Tehran Treads Lawrence Of Arabia's Footsteps

Lying recumbent and wrecked, roughly 130 kilometres to the North of the glittering Saudi city of Medina, rests the rusted hull of a century-old Ottoman locomotive. Targeted by British Intelligence Officer T. E. Lawrence and future King Faisal I of Iraq’s small cadre of Arab fighters, the sun-baked cadaver exists as a relic of the First World War guerrilla campaign that buckled the formidable Ottoman Empire’s control over the Hejaz, turning the tide of the theatre’s conflict, and wider war, in favour of the Triple Entente. There perhaps exists no better time to revisit Lawrence, who died 91 years ago this May, than following the irruption of regional conflict between lopsided powers; of course, it was he and his Arab faithful who illuminated how, and more specifically, where, weaker forces can make their stronger counterparts bleed.

Lawrence of Arabia, a moniker popularly bestowed upon Lawrence on account of his seamless assimilation to the customs, dress and distinct Northern Bedouin dialect of the Hejazi Arabs, was dispatched as British liaison to Emir Faisal in 1916 with the aim of fostering a mass uprising against the Ottomans. The result of Lawrence and Faisal’s joint machinations was the surgical targeting of the Hejaz railway; the crucial logistical spine of Ottoman supplies which ran down the back of the Arabian peninsula, connecting Damascus to Medina. If one is to properly understand the apparent strategy of the Iranian regime in its ongoing conflict with the US and Israel, then an examination of Lawrence’s own assaults on the Hejaz railway is required reading.

On the 28th of February, a series of US and Israeli air strikes tore through Tehran’s morning hue, killing Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei and marking the genesis of the 2026 Iran war. The strikes, primarily aimed at eliminating Iran’s budding nuclear programme and imposing regime change on Tehran, were met by Iran’s indiscriminate lashing out against not only Israel and US military installations in the region, but a litany of non-combatant Gulf states as well. Choking the Strait of Hormuz, targeting civilian transport infrastructure and striking energy facilities region-wide have come to represent the enduring focal point of the regime’s strategy throughout the conflict, despite the accelerating destruction of both its military and leadership.

While further exhausting an already depleted arsenal (following the Israel-Iran 12 day war in 2025) on these latter targets may, at first, seem counter-productive to ensuring the survival of the Iranian regime (disrupting transit at Dubai International Airport is unlikely to curb Tehran’s bombardment at the hands of US-Israeli forces, you see), an imitation of the tactics and strategy employed by T. E. Lawrence a century-prior may yield fruit for the theocracy not yet visible to most.

The Arab revolt, an uprising fomented by the efforts of British diplomats corresponding with Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca and Father of Faisal, quickly usurped Mecca from Ottoman control. Yet capturing the strategically vital Medina from a larger, better-equipped Ottoman force; one complemented by the frequent injection of supplies from the Hejaz railway, would prove far more elusive. Indeed, the siege of Medina ultimately lasted two and a half years, providing a stark contrast with Mecca’s two-month capitulation. The task of Lawrence in 1916 then, upon the commencement of the siege, was to cut this vital logistical artery and render the defending Ottomans in a state of disarray.

Lawrence’s war on the Hejaz railway, which encompassed numerous acts of sabotage, obstruction and direct assaults on the steady stream of locomotives which traversed its worn tracks, was not about ‘winning’ in the traditional sense of the word. In his wartime biography, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence presented the railway less as a simple line of transportation, and more as the psychological foundations on which Medina’s Ottoman forces staged their defence. By trusting the steady flow of provisions from the railway, Medina was both materially and psychologically able to withstand siege, perhaps indefinitely. Interrupting this flow would deny provisional relief while simultaneously introducing a steady stream of doubt which would, in Lawrence’s mind, poison the Ottoman garrison’s will to endure.

Iran’s regional gambit, brutal as it is, employs the same central philosophy. Defeating US-Israeli forces militarily through direct confrontation is a pipe dream, yet waging a war of attrition which targets the Gulf’s commercial heartlands and key logistical infrastructure through sustained assaults on the region’s air routes, tourism industry, shipping lanes and oil facilities provokes screams from investors, insurers, energy markets and allies with aching purses which reach decibels that Iran’s military might alone could never muster.

