The Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912)
Tags: Libia, History, Italy, Ottoman Empire, War

The Italo-Turkish War (1911–1912)

And how Omar Mukhtar fought the Italians for 20 years Vidar Follow Feb 2 · 4 min read

Italians take Turks under fire in Tripoli, 1911

The Italo-Turkish War, also known as the Tripolitanian War, broke out between Italy and the Ottoman Empire on 29 September 1911. The Tripolitanian War is mostly a bad memory in Italy’s imperialist history, but the consequences of the war are still being felt today in Libya, one of the most unstable countries of the world. Where the Second Libyan Civil War is raging. The Italo-Turkish war also prompted the decline of the Ottoman Empire which at that time was called ‘the sick man of Europe’.

A look at what went before

At the end of the nineteenth century, Italy was left with a sour feeling after the Berlin Conference. The major European powers — such as France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, among others — had largely divided up the African continent between themselves, while Italy, except for Eritrea and part of present-day Somalia, was left hungry. The young Italy, which had become a unitary state only a few decades earlier, had the dream of building its own colonial empire. The Italian government had tried to seize Tunisia sometime before but France had put a stop to this by forcing Muhammad III as-Sadiq, the Bey of Tunis, to sign the Treaty of Bardo. This made Tunisia a de facto French protectorate.

Giovanni Giolitti

Italy turned its attention to the islands of the Dodecanese, which belonged to the Ottoman Empire, as well as to Cyrenaica, on the other side of the Mediterranean, and Tripolitania and Fezzan in the southern part of the country, which together constitutes roughly today’s Libya. That Italy aspired to precisely these areas was not so surprising. The once-mighty Ottoman Empire had been weakened by successive wars with Russia and the autocratic reign of terror of Sultan Abdülhamit II for quite some time and, according to the Italians, would offer little resistance in the event of a military invasion.

The intrigues reached their climax in July 1902, when Italy and France secretly concluded an agreement in which France recognised the Italian claims to the Ottoman territories in exchange for a similar acceptance by Italy of the French territorial claims to Morocco. When, in the spring of 1911, France seized power from the Moroccan Sultan Moulay Abdelhafid and the Sultanate subsequently became a French protectorate, Italian Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti (1842–1928) did not hesitate to declare war on the Ottoman Empire on 29 September that same year.

The Italo-Turkish War

Surrender of a Turkish garrison to the Italian General Ameglio, near Psithos, 1912

Shortly after the declaration of war, an Italian force under the command of General Carlo Caneva invaded Tripolitania. It soon became clear that the Ottoman army was no match for the Italian invasion force, which was not only numerically much stronger, but also had armoured cars and even aircraft at its disposal with which the Turkish positions were mercilessly fired upon. Only three weeks later, Tripoli and Benghazi fell into Italian hands and in early November 1911, the Italian Prime Minister declared the area annexed.

The Turks, however, had no intention of giving up part of their empire and, with the help of local Bedouin tribesmen, began a guerrilla war. For a while, Caneva’s troops looked in dire straits, but when Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Montenegro also declared war on the Ottoman Empire a little later, the matter was soon settled and the Turks were forced to withdraw from their overseas colony to meet the threat on the Balkans.

In October 1912, the Turkish Sultan Mehmet V (1844–1918) signed a peace treaty in Ouchy, Switzerland, near Lausanne, by which he renounced further claims to Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and Fezzan and transferred its authority to Italy, which had meanwhile also annexed Rhodes and the other islands of the Dodecanese.

Resistance from an unexpected quarter

Omar Mukhtar in 1931

However, the withdrawal of the Turkish troops from their overseas colony did not mean the end of the struggle. Several Bedouin tribes had united under the leadership of the charismatic Omar Mukhtar (1858–1931), who soon became the symbol of resistance against the new colonial occupiers. Mukhtar would eventually fight the Italians for almost twenty years until he was captured by the Fascist troops of Italian general Rodolfo Graziani in 1931, and after a brief show trial on Mussolini’s orders, was sentenced to death by a noose and publicly hanged on 16 September.

In April 1981, a feature film about the last years of Mukhtar’s life and his bitter struggle against the Italian occupiers was released under the title The Lion of the Desert, starring Anthony Quinn and Oliver Reed. (Detail: the film, which had great success in the Arab countries, was banned in Italy and only aired on pay-TV for the first time in 2009.)