The Battle of Bir Bilal

In the previous article we followed the Cyrenaican resistance between 1913 and 1923: how the supreme leadership of the Senussi brotherhood passed to Sayyid Muhammad Idris al-Sanusi ﵀, how temporary peace accords were concluded in 1920 and in 1921, and how Italian colonial pressure was pressed forward again from 1922 onward under the Fascist movement. We also saw how Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was appointed military leader of the Cyrenaican resistance in 1923, and how in the months that followed he worked the guerrilla strategy of the adwar into a coherent system. This article follows what came of it: the Battle of Bir Bilal in the Cyrenaican Saharan zone, on 10 June 1923, where Cyrenaican Bedouin fighters and an Italian armored column faced one another in an encounter that would confirm the spiritual strength of the resistance. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ held no command in the field that day, for he was the supreme commander of the resistance and not the commander of this camp; that is precisely why Bir Bilal is the proof that his system worked where he did not stand.

The background of the battle

The preceding months of skirmishes

The months before Bir Bilal were not quiet months in the southern Saharan zone. The Italian expeditionary columns sent there covered their routes under continual contact with the Cyrenaican fighters, and what they met was nowhere an open pitched battle but the tactics that Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ had worked out in those months: small adwar units that fell upon a caravan and disappeared back into the country, ambushes at the mountain posts the Italians could occupy but could not defend, and a sustained struggle over information in which Italian planning was crossed again and again.

Those months were the schooling for what followed. The fighters who served under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ learned the tactics not from a manual but from repetition, and at the same time they grew used to the prospect of a larger encounter in which the resistance would show its full strength to the Italian colonial authorities.

The Italian expansion campaign of 1923

In the first months of 1923 the Italian army in Cyrenaica, under the command of General Luigi Bongiovanni and carried by the colonial pressure renewed under Mussolini, opened a campaign to widen the occupied zone and to establish Italian rule as far as the southern Cyrenaican Saharan zone. That campaign worked with two hands: military operations aimed directly at the local Bedouin population, and the building of forts in the oasis towns that lay strategically well. The intention was not concealed, for the Senussi presence in the southern desert was to be broken at its roots.

For the resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ this was a dangerous reckoning. The southern Saharan zone was the vast hinterland into which the armed fighters could withdraw when the Italians retaliated, and whoever subdued that zone cut off the Senussi movement’s room to move. In the spring of 1923 Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ therefore decided upon a counter-operation, in which the Italian expansion columns would be halted with the means of the guerrilla.

The location of the well

Bir Bilal was a well oasis in the vast Saharan zone, forty-two kilometers southwest of Ajdabiya, which itself lies about one hundred and fifty kilometers south of Benghazi, and it counted among the strategically most important places of the southern Cyrenaican desert. The caravans that crossed the region found water and rest there, and for the local Bedouin population the well was a fixed point in the seasonal migration routes. That was precisely why it was a target for the Italian expansion campaign, for whoever occupied Bir Bilal held a vast stretch of the southern Saharan zone in his hands.

On 10 June 1923 an Italian armored column advanced in the direction of Bir Bilal, led by Melli and with the armored cars under the command of Telger. It was made up of Italian marines, colonial tirailleurs from Eritrea, and local Muslim collaborators who had accepted Italian colonial service, and it brought with it ample supplies of ammunition and the equipment customary for a Saharan military undertaking. What gave it its character were the armored cars, and it is from their number that the battle carries its second name in the Arabic tradition: al-Karahib, the armored cars.

The local Bedouin informants

Without the local Bedouin informants the resistance could not have conducted its operations at all. The Bedouin population of the Cyrenaican Saharan zone and of the Jebel Akhdar kept the armed fighters informed: Italian troop movements were reported at once, the routes an expedition was likely to take were passed on, and word about the arrangement of the Italian logistics came in from people who saw it with their own eyes.

For the Italian colonial authorities that network was a problem they repeatedly tried to close by force. Suspected informants were executed in public, and wherever a suspicion of informant activity arose an entire village was punished. That repression laid a human cost upon the Bedouin population which would echo through all the years of the resistance.

The Senussi response

The resistance had followed the Italian expedition through its network of local informants while it was still in preparation, and Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ set his counter-operation against it as supreme commander. Field command lay with Salih al-Atyush ﵀, who within the system of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ led the camp of the Awaqir, and beside him stood al-Fadil al-Mahashhish ﵀ and Koja Abdullah al-Sudani ﵀, who led the camp of the Magharibah. The fighters they gathered came from various tribal affiliations, among them the Awaqir, the Bara’asa and several neighboring tribes that had bound themselves in brotherhood to the Senussi cause. They carried the Mauser rifles acquired through the Senussi networks in the preceding years, and, with the mobility of their horses, they were organized into the adwar units for which the encounter ahead would be the first great test.

