The Rif War provoked grave concern in France. On a tour of his northern front in June 1924, Lyautey was alarmed to see how the defeat of Spanish forces left French positions vulnerable to attack by the Rifis. The Rif was a poor, mountainous land that was heavily reliant on food imports from the fertile valleys of the French zone. Lyautey needed to reinforce the region between Fez and the Spanish Zone to prevent the Rifis from invading to secure their food needs. Lyautey returned to Paris in August to brief the premier, Edouard Herriot, and his government on the threat posed by Abd el-Krim’s insurrectionary state. Yet the French were overstretched, in occupation of the Rhineland and setting up their administration in Syria and Lebanon, and could not spare the men and material Lyautey believed the absolute minimum to preserve his position in Morocco. Whereas he requested the immediate dispatch of four infantry battalions, the government could muster only two. A life-long conservative, Lyautey sensed that he did not have the support of Herriot’s Radical government. Seventy years old, and in poor health, he returned to Morocco with neither the physical nor the political strength to contain the Rifis. In April 1925, Abd el-Krim’s forces turned south and invaded the French zone. They sought the support of the local tribes that claimed the agricultural lands to the south of the Rif. Abd el-Krim’s commanders met with the tribal leaders to explain the situation as they saw it. “Holy war had been proclaimed by Abd el-Krim, the true Sultan of Morocco, to throw out the infidels, and particularly the French, in the name of the greater glory of regenerated Islam.? The occupation of all of Morocco by Abd el-Krim?s forces, they explained, ?was no more than a question of days.?¹⁶ Abd el-Krim increasingly saw his movement as a religious war against non-Muslims who were occupying Muslim land, and he staked a claim to the sultanate of Morocco as a whole, and not just the smaller Rif Republic. As Lyautey had feared, the Rifis swept rapidly through his poorly defended northern agricultural lands. The French were forced to evacuate all European citizens and to withdraw their troops from the countryside to the city of Fez, with heavy casualties. In just two months, the French had lost forty-three army posts and suffered 1,500 dead and 4,700 wounded or missing in action against the Rifis. In June, with his forces encamped just 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) from Fez, Abd el-Krim wrote to the Islamic scholars of the city’s famous Qarawiyyin mosque-university to win them over to his cause. “We tell you and your colleagues . . . who are men of good faith and have no relations with hypocrites or infidels, of the state of servitude into which the disunited nation of Morocco is sunk,” he wrote. He accused the reigning sultan, Moulay Youssef, of having betrayed his nation to the French and of surrounding himself with corrupt officials. Abd el-Krim asked the religious leaders of Fez for their support as a matter of religious duty.¹⁷ It was a persuasive argument, put forward in sound, theological terms supported by many quotes from the Qur’an on the necessity of jihad. But the Arab religious scholars of Fez did not throw their support behind the Berber Rifis. When it reached the outskirts of Fez, Abd el-Krim’s army came up against the solidly French-controlled “Useful Morocco” created by the Lyautey system. Faced with a choice between the aspiring national liberation movement from the Rif and the solidly established instruments of French imperial rule, the Muslim scholars of Fez clearly believed the Lyautey system was the stronger of the two. Abd el-Krim’s movement came to a halt at the walls of Fez in June 1925. If the three pillars of French rule in the countryside were the mystical Muslim brotherhoods, the leading tribal notables, and the Berbers, then Lyautey had secured two out of the three. “The greatest reason for my failure,” Abd el-Krim later reflected, “was religious fanaticism.” The claim is incongruous in light of Abd el-Krim’s own use of Islam to rally support for a holy war against the imperial powers. But the Rifi leader was actually referring to the mystical Muslim brotherhoods. “The shaykhs of the tariqas were my bitterest enemies and the enemies of my country as it progressed,” he believed. He had no more success with the big qa’ids. “At first I tried to win over the masses to my point of view by argument and demonstration,” Abd el-Krim wrote, “but I met with great opposition from the main families with powerful influence.” With one exception, he claimed, “the rest were all my enemies.”