Battle of the Camel
In the ensuing hostilities between Ali and the largely Qurayshi partisans of A'isha, Marwan sided with the latter. He fought alongside A'isha's forces at the Battle of the Camel near Basra in December 656. The historian Leone Caetani presumed that Marwan was the organizer of A'isha's strategy there. The modern historian Laura Veccia Vaglieri notes that while Caetani's "theory is attractive", there is no information in the traditional sources to confirm it and should Marwan have been A'isha's war adviser "he operated so discreetly that the sources hardly speak of his actions."