught in a hellish war zone. Those are factors that should give planners pause.

But what is the alternative? The official U.S. strategy of “degrade and ultimately destroy” has not noticeably hampered ISIS. Of late, President Obama has walked degrade and destroy back to mere containment. He is understandably reluctant to become further embroiled to yet another war in the Middle East fraught with vast potential for unforeseen consequences and great expense in blood and treasure.

But if ISIS does, in fact, seek to draw the West into apocalyptic confrontation, they will continue to up the ante in their atrocities. At what point will the West decide that there is no option but to destroy ISIS?

Another argument is that even a significant military defeat won’t destroy this resilient ideological movement, that “you can’t bomb an idea.” Destroy ISIS and another, similar entity — with a greater motive for revenge — arises to take its place.

Perhaps. It’s not like there are clear, unambiguous choices to be made here. All options are bad. The question is, which bad option has the best chance of being most effective? Can the world bring the “Islamic State” to meet its Omdurman?

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Editor’s note: I’d like to turn your attention to an excellent blog post from FP reader Pat at Lex Anteinternet:

Taking them at their word. The war aims of evil

Strangely, the West continually fails to take aggressive, radical ideological movements’ own words seriously. When Osama bin Laden declared war on the U.S. — he meant it. The Nazis meant it when Hitler proclaimed that world war would bring destruction of the Jews. ISIS means what it says when it calls for an end-times battle.