¹⁸ In their opposition to Abd el-Krim, the big qa’ids and the shaykhs of the brotherhoods had all upheld French rule in Morocco as Lyautey intended. As for the Berbers?Abd al-Krim and his Rifi fighters were themselves Berbers. They took Lyautey?s policy of Berber separatism further than Lyautey himself ever intended. It is of no doubt that the Rifis? Berber identity played a role in discouraging Moroccan Arabs from joining their campaign against the French. Though his system of colonial government held, Lyautey himself fell to the Rifi challenge. To his critics in Paris, the overflow of the Rif War into the French protectorate proved the failure of Lyautey’s efforts to achieve the total submission of Morocco. As major reinforcements from France flooded Morocco in July 1925, Lyautey—exhausted by months of campaigning against the Rifis compounded by ill health—asked for another commander to assist him. The French government dispatched Marshal Philippe Pйtain, the hero of the World War I battle of Verdun, to assist. In August, Pйtain took control of French military operations in Morocco. The following month, Lyautey tendered his resignation. He left Morocco for good in October 1925. Abd el-Krim did not long survive Lyautey. The French and Spanish combined forces to crush the Rifi insurgency. The Rifi army had already withdrawn back to its mountain homeland in northern Morocco, where it came under a two-front siege by massive French and Spanish armies in September 1925. By October, the European armies had completely surrounded the Rif Mountains and imposed a complete blockade to starve the Rifis into submission. Abd el-Krim’s efforts to negotiate a resolution were rebuffed, and in May 1926, the Rif Mountains were overrun by a joint European force of some 123,000 soldiers. Rifi resistance crumbled, and Abd el-Krim surrendered to the French on May 26. He was later exiled to the Indian Ocean island of Rйunion, where he remained until 1947. With the collapse of the Rif War, France and Spain resumed their colonial administration of Morocco unencumbered by further domestic opposition. Though the Rif War did not engender sustained resistance to the French or Spanish in Morocco, Abd el-Krim and his movement sparked the imagination of nationalists across the Arab world. They saw the Rifis as an Arab people (not as Berbers) who had led a heroic resistance to European rule and had inflicted numerous defeats on modern armies in defense of their land and faith. Their five-year insurgency (1921–1926) against Spain and France inspired some Syrian nationalists to mount their own revolt against the French in 1925.

One young Syrian officer avidly followed newspaper accounts on the Rif War from the central town of Hama. Fawzi al-Qawuqji had once fought the French himself. A native of the city of Tripoli, in what would become Greater Lebanon, he had rallied to King Faysal?s cause and joined the disorganized band that confronted the French colonial army at Khan Maysalun in July 1920. The magnitude of that defeat left al-Qawuqji convinced that the Syrians could not expel the French?for the moment. Within weeks of Maysalun, al-Qawuqji chose pragmatism over idealism and accepted a commission in the new Syrian army the French were establishing, called the Troupes Spйciales, or the Syrian Legion. Yet he wasn’t comfortable in his French uniform, collaborating with a foreign imperial power to run his country. Reading the newspaper in the barracks of Hama, al-Qawuqji and his fellow nationalists were inspired by the Rif War and took Abd el-Krim for their role model. “What we saw in the heroism of their fight convinced us that the distinct character of the Arabs had survived,” al-Qawuqji wrote in his memoirs, “and a love of sacrifice spread among us. I obsessively followed events in Morocco, and found maps of the field of conflict.”¹⁹ If the Rif War inspired nationalists in Syria, the imperial administrators took their inspiration from Lyautey’s methods of imperial rule in Morocco. The French officials appointed to rule Syria were in large part graduates of the Lyautey “school”: General Henri Gouraud, the first high commissioner in Syria, had been Lyautey’s assistant in Morocco. Other prominent colonial officials appointed to Syria had served under Lyautey, including Colonel Catroux, Gouraud’s delegate to Damascus; General de Lamothe, the delegate to Aleppo; and the two colonels who served as delegates to the Alawite territories. Many lower-ranking officials came to Syria from Morocco as well. Predictably, they sought to reproduce a modified Lyautey system in Syria.²⁰ The French faced nationalist opposition in town and country alike from the outset of their occupation of Syria. In 1919, an anti-French uprising broke out in the Alawite Mountains in western Syria and took two years to quell. The Alawites, a religious community that trace their origins to Shiite Islam, only wanted to preserve their autonomy; they made no pretense of fighting for national independence. The French were able to satisfy Alawite wishes for local autonomy by creating a ministate based in the port city of Latakia and the Alawite highlands, in which local notables ruled in collaboration with French administrators. A more serious nationalist revolt broke out in the countryside around the northern city of Aleppo in 1919, headed by a local notable named Ibrahim Hananu. A landowner who had