The Fight at Bir Bilal

In the first months of 1923, with the colonial pressure renewed under Mussolini, the Italian army in Cyrenaica under General Luigi Bongiovanni set out to extend the occupied zone south into the Sahara. The method was direct operations against the Bedouin population combined with forts built in the oasis towns, and the declared object was to break the Senussi presence in the southern desert at the root. For the resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ this was the most dangerous thing the Italians had yet attempted, because the southern desert was the depth the fighters withdrew into when reprisals came. Take the wells and there is nowhere to withdraw to. In the spring he decided to meet the expanding columns rather than let them settle.

Nothing the resistance did in these years was possible without the Bedouin who lived along the routes. Movements were reported as they happened, expedition routes were passed on before they were used, and the shape of Italian supply was known to the fighters in a way Italian intelligence never matched on the other side. It was met with reprisal: public executions of suspected informants, and collective punishment of whole villages where information was thought to have passed. That price is part of this engagement and not a footnote to it. In the late spring an Italian column moved on Bir Bilal — about three hundred men under Colonel Mezzetti: Italian marines, Eritrean askari and local auxiliaries in Italian service, with a few guns. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ knew it was coming before it started.

He gathered about five hundred Cyrenaican fighters from several tribal confederations — the Awaqir, the Bara’asa and neighbours bound to the Senussi cause — armed with the Mauser rifles the Senussi networks had been acquiring for years and mounted in the adwar units the resistance fought in. The plan was the one he had been refining for months: no frontal meeting with a column that had artillery, but flank attacks and sudden full attacks that wore the column down before anything was decided. The ground was chosen to make that possible. The sand hills around Bir Bilal gave men who knew them somewhere to come from and gave the guns nothing to fire at.

The column was on the march toward the well, strung out in a valley, when the first attack came down out of the sand hills at first light. It took immediate casualties and had to regroup into a defensive position before it could use what it had. That first hour is the whole design: the Italians were fully armed and could not bring their armament to bear on men who were already among them and moving.

Through the following hours the fighters came at the column from several directions in turn, without ever standing still long enough to be shot at properly. By midday Italian losses had mounted — several tens killed and a larger number wounded, by the account the article follows — and Colonel Mezzetti decided to withdraw north toward the Italian positions. The withdrawal was harried for days afterwards, and the column reached the northern posts exhausted.

Bir Bilal did not decide the war and was never going to. What it did was hold up the Italian expansion into the southern desert and confirm, to the fighters and to the tribes watching them, that a column could be stopped. In the zawiyas afterwards Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ preached the outcome as the protection of Allah ﷻ rather than as the skill of his fighters, and called for renewed discipline for what was coming. What was coming was not another column. Within a few years the Italian answer to exactly this problem would be aircraft, the wire, and the camps: the escalation that ends this period. None of that is on this map, because none of it was at this well.