Turco-Italian War
| Italo-Turkish War | |||||||||
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 Italian offensive |
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| Belligerents | |||||||||
 Kingdom of Italy Asir
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 Ottoman Empire Senussi Order
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| Commanders and leaders | |||||||||
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Victor Emmanuel III Carlo Caneva Augusto Aubry
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Mehmed V Enver Pasha Mustafa Kemal Ahmed Sharif as-Senussi
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| Strength | |||||||||
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Expeditionary force: 34,000 troops 6,300 horses & mules 1,050 waggons 48 field guns 24 mountain guns Reinforcements: 85,000 troops |
Initial: ~8,000 regular Turkish troops ~20,000 local irregular troops Final: ~40,000 Turks and Arabs |
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| Casualties and losses | |||||||||
| 1,432 killed in combat 4,250 wounded 1,948 died of disease |
~14,000 casualties 10,000 killed in reprisals & executions |
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Italian victory
The Italo-Turkish or Turco-Italian War (Turkish: Trablusgarp Savaşı, "Tripolitanian War"; also known in Italy as Guerra di Libia, "Libyan War") was fought between the Kingdom of Italy and the Ottoman Empire from September 29, 1911, to October 18, 1912. As a result of this conflict, Italy captured the Ottoman Tripolitania Vilayet (province), of which the main sub-provinces (sanjaks) were Fezzan, Cyrenaica, and Tripoli itself. These territories together formed what became known as Italian Libya.
During the conflict, Italian forces also occupied the Dodecanese islands in the Aegean Sea. Italy had agreed to return the Dodecanese to the Ottoman Empire in the Treaty of Ouchy in 1912 (also known as the First (1912) Treaty of Lausanne). However, the vagueness of the text allowed a provisional Italian administration of the islands, and Turkey eventually renounced all claims on these islands in Article 15 of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
Although minor, the war was a significant precursor of the First World War as it sparked nationalism in the Balkan states. Seeing how easily the Italians had defeated the weakened Ottomans, the members of the Balkan League attacked the Ottoman Empire starting the First Balkan War before the war with Italy had ended.
The Italo-Turkish War saw numerous technological changes, notably the airplane. On October 23, 1911, an Italian pilot, Captain Carlo Piazza, flew over Turkish lines on the world's first aerial reconnaissance mission, and on November 1, the first ever aerial bomb was dropped by Sottotenente Giulio Gavotti, on Turkish troops in Libya, from an early model of Etrich Taube aircraft. The Turks, lacking anti-aircraft weapons, were the first to shoot down an aeroplane by rifle fire.
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Wikipedia