The approach followed the guerrilla line that Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ had laid down in his earlier deliberations and that his commanders applied on their own authority in the field. The Bedouin fighters would not attack the Italian column head on but wear it down with flanking attacks and sudden full assaults, so that the decisive fight would fall only once the enemy was already worn out. The battle site in the sand hills near Bir Bilal was chosen for that reason, since there local knowledge and quick mobility weighed more than firepower.

The battle itself

The encounter fell on 10 June 1923, a date still remembered in detail in Bedouin oral tradition, and it ran as an alternation of sudden guerrilla attacks and cavalry charges. In the early morning, while the Italian column was on the march toward Bir Bilal, the Cyrenaican fighters came down upon it in a valley from the neighboring sand hills. The Italians were armed but taken by surprise; they suffered losses at once and had to regroup their position in a defensive movement.

In the hours that followed, several further attacks came in, each from a different side, with the Bedouin fighters never exposing themselves to the Italian firepower. Melli was killed and Telger with him, and once the command had fallen away the cohesion fell out of the column as well: it was not driven back but destroyed. About a hundred vehicles were left burning in the sand, and into Cyrenaican hands passed twenty-five guns and machine guns and a thousand serviceable rifles.

The care of the wounded

The fighters wounded at Bir Bilal and in the engagements around it were taken into the care of the local Senussi community. The ulama members brought in their knowledge of the classical Islamic tibb al-nabawi medicine, while local herbal healers applied the Cyrenaican Bedouin herbal tradition to the treatment of the wounded. Those in a serious condition were carried by the Senussi brotherhood to remote safe places in the Jebel Akhdar, where a longer course of treatment was possible.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ personally that care was a spiritual responsibility, and he laid it before his fighters repeatedly in his Friday sermons. He visited the wounded where they were being nursed, he led communal prayers for their recovery, and he gave spiritual guidance to the mortally wounded who would succumb to their martyrdom.

The spiritual meaning of the victory

For the Cyrenaican resistance the outcome of Bir Bilal confirmed the Senussi strategy that Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ had set up in the preceding months, and it confirmed that strategy precisely because he was not there himself: an armored column had been destroyed by commanders of his own camps, and the Italian expansion in the southern Saharan zone stood still. On that fact the shared morale of the phases that followed could be built.

In the Friday sermons he delivered in the local zawiyas in the weeks after the battle, Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ ascribed the victory not to the military skill of his fighters but to the protection of Allah ﷻ, who sustained the Senussi cause. He called his community to a renewed spiritual discipline in view of what the years ahead would demand, and he urged it toward the shared Muslim unity in which the strength of the resistance would be held high.

The Italian reaction

In Benghazi and in Rome, Bir Bilal was a military and a political embarrassment. The losses were more considerable than those of the preceding Cyrenaican operations, and the reports that went to Rome described a pronounced Cyrenaican resistance, in terms that prepared the way for a harder colonial course. In the autumn of 1923 the Italian high command revised its strategy, and the step-by-step expansion followed until then gave way to a more aggressive use of military operations against the Cyrenaican resistance.

That revision was worked out between 1924 and 1926. The Italian military apparatus in Cyrenaica grew by 1926 to more than thirty thousand men, forts and logistical posts rose in the Jebel Akhdar zone, and preparation was made for the strategy of starvation that would reach its full, tragic form only years later: under General Pietro Badoglio, governor of Libya from January 1929 to November 1933, and under General Rodolfo Graziani, vice-governor of Cyrenaica from 1930 to 1934.

The testimonies of the survivors

What happened at Bir Bilal has been preserved in the oral tradition of the Cyrenaican Bedouin who survived it and who passed their testimonies on to modern historians in the decades that followed. The principal collector of them was E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who set them down in his anthropological work The Sanusi of Cyrenaica of 1949. Libyan historians have assembled further collections in the post-colonial period.

From those testimonies it appears that the outcome of the battle was received in Cyrenaican memory as a spiritual confirmation. The local fighters remembered the courage of Salih al-Atyush ﵀ and of the men who lay with him among the sand hills, and they placed their own account within the leadership that Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ exercised over the resistance as a whole. On that tradition of witness rests the image of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ as the Lion of the Desert, which outlived the years of the resistance and has gone on living in the shared Cyrenaican memory.

