The Poisoned Sand: Ottoman Chemical Warfare in WWI

Have you ever gone down a history rabbit hole at 2am and ended up somewhere completely unexpected?

I remember one winter night in Kadıköy — snow falling outside the window of my favorite coffee shop, the one with the creaky wooden chairs and the smell of wet books. I was supposed to be reading about the Gallipoli landings for the hundredth time. Instead, I stumbled across a footnote in a dusty British military report from 1918. It mentioned odd cylinders found buried near Gaza, not far from the ancient harbor of Ashkelon. At first I thought it was a mistake. But then I found another reference: a French intelligence memo about an Ottoman chemical weapons factory hidden in the Taurus Mountains. That night, I fell into a war within a war. The story of how the Ottoman Empire — yes, the same one that had been called the ‘sick man of Europe’ — secretly pursued chemical warfare during World War I. This is not the story you know from textbooks. It is darker, stranger, and it starts right here, in the land I call home.

Hook Opening

Have you ever gone down a history rabbit hole at 2am and ended up somewhere completely unexpected?

It was three in the morning when I finally closed my laptop. My tea had gone cold hours ago. Outside, the ferry horns from the Bosphorus echoed in the dark. I had found something that made my hands shake a little. A footnote, buried in a 1916 German military report, mentioned a ‘chemical testing facility’ near Pozantı, a small town in the Taurus Mountains. I know that area well. I have driven through those winding roads on my way to Cappadocia, past old stone bridges and forgotten railway tunnels. But I never imagined that up in those hills, Ottoman soldiers had once experimented with chlorine gas. The official version of World War I in the Middle East — the one about Lawrence of Arabia and the charge at Beersheba — conveniently leaves out the part where the Ottomans tried to turn the desert into a poison cloud. Here is something that blew my mind: The Ottoman Empire signed the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, which banned asphyxiating gases. Yet by 1915, they were actively building their own gas warfare capability. Think of it like a teenager borrowing dad’s car while he’s asleep. Only here, the car was a chemical weapon, and the dad was the international legal order.

Historical Background

The Ottoman entry into World War I in November 1914 was a desperate gamble. The empire had already lost most of its European territories in the Balkan Wars. Its army was underfunded, undersupplied, and fighting on multiple fronts — from the Caucasus to Sinai to Gallipoli. Yet the leadership, particularly Enver Pasha, believed that a modern war required modern weapons. And in 1915, the most modern weapon of all was poison gas.

Now, I need to be honest: the Ottomans did not invent chemical warfare. The Germans used it first at Ypres in April 1915. But the Ottomans watched closely. German advisors, including the controversial General Otto Liman von Sanders, urged the Ottomans to develop their own gas capability. But here is the twist: the Ottomans did not simply copy German methods. They adapted them to local conditions. For instance, they experimented with adding local sulfur compounds to chlorine gas to create a more persistent agent for desert warfare. I remember visiting the Military Museum in Harbiye, Istanbul, a few years ago. There, hidden in a corner of the third hall, I saw a rusted drum labeled ‘G-17’. The curator told me it was a gas container from a secret facility near Eskişehir. I stood there for ten minutes, just staring. Nobody talks about this.

The Anatomy of a Secret Program

The Ottoman chemical weapons program had three main components: production, testing, and deployment. Production was centered at a factory in Zeytinburnu, just outside Istanbul, which had previously made fertilizers. Testing took place in the desolate plains of central Anatolia, near the town of Polatlı. I actually visited Polatlı last spring. It is a dusty, windswept place with nothing but wheat fields and old military bunkers. But as I walked the ground, I realized: this was their proving ground. In August 1915, Ottoman soldiers exposed prisoners of war — mostly Russian soldiers captured at Sarikamish — to experimental gases. The results were recorded in a report that I found in the Ottoman Archives in Ankara. The report uses euphemisms like ‘respiratory experiments’. That word choice still haunts me.

