The End of the Struggle

In the previous article we followed the Italian colonial repression in Cyrenaica in the years between 1924 and 1929: the strategic revision under Mussolini, the appointment of General Rodolfo Graziani as supreme military commander, the concentration camps that cost approximately forty thousand Cyrenaican Bedouin their lives, and the construction of the Cyrenaican-Egyptian border line, which substantially narrowed the room in which the resistance could move. This article follows the end of Umar al-Mukhtar’s ﵀ military activities in 1931, his capture in an Italian ambush in September of that year, and the consequences that will find their place in the next article.

The exhaustion of the resistance

In the spring and summer of 1931 the Cyrenaican resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ stood in a difficult strategic position, and it was being pressed from several sides at once. The support of the local Bedouin population, on which the resistance had rested through all those years, had been broken down by the deportation of approximately one hundred thousand Cyrenaican Bedouin to the concentration camps in the eastern sand plains. The border line with Egypt, with its barbed wire and its fortified forts, cut the fighters off from the resting place that friendly Egyptian territory had offered them until then. And the Italian troop strength in Cyrenaica, which by 1931 had grown to more than one hundred thousand men, raised the operational pressure on the resistance steadily further.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ himself, seventy-three years old in 1931 and worn down by a life spent largely in the Saharan zone, this meant that the armed guerrilla as he had waged it was barely still possible. In these months he discussed with his closest associates what forms the resistance could still take, and with a mixture of spiritual steadfastness and practical prudence he held the morale of the resistance remarkably steady. But in his own spiritual life he sensed his end in advance, according to what his closest associates related in later tradition, and he sensed it in acceptance.

The morale of the fighters in the final months

In the last months of the resistance several forces worked on the Cyrenaican fighters at once: their own physical exhaustion, the human losses among the communities they came from, and the slowly settling knowledge that the outcome could no longer be turned. In these months Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ delivered a number of Friday sermons in which he shored up his followers in their moral steadfastness, and he gave them spiritual encouragement to hold to that steadfastness despite what awaited them.

For the ordinary Cyrenaican fighters who kept fighting under the hard conditions of these final months, the spiritual leadership of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was the point on which everything rested, for without that leadership the resistance could not have been sustained. And for his own martyrdom he prepared himself personally, in a surrender to what awaited him.

The size of the resistance in 1931

By the summer of 1931 the Cyrenaican resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ had been reduced to approximately five hundred to eight hundred armed fighters, a severe contraction against the troop strength of the preceding years. They were divided over a few dozen smaller adwar units, which carried out their operations with the utmost mobility and caution. They were supplied from the stores laid up in earlier years in remote caves and in Saharan terrain the Italians did not know, and by the remaining Bedouin families who sustained their resistance in hiding in the mountain valleys of the Jebel Akhdar.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ as leader that shrinkage meant that he had to keep moving constantly, with regular displacements between secret locations in the Jebel Akhdar that cost him physically. His seventy-three years had been hardened by his long Saharan life, and he went on leading the resistance despite what his age and the unbroken conditions of war demanded of him.

The Italian hunt strategy

In the course of 1931 the Italian leadership under Graziani adjusted its operational approach, and that adjustment amounted to a targeted hunt for Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ personally. Graziani understood in strategic terms that the capture or the death of the leader could break the Cyrenaican resistance as a whole in a fundamental way, and he set himself to tracing his movements and to preparing an ambush for his capture.

For that hunt the Italian leadership deployed everything it had. It held out rewards for information about the movements of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀, with sums of money whose magnitude was set out in the Italian reports of the time. It interrogated captured Cyrenaican fighters and ordinary Bedouin civilians in an attempt to learn where Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was staying and where he would move next. And it had reconnaissance operations carried out in the zone of the Jebel Akhdar, with the express purpose of fixing his location.

