The Times of Friday contains a most curious and interesting
letter from its Cairo correspondent describing a tribal war recently waged in Syria between Arabs and the Druses. It appears that in the autumn of 1905 a body of Druse raiders were defeated by the Wald Ali, a Bedouin tribe. This defeat was a severe blow to the Druse prestige, and encouraged the Bedouin to make several raids last spring. As the Druses were unable to get protection from the Turkish authorities, they decided to take action themselves, and on October 10th some four thousand picked men, half of them mounted and all armed with Martini or Mauser rifles, assembled at the Araje spring on the north-east border of the Hauran, where they were joined by a thousand Bedouin of the tribes in alliance with them. The Wald Ali and their supporters had meantime assembled in about equal strength at a village near by, and a general engagement soon followed. The Drone force, marching with its infantry in the centre and its mounted men on each wing, was attacked by the Bedouin, who opened the engagement by a charge en masse on the centre of their opponents. The Druse infantry halted, knelt, and "swept away the front of the attack with a well-aimed rifle fire," while their mounted men closed in from the flanks and completed the victory.
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