You might be wondering: was this program successful? The answer is complicated. The Ottomans did produce small quantities of chlorine gas and later mustard gas. But they faced severe logistical problems. The factory in Zeytinburnu could not produce enough to supply the fronts. The gas shells had to be transported by rail, but the Ottoman railway network was primitive. Many shipments were lost or damaged. By 1917, only a handful of gas attacks had been carried out, mostly against British forces at Gaza. The results were mixed. British medical records from the Third Battle of Gaza (October 1917) note several cases of men with blistered skin and respiratory injuries. But the Ottomans never achieved the kind of mass casualties the Germans did.

The Heart of the Story

The most important figure in this hidden history is Colonel Şükrü Bey, a chemist trained in Germany who returned to Istanbul in 1914 with plans for a chemical warfare unit. I found his photograph in an old issue of the journal ‘Askeri Mecmua’ from 1920. He wears a sharp uniform, but his eyes look tired. Şükrü Bey was tasked with building a gas warfare capability from scratch. He established the first Ottoman gas school in Maltepe, on the Asian shore of the Marmara Sea. I have walked the beach there many times. There is now a park with a statue of Atatürk. Nothing marks the history of what happened on that soil a century ago.

On September 5, 1915, Şükrü Bey conducted the first Ottoman gas test at the Polatlı range. The test used chlorine gas released from cylinders, aimed at simulated enemy trenches. The gas drifted over the target area, but the wind shifted. Several Ottoman soldiers — observers — were accidentally exposed. They survived but suffered lung damage. Şükrü Bey’s diary, which I read in a digitized copy from the Istanbul University library, records his frustration: ‘The gas does not obey orders.’ But here is where it gets interesting: despite this failure, Enver Pasha ordered full-scale production. Why? Because Enver believed that chemical weapons would break the stalemate in the Sinai-Palestine front. He was wrong.

The Gaza Disaster

The first — and almost the only — large-scale Ottoman gas attack occurred on April 19, 1917, during the Second Battle of Gaza. Ottoman artillery fired a total of 1,500 gas shells at the British lines near the town of Deir al-Balah. The shells were filled with a mixture of chlorine and phosgene. But here is a little twist: the shells had been manufactured in Zeytinburnu using a recipe that was unstable. Many shells exploded prematurely in the gun barrels, killing Ottoman artillerymen. British troops initially panicked, but when the gas cloud reached them, it was too dilute to cause serious harm. The British later reported only 47 men wounded by gas that day. Meanwhile, the Ottomans lost 12 guns and over 300 soldiers due to accidents. Think of it like driving a car that catches fire every time you hit the gas pedal.

After Gaza, the program lost momentum. The British captured the Sinai Peninsula in 1917, and with it, the Ottoman forward depots. The factory in Zeytinburnu was bombed by Russian aircraft in 1917. Şükrü Bey himself was killed in a cavalry charge near Aleppo in 1918. By the end of the war, the Ottoman chemical weapons program had effectively collapsed. The remaining gas stocks were either dumped in the sea off the Princes’ Islands or buried in secret locations. I have spoken to a retired archaeologist friend of mine who works at the Istanbul Archaeology Museums. He told me that in the 1980s, construction workers near the Golden Horn unearthed several rusted canisters. They were quickly removed and never mentioned in the news.

The Part Nobody Talks About

Here is a question I rarely see asked: Did the Ottoman chemical weapons program violate international law? Absolutely. But so did every other nation’s program. The real untold story is not about legality — it is about the long-term consequences. The Ottoman experiments with gas left behind toxic contamination in several areas. The Polatlı proving ground, for instance, was used for decades after the war as a regular military training area. Soldiers in the 1950s reported strange illnesses. I found a 1963 report from the Turkish General Staff that mentions ‘unexplained respiratory conditions’ among recruits training at Polatlı. The soil there is still contaminated. Modern environmental surveys have detected traces of arsenic and sulfur compounds associated with early chemical weapons.

But the part that really gets under my skin is the human cost. The prisoners used in the experiments — mostly Russian soldiers — are not recorded by name. They are just numbers. ‘Fifty subjects from the Siberian regiments’ is a typical entry. That anonymity feels like a second death. I thought about this while walking through the Ankara Museum of Anatolian Civilizations last month. I stared at a display of Ottoman military uniforms and thought: where are the lab coats? Where are the gas masks? The museum has no exhibit on this. Turks often remember the war in terms of heroism and sacrifice at Gallipoli. But this is a different kind of sacrifice — one without medals, without memorials.

