Early Life and Ottoman Army Career
Ja’far Pasha al-Askari was born on September 15, 1885 in Baghdad, when it was still part of the Ottoman Empire, the fourth of five brothers with one sister. His father, Mustafa Abdul Rahman Al-Mudarris, was a colonel in the Ottoman Army. Ja’far attended the Military College in Baghdad before transferring to the Military College in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul where he graduated in 1904 as a Second Lieutenant. He was then sent to the Sixth Army stationed in Baghdad. Ja’far then was sent to Berlin, Germany from 1910-1912 to train and study as part of an Ottoman initiative to reform the army through the selection of officers via competition. Al-Askari stayed in this program until ordered back to the Ottoman Empire to fight in the war between the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan States.
After the war with the Balkan states ended in 1913, Ja’far was made an instructor at the Officer Training College in Aleppo, but eight month later passed qualifications for the Staff Officers’ College in Istanbul.
Read more about this topic: Jafar Al-Askari
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, army and/or career:
“He had long before indulged most unfavourable sentiments of our fellow-subjects in America. For, as early as 1769,... he had said of them, “Sir, they are a race of convicts, and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging.””
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)
“I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you—it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman army had a name of his own,—because we have not supposed that he had a character of his own.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)