served in the Ottoman bureaucracy before the First World War, Hananu was disenchanted with Ottoman wartime repression. He volunteered for Amir Faysal’s army in the 1916–1918 Arab Revolt and took part in the Syrian General Congress of 1919. A man of action, Hananu viewed the Syrian Congress as little more than a talking shop and returned north to Aleppo to mobilize a guerrilla force to mount an effective deterrent against the French. He initiated a rural uprising against the threat of French rule that quickly turned into a nationalist insurgency after the French occupied Aleppo in 1920. The number of insurgents expanded rapidly between the summer and autumn of 1920, from 800 to nearly 5,000 volunteers. ²¹ The Syrian nationalists received arms and funding from the neighboring Turks, who were fighting their own war against a short-lived French occupation in the southern coastal region of Anatolia. The French moved quickly to deploy troops and reassert their control over Aleppo, lest Hananu’s revolt provoke a broader nationalist uprising across Syria. In the autumn of 1921 Hananu fled to Jordan, where he was captured by the British and delivered to French justice. The French put Hananu on trial but had the wisdom to acquit the nationalist rather than turn him into a martyr. For Fawzi al-Qawuqji, who was already enrolled in the Syrian Legion, the collapse of Hananu’s revolt only confirmed his view that the Syrians were not yet ready to withstand the French. The French were more concerned about their vulnerability to nationalist agitation than Fawzi al-Qawuqji realized. To counter the threat of a unified nationalist movement, the French chose to employ a divide-and-rule scheme, splitting Syria into four mini-states. Aleppo and Damascus were made the seats of two separate administrations to keep the urban nationalists in Syria’s principal cities from making common cause. The French also envisaged separate states for the two religious communities with long histories of territorial autonomy—the Alawites in western Syria, and the Druzes to the south. On the model of Lyautey’s Berber policies, France hoped by these means to give the Alawites and Druzes a vested interest in the mandate that would insulate them from urban nationalism. High Commissioner Gouraud justified this division of Syria into autonomous regions with local men appointed to serve as governors with reference to the doctrine he had learned at the school of Marshal Lyautey.²² While working to assure the goodwill of Syria’s Druze and Alawite communities, the French authorities made no concessions to nationalist leaders in Damascus. The most influential Syrian nationalist in the early 1920s was Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar (1882–1940), a medical doctor who had trained at the American University of Beirut. Fluent in English after his medical training, Shahbandar had served as guide and translator to the King-Crane Commission in 1919 and had struck a personal friendship with Charles Crane. He briefly served as foreign minister in King Faysal’s last cabinet in May 1920, taking refuge in Egypt following the fall of Faysal’s government in July of that year. He returned to Damascus one year later when the French announced a general amnesty in the summer of 1921. On his return to Syria, Dr. Shahbandar resumed his nationalist activities and founded a clandestine organization called the Iron Hand Society. The Iron Hand assembled veterans of the Ottoman-era secret Arabist societies and the supporters of Faysal’s Arab government in Damascus with a common agenda to expel the French from Syria. The activities of the Iron Hand were held in check by strict French surveillance. On April 7, 1922, the French arrested Shahbandar and four other leaders of the movement on suspicion of fomenting rebellion. The French arrests only fanned the flames of Syrian dissent. The following day a group of nationalists used Friday prayers in the central Umayyad Mosque to rouse the 8,000 congregants to a mass demonstration. Iron Hand members led a diverse crowd of religious leaders, neighborhood bosses, merchants, and students. They marched through the central markets of Damascus toward the citadel, where they were dispersed by French security forces, who wounded dozens and arrested forty-six Damascenes. French repressive measures failed to stem the protests, as ever more Damascenes responded to the nationalists’ call. On April 11 a group of forty women headed by Shahbandar’s wife led a massive demonstration. French soldiers fired into the crowd, killing three and wounding many more, including several women. A general strike was called, and shopkeepers in Damascus kept their shutters down for two weeks while the French tried Shahbandar and the other opposition leaders. Severe sentences were passed against all the men, with Shahbandar receiving twenty years and the others between five and fifteen years. The Iron Hand was broken, the nationalists were silenced, and calm prevailed—though only for the next three years.