Italian troops captured Ghat in the south-west of the province in August 1914, which prompted an uprising and forced the Italians out of Ghat and Ghadames. The call to jihad had more effect among the Senussi than elsewhere and Ahmad began the jihad in Fezzan in southern Libya. The Italians re-captured Ghadames in February 1916 but the blockade on the Senussi had little military effect, since they were well stocked with captured Italian weapons; Italian garrisons in Cyrenaica were withdrawn to reinforce the west. Ottoman-German operations in Tripolitania were based at Misratah, where a submarine visited every couple of weeks to deliver arms and ammunition and in May 1917 a wireless station was built. Ottoman troops established about twenty posts on the coast and by 1918 had 20,000 regular troops, a similar number in training and another 40,000 untrained reservists. In September 1918, having been prevented from entering Tripolitania by the Ottoman forces, Sayed Ahmed boarded a German submarine at al-Aqaila and went into exile in Turkey. In Tripolitania, local troops under al-Shtaiwi and Ottoman regular soldiers under Nuri Bey and Suliman al-Baruni, resisted the Italians until the end of the war. Archaeological analysis of the salt pan of Kallaya, the site of a minor skirmish between Libyans on 14 November 1918, shows that they had Russian rifles captured by the Germans and Austro-Hungarians on the Eastern front and sent to Libya via the Ottomans.

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