The Zeila garrison of the sanjak of Ottoman Zeila was an Ottoman sanjak of the Habesh Eyalet .
The garrison was reinforced and used by the Khedivate's Somali coast and was the land warfare force based in the city of Zeila from 1559 to 1884.
History
Under pasha Kara Naʾib, it was visited by the Turkish traveler Evliya Celebi in 1672. Celebi provides a lengthy description of the city, which he describes as a ‘citadel’, with a ‘castle’ that housed a garrison of 700 troops and 70 cannos under the governor Mehemmed Agha who collected customs from the 10-20 Indian and Portuguese ships that visited the port each year to purchase livestock, oil and honey.
He describes its inhabitants as ‘blacks’ who followed the Qadariyyah school27 and were wealthy merchants who traded extensively with the Banyans of Cambay (India) and with Yemen.
The military force that Ra’uf Pasha commanded was made up of five infantry units. It had fourteen officers, 236 irregular soldiers (''baṣhi bozuk''), eighteen two Howitzer mountain cannons with two rocket launchers, and around 250 camels for transport.
Muhammad Rauf Pasha led a well-armed Egyptian force of 1,200 men from Zeila into the interior of eastern Ethiopia and absent opposition, seized Harar on 11 October 1875.
Logistics was handled by local Somali populations as seen with the withdrawal of the 3,500-strong Egyptian garrison from Harar. The evacuation could not have been successfully executed without the cooperation of the Somali issa. The retreat required many camels to transport heavy weapons.
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