⚔️ Ottoman & Islamic Empireshard
Battle of Kut
1916 CE · Iraq
Quick Facts
- Year
- 1916 CE
- Location
- Iraq
- Era
- ⚔️ Ottoman & Islamic Empires
- Difficulty
- hard
Ottoman forces besieged a British-Indian garrison of around 13,000 troops under General Townshend at Kut-al-Amara on the Tigris River. After 147 days of siege and multiple failed relief attempts that cost 23,000 additional British casualties, Townshend surrendered. It was one of Britain's worst military humiliations, with thousands of captured soldiers dying in Ottoman captivity. The disaster led to a complete overhaul of the British Mesopotamian campaign.
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After the fall of Kut, approximately 70% of the British-Indian prisoners died in Ottoman captivity from disease, starvation, and forced marches, one of the worst POW death rates of World War I.