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Khalid ibn al-Walid (Sword of Allah)
Khalid is said to have fought around a hundred battles, both major battles and minor skirmishes as well as single duels, during his military career. Having remained undefeated, this fact makes him one of the finest military generals in history.
Khalid was the architect of most of the early Muslim military doctrines, he was pioneer of almost every major tactic that Muslims used during Early Islamic conquest. One of Khalid's major achievements in this context was utilizing the individual skills of Arab Bedouin warriors to a larger scale. He is believed to have developed them into an almost regular unit called Mubarizun ("champions"), who would issue personal challenges to the enemy officers. These were highly trained and skilled swordsmen, whom Khalid utilized effectively to slay as many enemy officers as possible, giving a psychological blow to enemy morale. The Battle of Ajnadayn is perhaps the best example of this form of psychological warfare. Moreover his biggest achievement was the conversion of Arab tactical doctrine into a strategic system. Until Khalid, the Arabs were basically raiders and skirmishers. Khalid turned those skirmishing tactics into something that could be used anywhere. Thus he would skirmish the enemy to death: he would bring his army in front of his enemies and wait until the whole battle degenerated into a skirmishing affair between small units. Then, after exhausting the enemy units, he would launch his cavalry at their flanks employing Hammer and Anvil tactics.
Much of Khalid's strategic and tactical genius lies in his use of extreme methods. He apparently put more emphasis on annihilating enemy troops, rather than achieving victory by simply defeating them. For instance his employment of the double envelopment maneuver against the numerically superior Persian army at the Battle of Walaja, and his brilliant maneuver at the Battle of Yarmouk where he virtually trapped the Byzantine army between three steep ravines by stealthily capturing their only escape route, a bridge, at their rear.
Khalid utilized his better understanding of terrain in every possible way to gain strategic superiority over his enemies. During his Persian campaigns, he initially never entered deep into Persian territory and always kept the Arabian desert at his rear, allowing his forces to retreat there in case of a defeat. It was only after all the strong Persian and Persian-allied forces were routed that he penetrated deep into Euphrates region and captured the regional capital of Iraq, Al-Hira. Again, at Yarmouk, the terrain would help him in executing his grand strategy of annihilating the Byzantines.
In their mobility, Khalid's troops had no match until the Mongol hordes of the 13th century. In fact the tactics of the desert Arabs and steppe Mongols were somewhat identical. Entire troops of Khalid would ride on camels while on march, whereas the Mongols used horses, with the difference that the Arabs did not make use of mounted archers. His most commonly used maneuver was surprise attack, also apparently his favorite one. Some of the most brilliant surprise attacks of Khalid were his night attacks from three different sides on Persian camps at Zumail, Muzayyah and Saniyy, his highly mobile army successfully maneuvering in a 100 km area, quickly destroying encampments of the Persians and their Arab allies. The Battle of Maraj-al-Debaj being no exception, where once again his highly mobile army maneuvered around a Byzantine army, appearing from four directions and opening several fronts at a time, a maneuver which later in 13th century became one of the Mongol armies' principal maneuvers.
The historian Waqidi writes that after the battle of Battle of Maraj-al-Debaj, Emperor Heraclius sent an ambassador to ask Khalid to return his daughter. The ambassador gave Khalid the letter from the Emperor which read as follows:
“'I have come to know what you have done to my army. You have killed my son-in-law and captured my daughter. You have won and got away safely. I now ask you for my daughter. Either return her to me on payment of ransom or give her to me as a gift, for honour is a strong element in your character.”
Khalid said to the ambassador:
“Take her as a gift, there shall be no ransom.”
The ambassador took the daughter of Heraclius, and returned to Antioch.
An example of Khalid's strategic maneuverability was his advance into Roman Syria. Emperor Heraclius had sent all his available garrisoned troops into Syria, towards Ajnadayn, to hold the Muslim troops at the Syria-Arabia border region. The possible route of any Muslim reinforcement was expected to be the conventional Syria-Arabia road in the south, but Khalid, who was then in Iraq, took the most unexpected route: marching through the waterless Syrian desert, to the surprise of the Byzantines, he appeared in northern Syria. Catching the Byzantines off guard, he quickly captured several towns, virtually cutting off the communications of the Byzantine army at Ajnadayn with its high command at Emesa, where emperor Heraclius himself resided.
Khalid's elite light cavalry, the Mobile guard, acted as the core of the Muslim cavalry during the invasion of Syria. It was composed of highly trained and seasoned soldiers, the majority of whom had been under Khalid's standard during his Arabian and Persian campaigns. Muslim cavalry was a light cavalry force armed with 5 meter long lances. They could charge at an incredible speed and would usually employ a common tactic of Kar wa far literary meaning "engage-disengage", or in modern term: “hit-and-run.” They would charge on enemy flanks and rear, their maneuverability making them very effective against heavily armored Byzantine and Sassanid cataphracts.Khalid's famous flanking charge on the final day of the Battle of Yarmouk stands as testimony to just how well he understood the potentials and strengths of his mounted troops.
The Arabs soldiers were far more lightly armored then their Roman and Persian contemporaries, which made them vulnerable in close combat at set-piece battles and to missile fire of enemy archers. Khalid therefore never blundered in the battle and would rely on intelligence reports from spies that he would hire from local population on liberal rewards. Persian Historian Al-Tabari said:
He (Khalid) neither slept himself, nor did he let others sleep; nothing could be kept hidden from him.
—Al-Tabari, History of the Prophets and Kings'
Badass of the Week: Khalid ibn Al-Waleed
Khalid ibn al-Walid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
