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The Ottoman army was astonishingly capable in WW1. Besides the famous victory at Gallipoli, the Ottomans eliminated a British army of 45,000 troops with an army half its size (the Siege of Kut) in Iraq. The Ottomans kept the British at bay for three years in Palestine, winning the First Battle of Gaza in March 1917 (again despite being outnumbered) and the Second Battle of Gaza a month later until final defeat in November. And ultimately, no matter how battered and tired, the Ottoman army had survived as a fighting force in 1918, long after the rest of the Central Powers had succumbed to mutinies. It fought off the invaders in the final act of WW1, the Turkish War of Independence, and assured the creation of a territorially extensive Turkish Republic.

This was the same army that had lost the First Balkan War catastrophically only two years before, and one disparaged as the "Sick Man of Europe" for almost a century.

Why were the Ottomans so successful?
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