The Theft of Alexandretta – Part I 

In all Syrian schools Alexandretta is called  the “fifteenth Syrian province” and no   map of Syria is considered valid if the province of Alexandretta is not on it .Along with the occupied Syrian Golan ,Alexandretta  is considered occupied land – occupied by Turkey . But how did Alexandretta fall into Turkish hands?

The district of Alexandretta in the Ottoman era was a sanjak ( province) belonging to the state of Aleppo. It  served as a port for the state and was  its outlet to the Mediterranean. Spreading over an area of 4,800 square kilometers, it overlooks the Mediterranean Sea from the west, and the plains of Cilicia and the Taurus Mountains from the north. Alexandretta is located between four mountains: Al-Amanous, Al-Aqra’, Musa, and Al-Nafakh. Its plains are fertile, in which fresh rivers flow, namely, the Orontes, which passes through the city of Antioch and then proceeds to the Gulf of Sweida, the Aswad River coming from Cilicia, and the Afrin River coming from Cilicia. Aleppo. Today, the population of the district is about one and a half million people distributed among cities and villages, most notably Al-Suwaidiyya, Al-Rayhaniya, Harbiyyat, Iskenderun, Antakya, and Arsuz. .

The Arabs liberated Alexandretta in the year 16  Hijerah  from the Byzantines , restored its identity, built it and fortified it as a first line in the face of the Byzantine Romans, and it remained a fortress and a ready military outpost in the face of external invasion attempts, compensating for the weakness of the central Arab Islamic state in Baghdad.

Then the Crusaders occupied it during their conquest of the Arab East between 1096 and 1291, until the Arabs liberated it after the liberation of Jerusalem under the leadership of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi after the Battle of Hattin in 1187.

After the fall of the Ayyubid state, the Ottomans invaded the Arab region and annexed Alexandretta, attaching it to the state of Aleppo. Alexandretta suffered the same fate as all areas that were occupied by the Ottomans and was afflicted with  poverty and backwardness. However the province of Alexandretta never lost its ties to other Arab parts of the Ottoman empire and was on par with all the Arab revolutions   that took place against the Ottomans starting  from the revolution of Prince Fakhr al-Din al-Ma’ani II, to Ibrahim bin Muhammad Ali Pasha, until the Great Arab Revolt broke out in 1916, where the sons of Alexandretta   participated in resisting the Ottoman occupation  and expelling it from the Arab East.

Editor In Chief

Reem Haddad