Yakup Satar RIP

Kyt · Apr 7, 2008

Yakup Satar | Times Online Obituary

The last Turkish veteran of the First World War, Yakup Satar fought at the Second Battle of Kut in the Mesopotamian campaign. He was captured by the British in February 1917, as Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Maude’s British and Indian army drove the Ottoman Empire’s forces back up the Tigris from Basra towards Baghdad.

The victory avenged a humiliating defeat for the British the previous year, in which a division under General Sir Charles Townshend had been surrounded by the Turks in Kut and forced to surrender after a five-month siege in which thousands of its soldiers perished from disease and dehydration.

Unlike Townshend the Ottoman commander in Kut in 1917, Karabekir Bey, did not let his forces become trapped in the town but extricated them and retreated to Baghdad. Following up, Maude’s troops captured the Ottoman provincial capital without a fight on March 10, 1917, several thousand Turkish troops being made prisoner in the confusion of the Anglo-Indian advance.

Yakap Satar was born in Crimea in 1898 into a Tartar family. His father, Zeki Bey, had been one of the Tartar chieftains who had fought for independence from the Russian Empire. In 1915 Satar enlisted in the army of the Ottoman Empire, which had entered the war on the side of Germany.

After basic training in Constantinople (Istanbul) he was selected as part of a special 200-strong force secretly trained by German instructors in the techniques of gas warfare. This was kept quiet from the Turkish authorities, but when Satar and 50 of his comrades from the unit were sent to the Mesopotamian front, orders from Constantinople forbade the use of gas.

By this time British and Indian troops under Maude, who had arrived by sea via the Persian Gulf, had in December 1916 begun advancing up the Tigris from Basra, with the Turks falling back before them. Now fighting as infantry, Satar and his colleagues were among Turkish forces forced out of a succession of Turkish strongpoints along the river by their numerically superior enemy. In February 1917 Maude’s forces began their attack on Kut where Satar was captured on the 23rd of the month.

Released from captivity after the end of the First World War, Satar joined the forces of the Turkish National Movement under Mustafa Kemal in Anatolia, which fought against the terms of the Allied partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. From 1919 to 1922 he fought in the Turkish War of Independence and the Greco-Turkish War, which culminated in the declaration of the Turkish Republic.

Satar settled in Anatolia at Eskisehir, where he married and had six children.

Yakup Satar, Turkish veteran of the First World War, was born on March 11, 1898. He died on April 2, 2008,

aged 110
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Antipodean Andy · Apr 9, 2008

What a career and what an innings. He would have seen some horrendous action throughout his career, particularly the Greco-Turkish War, very spiteful stuff.

I have a lot of respect for the Turks and am proud to have a Turkish brother-in-law.

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