Gura, Eritrea
Coordinates: 15°00′48″N 39°03′38″E / 15.013333°N 39.060556°E
Gura (Arabic: قورع) or Gura’e is a settlement in Eritrea's Debub region in northeast Africa. It is located in the eponymous Gura Valley in the southeastern Eritrean highlands. It is about 9 kilometers (5.6 mi) SE of Dekemhare and about 32 kilometres (20 mi) SSE of the capital Asmara.
Gura developed as a market at the present site from the 17th century AD. It stood across a caravan route linking northern Ethiopia with the port of Massawa on the Red Sea via the Alighede and Mareb rivers.
During the 19th century Ethio-Egyptian War, Gura (and nearby Khaya Khor) was the site of two major Egyptian forts and, subsequently, a major Ethiopian victory over their inhabitants in 1876. The Egyptian commander Ratib Pasha intended to remain within the safety of the Gura fortress, but his American chief of staff Loring Pasha—the former Confederate Brig. Gen. William Loring—shamed him into direct confrontation with the main Ethiopian force by crying "No! March out of them! You are afraid!" (Discharged and returned to America, Loring would subsequently point his finger at the Egyptians for the loss in A Confederate Soldier in Egypt, simultaneously complaining of commander Osman Pasha's refusal to leave the second fort and explaining Ratib Pasha's having left the safety of his own because "what little judgment [he] possessed was entirely crushed by abject fear".) The subsequent rout from March 7 to 9 ended Egyptian hegemony over Eritrea and the Red Sea littoral and left open the possibility that the French would be able to colonize the entire region and endanger British routes through the Suez Canal.
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