Fawzi al-Qawuqji

Fawzi al-Qawuqji (1890–1977) was an Arab military officer from Tripoli who served, in turn, in the Ottoman, Syrian and Iraqi armies, fought in revolts against the French and British mandates, and in 1948 commanded the Arab Liberation Army in Palestine ^{1 2}.

He was born on 19 January 1890 in Tripoli (al-Sham), then in the Ottoman Empire, to a Turkmen family; his father was an Ottoman officer. He graduated from the Istanbul military academy in 1912 as a cavalry officer, fought the British in Iraq and at Beersheba in the First World War, and after the war served King Faisal in Damascus, fighting at Maysalun in 1920 ^{1 2}.

Under the French Mandate he joined the Syrian Legion, trained further in France, and commanded the cavalry at Hama, where he took part in the revolt of October 1925 during the Great Syrian Revolt; exiled, he was amnestied in 1928. He then served King Abd al-Aziz in the Hejaz and, from 1932, King Faisal in Iraq. In 1936 he resigned his Iraqi commission and led Arab volunteers into Palestine during the revolt there, commanding in the Nablus–Tulkarm–Jenin triangle before withdrawing at the end of that year ¹.

In 1941 he fought the British again during the Rashid Ali coup in Iraq and was seriously wounded. He spent the rest of the Second World War in Germany, where, the English article records, he was awarded the rank of colonel in the Wehrmacht and his name and reputation were used extensively in German propaganda; the article also recounts, from his memoirs via Gilbert Achcar, his account of German pressure on him to declare allegiance and his refusal. Captured by Soviet forces in 1945, he was released in 1947 ¹.

In March 1948 he crossed into Palestine at the head of the Arab League's Arab Liberation Army and fought mainly in the north, his campaign marked by rivalry with the forces of Amin al-Husseini around Jerusalem. He died in Beirut on 5 June 1977 ¹.

No source followed here names a school or order for him personally: the English article states no religion, and the Arabic article's infobox gives his religion as Islam with the branch and order fields blank. His affiliation is therefore recorded as unknown ^{1 2}.