Map of Beirut and its old city and bazaar from the Baedeker guide to 'Palestine and Syria with Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylonia and with the Island of Cyprus'.
"Inside the Ottoman Empire there were also those who regarded opposition to the regime as patriotic. Not only Armenians, but also Arabs, were suffering from Turkish fears of the national aspirations of their subject peoples. In Beirut, a Maronite Christian, Yusuf al-Hani, had sought French support for an independent Lebanon even before the war. He, and sixty others who thought as he did, decided to invite the French to enter the Levant as Lebanon's protector. Before they could do much more than discuss their idea, they were arrested. When a British agent contacted them in Aley prison, one of them asked him: 'Where are the English? Where are the French? Why are we left like this?' On April 5, Yusuf al-Hani was hanged in Beirut."
Nationalism was building within the Ottoman Empire. The Armenians of Turkey and the Empire had already been slaughtered in great number by Turkey's genocidal policies. Some Arab groups were beginning to seek independence. A month after al-Hani's execution, 21 Arabs were publicly hanged in Beirut and Damascus for their association with nationalist groups. Further south, Husein ibn Ali and Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud would rebel against the Turks, allying with the British.
The First World War, a Complete History by Martin Gilbert, page 237, copyright © 1994 by Martin Gilbert, publisher: Henry Holt and Company, publication date: 1994
1916-04-05, 1916, April, Beirut, Lebanon