The Cyrenaican cavalry

The Cyrenaican cavalry was the military backbone of the resistance, and it brought the Bedouin culture of horsemanship and the tactics of the guerrilla together in a single method. The horsemanship tradition of the Cyrenaican Bedouin had grown over centuries, with breeds of Cyrenaican horses bred for the Saharan and the mountainous conditions.

An ordinary Cyrenaican rider carried a Mauser rifle acquired through the Senussi networks, a Cyrenaican saber from the local craft tradition, a supply of ammunition in a bandolier, and the further pieces of equipment the Sahara demanded. Equipped in that way he was a military unit in himself, one that challenged the Italian colonial troops in mobility and in firepower.

The training of the young fighters

Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ trained the young Cyrenaican fighters himself. The training covered the practice of horsemanship skills, instruction in the Cyrenaican guerrilla tactics, spiritual formation in the Senussi discipline, and the building of the brotherhood within which the adwar units would function.

On that training rested a resistance that could be carried on for a further series of years. For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ personally it was moreover a spiritual joy, for in the boys he drilled he saw the continuity of the Senussi tradition assured in the next generation.

The Italian methods of punishment in preparation

The methods of punishment that would be developed under General Graziani together defined the Italian colonial conduct that followed: the construction of concentration camps, the collective punishment of villages that stood under suspicion of supporting the resistance, the execution of local notables, and the laying of border lines.

For the Cyrenaican Muslim population they meant a human catastrophe that would strike Bedouin society at its foundations. Between 1923 and 1931, by modern estimates, about a third to a half of the Cyrenaican Bedouin population perished, a tragedy that modern historiography increasingly names a form of colonial genocide.

The Italian air force

To that conduct was added the use of the Italian air force, which bombed the local Bedouin villages and the resistance sites in the Jebel Akhdar zone and eroded the Cyrenaican resistance step by step. The bombers were of a type that had come into development in the first decades of the twentieth century, and against what they inflicted the ordinary Bedouin population had no answer.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in his leadership the air force was a strategic challenge to which the Cyrenaican tactics had to be adapted, and he set down in instructions how resistance activity was to be carried out under that threat from then on.

The consequences for the Italian position

For the Italian colonial position, Bir Bilal issued in a strategic reorientation. The authorities in Benghazi and in Tripoli received the reports on the expedition that had been sent to the oasis, and the internal deliberation that followed turned on the course Italian colonial strategy in Cyrenaica ought to take. That course shifted: the method of step-by-step expansion with expeditionary columns gave way to military concentration and systematic execution.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in his leadership that reorientation meant that the years ahead would be lived through under a harder Italian colonial conduct. He discussed with his naib leaders what form the Cyrenaican strategy should take in that period, and he developed the adaptations by which the resistance could be sustained for a further series of years.

Toward the escalation of the conflict

We have considered the Battle of Bir Bilal as the confirmation of the guerrilla strategy that Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ had set up after his appointment as military leader of the Cyrenaican resistance. We saw how the fighters under Salih al-Atyush ﵀ destroyed an Italian armored column, how the outcome of the battle spiritually confirmed the morale of the resistance, and how the Italian reaction took the form of a strategic revision that would set the resistance a challenge in the period that followed. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ fought his own engagement that spring at Bir al-Ghabi, on 23 April 1923, 5 Ramadan 1342, about eighty kilometers south of Tobruk, on the way back from a meeting with Sayyid Muhammad Idris al-Sanusi ﵀, where Italian armored cars were likewise destroyed. How the conflict escalated between 1924 and 1927, and how the Italian strategy was worked out into persecution and starvation, is the subject of the next article.

Sources

• Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, vol. 2, Mondadori (1988), pp. 86–168.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Clarendon Press (1949), pp. 186–214.
• Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, State University of New York Press (2009), pp. 248–294.
• Nicola Labanca, La guerra italiana per la Libia, 1911–1931, il Mulino (2012), pp. 198–248.
• Enzo Santarelli et al., Omar al-Mukhtar e la riconquista fascista della Libia, Marzorati (1981), pp. 334–376.
• Anna Baldinetti, The Origins of the Libyan Nation, Routledge (2010), pp. 268–298.
• Eric Salerno, Genocidio in Libia: Le atrocità nascoste dell’avventura coloniale italiana, 1911–1931, manifestolibri (2005), pp. 14–86.
• Habib Wadaa al-Hesnawi, Fascist Colonial Policies Toward the Arabic-Speaking Inhabitants of Libya, 1911–1943 (1988), pp. 124–168.