Conflict With Egypt and Nafusa
Ibrahim II entered into a conflict with the ambitious Turkic dynasty of the Tulunids, who had seized control of Egypt in 868, and Syria and the Hejaz in 878. In 879-80, while the Tulunid emir Ahmad ibn Tulun was away in the east, his hot-headed son al-Abbas ibn Ahmad, without his father's permission, decided to invade Ifriqiya and led a large Egyptian army west. Upon reaching Barqa, al-Abbas dispatched a message, falsely claiming that he had credentials from the Abbasid Caliph ordering Ibrahim to step down and hand the governorship of Ifriqiya over to him. The Egyptian army reached as far as Tripoli, and defeated the local Aghlabid governor Muhammad ibn Qurhub. But the Egyptian army was defeated in turn in 880 by the Nafusa, a Berber Kharijite (Ibadite) tribe, allied with the Rustamids of Tahert, which had carried on an independent existence in the Djebel Nafusa mountains southwest of Tripoli for over a century. Rushing south from Tunisia, Ibrahim II arrived just in time to seize the Tulunid baggage train and its ample war chest, which proved a fortuitous bolster to the Aghlabid treasury.
Following the assassination of the Tulunid emir Khumarawaih in 896, Egypt fell into chaos. In 896-97, Ibrahim II led an Ifriqiyan campaign to recover and secure his eastern borders against Tulunid Egypt. Some of the grimmer tales of Ibrahim II's brutality arise from this expedition. Reaching Tripoli, Ibrahim II had the governor Muhammad, his own cousin, executed and impaled (ostensibly because he heard the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tamid had spoken favorably of him). That same year, he attacked and defeated the Ibadite Nafusa at a great battle at Manu (south of Gabès), putting an end to their independent imamate. In the aftermath, Ibrahim II is reported to have set up a throne and ordered the Nafusa prisoners paraded before him one by one so that he could kill each prisoner himself with his lance. He is said to have personally executed 500 prisoners this way before he got tired. At Ajdabiya, on the borders of Barqa, he is reported to have cooked and eaten the heads of fifteen of his enemies.
Read more about this topic: Ibrahim II Of Ifriqiya
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