Arab Legion
From Wikinfo
The Arab Legion (Al-jaish Al'-arabi) was Transjordans and later on also Jordans regular army. It was formed in 1921 by Liutenant Colonel Frederick Gerard Peake as a police force to keep order among Transjordanians tribes and to guard the important Jerusalem-Amman road. Originally it consisted of only 150 men, most of them stationed along the road.
In 1939, John Bagot Glubb, better known as Glubb Pasha, became the legion's commander and transformed it to the, at the time, best trained Arab army in the world.
The legion's actions in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war played an important role for the outcome of that war. In bloody fightings with the Zionists it conquered the Old City of Jerusalem in May xx, 1948 and managed to hold it against repeated attacks. It also secured the West Bank for Jordan. The Jordanian occupation of the West Bank from 1948 to 1967 and its annexation in April 1950 was recognized by two countries, Great Britain and Pakistan.
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See also
Books
- P.J. Vatikiotis, Politics and the Military in Jordan: A Study of the Arab Legion, 1921-1957, New York, Praeger Publishers (1967)
External links & references
References
- Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Arab_Legion" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Legion, used under the GNU Free Documentation License