What Lawrence grasped in the Hejaz a century ago was that the destruction of a locomotive mattered less than the contagion of uncertainty its absence would spread. A supply line need not be wholly erased for it to become strategically infirm. Iran’s ploy is to make the modern railways of the Middle East sufficiently dangerous, expensive and unpredictable enough that the US, GCC (and wider world) wobbles. As much is evident in Iran’s strangling of the Strait of Hormuz; severely limiting oil exports and skyrocketing its price at a rate which has led to US President Trump temporarily easing sanctions on Russian oil imports while imploring European allies to provide military support to help ensure the passage’s swift reopening. In truth however, Iran need not sink every tanker in the Hormuz, nor crater every runway from Doha to Dubai to impose a punishing effect; it simply needs to make the region’s commercial circulatory system appear unreliable. A passing glance at global energy markets, in which oil has reached its most expensive since 2022, and at the numerous states who have now dipped into their limited strategic oil reserves, illuminates how such tactics can possess effects far more devastating than any salvo of missiles.

To grasp the financial and logistical toll already inflicted by Iranian hostilities, one need only look to the surging maritime insurance premiums for Gulf transit. Washington has so far offered maritime transporters $20 billion in reinsurance support for losses in the Gulf, while last week President Trump suggested that the US Navy may begin to escort tankers through the Strait to ensure their safe transit; an extraordinary measure and one which testifies to the scale of disruption.

This global oil dependency elucidates why the Gulf states, who collectively produce 26% of the world’s oil supply, possess such profound importance in the ongoing war. The UAE claims to have suffered over 1,400 Iranian attacks in the first week of the conflict, with strikes on desalination and energy facilities incurring civilian casualties and broad disruption to business and transport. Saudi Aramco sites have too been struck, while Bahraini oil refineries and Kuwait’s International Airport have also incurred Iran’s wrath in this regard. Lawrence, for his part, understood that Empires are rarely felled by battlefield losses alone; they are most significantly weakened when the cost of preserving their own periphery begins to outweigh the value of holding it. Iran’s wager is that its fellow Gulf states, faced with shaken bourses, damaged infrastructure and leaking foreign investment, alongside the World’s shrinking oil reserves, will press Washington towards a ceasefire with a force that Tehran’s depleted arsenal could not command alone.

There is, of course, an uglier contrast between Lawrence’s original ploy and the Iranian regime’s desperate scramble for survival. Where Lawrence sought to strike a crucial imperial artery which supplied a military garrison, Iran has battered a globalised civilian-commercial ecosystem, a little over a month following the brutal murder of over 30,000 Iranian protestors at the regime’s hands. There is not so much an incidental difference here than there is a moral one. While the Hejaz railway was a wartime supply line feeding Medina’s Ottoman garrison, the Gulf’s airports, oil refineries, energy terminals and wider infrastructure sustain ordinary civilian life globally as much as they provide for the US military. While Tehran may have borrowed Lawrence’s grammar, the regime has rewritten it in a far harsher dialect. 

In January 1919, Medina fell before the conquering Arab forces, who marched swiftly onwards to inflict a similar fate on the Ottoman-held city of Damascus. Lawrence’s lesson, then, is not that the weaker side can ebb victory through brute force, but that it can, at times, coerce the stronger foe by attacking the architecture that makes its strength usable. It is highly unlikely that Iran will be able to collapse US regional hegemony as Lawrence’s & Faisal’s contingent (aided by the muscle of the British Egyptian Expeditionary Force) did to the Ottoman Empire, but if Tehran manages to make the Gulf too costly, the war too drawn out and the GCC too exhausted, it may yet force others to demand a peace that it could never impose itself.

Image 1: NASA Landsat 7 Satellite (See Observatory Files)/University of Maryland's Global Land Cover Facility

Licence: public domain.

No image changes made.

Image 2: 2.1 (Augustus John 1923 - National Portrait Gallery) 2.2 (Augustus John 1921 - National Portrait Gallery).