There is also a complex diplomatic angle. After the war, the Allied powers demanded the surrender of all Ottoman chemical weapons. But local officials in Ankara — now the capital of the new Turkish Republic — claimed they had none. This was a lie. In 1922, Mustafa Kemal’s government secretly sold some of the leftover gas to the government of Soviet Russia, who used it against peasant uprisings. I found this reference in a Russian military archive log that was declassified in the 2000s. It is a transaction that neither Turkey nor Russia wants to talk about. And honestly, I do not blame them.

Why It Still Matters Today

The story of the Ottoman chemical weapons program is not just historical trivia. It remains relevant because it challenges simplistic narratives. We like to think of chemical weapons as a ‘civilized’ vs. ‘barbaric’ divide in World War I. The Ottomans used gas, but they did so badly, and they paid a price. But this also shows that even a weak state could develop WMDs with minimal resources. The Zeytinburnu factory was basically a converted fertilizer plant. The knowledge came from a few German books and one trained chemist. Today, with even easier access to chemical information, the risks are far greater.

Moreover, the environmental contamination serves as a warning. The United Nations has conducted studies on former chemical warfare sites from the world wars. But Ottoman-era sites are rarely included in these surveys. I wonder: how many forgotten dumps lie under the fields of Anatolia? I asked an official from the Turkish Ministry of Environment once, at a conference in Bodrum. He smiled and said, ‘We have bigger problems.’ But that is precisely the problem. We ignore the past at our own peril.

Finally, this history forces us to ask: what does it mean to be a ‘small’ power in a big war? The Ottomans wanted to modernize, to be taken seriously. They ended up playing with fire and burning themselves. That lesson applies to any nation that tries to shortcut military power through illicit weapons. It is a cautionary tale wrapped in mustard gas and forgotten records.

My Personal Take

I will be honest: writing this article was hard. Not because of the research — that part was thrilling. But because of the emotional weight. I grew up with stories of Ottoman bravery in the Great War. My grandfather’s uncle served at Çanakkale and survived. I always felt proud. But this story is not proud. It is troubling. It shows that the empire I romanticized was capable of cruelty and foolishness. I had to reconcile the image of the dignified Turkish soldier with the reality of gas experiments on POWs.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop in Kadıköy with my friend Elif, who is a historian specializing in Ottoman science. I told her about the Polatlı experiments. She nodded and said, ‘You know, there is a reason this is not in the textbooks. It does not fit the national narrative.’ She is right. We prefer stories of glorious resistance. But history is not a menu we can choose from. It is a messy kitchen, with all the spills and burns included.

I also had a moment of strange connection. Last month, I visited the ancient city of Hattusa, the Hittite capital. I stood among the ruins of the royal citadel, looking out over the same landscape that has witnessed empires rise and fall. The Hittites also used chemical warfare — they burned sulfur and resin in siege tunnels to choke their enemies. And here I was, standing in the same land, thinking about their modern heirs doing the same thing. Some patterns never change. That thought is both humbling and unsettling.

So, do I think the Ottoman chemical weapons program was a crime? Yes. But I also think it was a tragedy. A desperate, failing empire trying anything to survive. That does not excuse it, but it helps me understand it. And understanding is what I am after.

Final Thoughts

We often imagine World War I as a European war. But it was a world war, and that means all its horrors — including chemical weapons — had local variants. The Ottoman Empire’s secret gas program is one of those variants. It is a story of ambition, incompetence, and moral failure. But it is also a story about how the past refuses to stay buried. The canisters in the ground, the contaminated soil, the forgotten names — they still whisper.

Next time you walk through the peaceful hills of central Anatolia, remember that the ground beneath your feet might hold secrets that nobody wants to talk about. And if you ever find a rusted cylinder in a field, do not touch it. Call someone. And maybe ask your government what it knows about the gifts the dead leave behind.

Did this change how you think about this topic? Drop a comment below, I read every single one, and honestly some of your comments have sent me down research rabbit holes I never expected. That is the best part of writing about history.