The capture attempt

In the course of September 1931 the Italian leadership, after a preparation built up step by step, carried out an operation with no other purpose than to draw Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ into an ambush. The operation stood under the command of General Ottavio Tomaselli and rested on information from local Muslim collaborators who had followed his movements in Italian colonial service. The ambush was laid in a valley in the Slonta area of the Jebel Akhdar, at a distance of approximately thirty kilometers southeast of Cyrene, in a place where the terrain gave the Italian troops ample cover.

In the early morning of 11 September 1931, by the most usual reconstruction, the trap closed in that valley around Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ and the small escort of a few fighters who were with him. The fighting that followed stretched over several hours; most of his escort found the death of martyrs, and Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ himself was wounded in the shoulder before he was finally taken captive. His horse was shot dead beneath him in the fighting, and with it went the last remnant of the free room of movement in which he had lived until then; in surrender he was handed over to the Italian troops.

The Italian transfer

In the hours after the ambush the Italian troops brought Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ under military escort to the neighboring Italian fort in Cyrene, for the treatment of his shoulder wound and for the first interrogations. In this first phase he was treated according to the ordinary Italian military conventions, with proper medical care for his wound and with the personal respect that the Italian officers showed an opponent of his stature. His own bearing was one of dignified reserve, in which he met his Italian escorts with spiritual steadfastness and personal courtesy.

The principal Italian officer with whom he stood in contact in this first phase was General Tomaselli, who in a formal first audience expressed his appreciation for the courage with which the Cyrenaican fighter had carried his cause through the preceding years, and who set out what treatment awaited him. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ answered steadfastly and directly: in his capture he recognized no spiritual defeat but only an outward outcome, decreed by Allah ﷻ in His wisdom, and the cause for which he had striven in his life’s work could not be taken away in its spiritual core by any earthly power.

The transfer to Benghazi

In the days that followed Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was brought under military escort to Benghazi, for the legal handling of his capture and for the trial that the Italian authorities were preparing. The journey was heavily guarded, for the Italian leadership feared that the Cyrenaican fighters would mount an operation to free him, and it took its precautions to complete the transfer safely.

In Benghazi Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was placed in a military prison to await his trial, and there he was held in strict isolation from the wider Cyrenaican Muslim population. His presence in the city became known to the local population step by step, and in the days that followed the Cyrenaican Muslim communities voiced their part in prayer and in spiritual fasting for their captured leader.

The medical care of his wound

At the ambush near Slonta on 11 September 1931 Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ had sustained a shoulder wound, and on his arrival at the neighboring Italian fort in Cyrene it was tended. The Italian military physicians responsible for it worked professionally, sutured the wound and watched over the physical condition of the detained Cyrenaican leader. For the Italian colonial authorities that care was no expression of compassion but a practical matter, for Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ had to stay alive until the handling of the trial was complete.

Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ underwent the treatment with a stoic bearing. He raised no protest against the Italian medical care, and he held a few conversations with the Italian physicians in which he expressed to them, in personal courtesy, his appreciation for their professional work. For the physicians themselves his bearing was an unexpected dignity, a dignity they would confirm later in their reports.

The trial and its preparation

In the course of September 1931 there was discussion in Italy and among the Italian colonial authorities in Libya about the form the trial against Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ should take. The Italian leadership under Mussolini weighed the possible outcomes of that trial against one another. A formal military execution without trial, in Fascist style, was rejected after deliberation in favor of an official trial, because a trial could give the Italian colonial authority an international justification.

The trial was set for 15 September 1931, only four days after the capture, and that speed reflected the Italian haste to close the matter. Its outcome was already fixed within the Italian leadership before it formally opened; what followed was a legal handling meant to give the execution of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ an international justification.

The encirclement in the final months

In the summer of 1931 an Italian colonial encirclement closed around the Cyrenaican resistance, and the pressure it exerted was inescapable. The Italian troops, brought by General Graziani into a tight military order, carried out coordinated operations from four different directions: from Benghazi in the west, from the Egyptian border in the east, from the southern Saharan zone by way of Kufra, which had fallen into Italian hands in January 1931, and from the Mediterranean coast in the north. The ring thickened step by step, and the Cyrenaican fighters were driven into an ever smaller geographical space.

For Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ in his leadership that encirclement meant that the guerrilla mobility on which the resistance had always turned could no longer be used to the full. He made several attempts in these months to break through to the Egyptian border, for supplies and for a possible withdrawal, but the Italian border line lay in such a way that none of those breakthroughs could be carried out.

The fall of Kufra

One part of the Italian colonial campaign in 1931 damaged the Cyrenaican resistance lastingly: the capture of Kufra on 20 January of that year. Kufra, the Saharan oasis city that had been the Senussi headquarters since the relocation from Jaghbub in 1895, was taken by an Italian expedition under General Rodolfo Graziani personally. His column numbered about three to four thousand men and had mechanical vehicles, some twenty aircraft and about five thousand camels at its disposal; it made the crossing of the vast Saharan zone between the Mediterranean coast and Kufra in a span of approximately three weeks.

The fall of Kufra struck the Cyrenaican resistance symbolically as well as practically. Symbolically, because the Senussi headquarters that had housed the spiritual and administrative center of the brotherhood since the second half of the nineteenth century was placed under Italian colonial control. Practically, because the Senussi library with several tens of thousands of Arabic, Persian and Ottoman Turkish manuscripts was taken away from the brotherhood by the Italian colonial power. For the resistance under Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ it was a spiritual blow, and he laid it before his followers in his Friday sermons in the months that followed.

The fortified garrison in Cyrene

The Italian fort in Cyrene, where Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ was housed in the first hours after his capture, had been built up between 1923 and 1929 into a considerable colonial garrison town. It housed approximately five hundred Italian troops, with additional support from local Muslim collaborators and with medical facilities of its own. For the Italian colonial administration in Cyrenaica the fort was thereby the practical place from which the handling of the trial against the Cyrenaican leader could be begun.

In the hours between Umar al-Mukhtar’s ﵀ arrival at the fort and his transfer to Benghazi he held a few conversations with the Italian commander. That commander, an experienced colonial officer well acquainted with the Cyrenaican situation, put questions to him about the form the Cyrenaican resistance would still take. Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ answered with the dignity that marked him, giving his opponent nothing about the future of the resistance.

Toward the martyrdom

In this article we have followed the end of Umar al-Mukhtar’s ﵀ military activities in 1931: the exhaustion of the resistance under the Italian colonial pressure, the Italian hunt that ran out in September 1931 in the ambush near Slonta, the capture of Umar al-Mukhtar ﵀ on 11 September 1931, and the preparation of the trial in Benghazi. We saw how a spiritual steadfastness and a personal dignity became recognizable in his conduct during this first phase of his captivity, and how the Italian leadership prepared in these days a swift trial in which the execution was to receive an international justification. To the trial itself, and to his martyrdom on 16 September 1931 on the hills of Solluq, the next and last article of this cycle will devote its attention.

Sources

• Eric Salerno, Genocidio in Libia, manifestolibri (2005), pp. 212–268.
• Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia, vol. 2, Mondadori (1988), pp. 268–334.
• Enzo Santarelli et al., Omar al-Mukhtar e la riconquista fascista della Libia, Marzorati (1981), pp. 426–478.
• E.E. Evans-Pritchard, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica, Clarendon Press (1949), pp. 214–248.
• Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, The Making of Modern Libya, State University of New York Press (2009), pp. 294–334.
• Nicola Labanca, La guerra italiana per la Libia, 1911–1931, il Mulino (2012), pp. 248–298.
• John Wright, Libya: A Modern History, Croom Helm (1981), pp. 168–212.
• Habib Wadaa al-Hesnawi, Fascist Colonial Policies Toward the Arabic-Speaking Inhabitants of Libya, 1911–1943 (1988), pp. 256–298.