| rdfs:comment | - After the Mahdi retreated into Kordofan in 1881 he started to raise an army there and in Darfur. A force of 4,000 was sent to capture him, but it was ambushed near El Obeid and destroyed, and all of its equipment captured. The Mahdi's forces had grown spectacularly, and by 1883 British sources placed their size at 200,000, although that is almost certainly an overestimate.
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| abstract | - After the Mahdi retreated into Kordofan in 1881 he started to raise an army there and in Darfur. A force of 4,000 was sent to capture him, but it was ambushed near El Obeid and destroyed, and all of its equipment captured. The Mahdi's forces had grown spectacularly, and by 1883 British sources placed their size at 200,000, although that is almost certainly an overestimate. The Egyptian Governor, Raouf Pasha, decided that the only solution to the growing rebellion was a fight, and against the advice of his British advisors started to raise an army of his own. He hired a number of European officers to lead his force, placing them under the command of William "Billy" Hicks, a retired Colonel who had experience in India and Abyssinia. Hicks' force was composed mostly of Egyptian soldiers who had been imprisoned after fighting in the Urabi Revolt. They were released for service in Sudan and accordingly showed little inclination to fight. They initially stayed near Khartoum and met small portions of the Mahdist forces on April 29, near the fort of Kawa, on the Nile, beating them off without too much trouble. Similar skimishes followed over the next few weeks. Later that summer they heard that the Mahdi himself was besieging El Obeid, a small town set up by the Egyptians some years earlier and now the capital of Kordofan. The Egyptian officials decided to capture him and, despite Hicks' reluctance, planned an expedition from their current location at Duem on the Nile to El Obeid, about 200 miles away.
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