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he was not troubled by serving in the Israeli army.
    â€˜When the British were here,’ he had replied, ‘we served the British as policemen. Then in 1948 some younger men moved into the Israeli army. I did not plan a career in the army, but I am from Rehaniye, a small village. There is no factory, and all there was was the police or the army: what we call security jobs. I did not enjoy the war, fighting the Palestinians. We have a problem because we are Muslims but we are a part of Israel, and so we do our best to be part of the community, but we do not like the war between the Palestinians and Israel.’
    This loyalty to their new homes had been a characteristic of the Circassians ever since the tragedy of 1864. Circassians fought for the Ottoman Turks until their state collapsed after the First World War.
    When the sultan was deposed, they fought for the Turkish Republic against the Greeks and the occupying powers, although their leader, Ethem, received no thanks for it. He was driven out by Ataturk, who disliked rivals and accused him of being a traitor.
    With the Ottoman Empire shattered, they also served their new masters in Jordan, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere. They earned a reputation as tough soldiers to fight alongside or against. One Sir Gerald Clauson wrote a memo to the British Foreign Office in 1949 about his time fighting with the Arab Legion – of Lawrence of Arabia fame – against the Ottoman state.
    The Circassians in Jordan, he said, were ‘the best fighters in that area, and, generally speaking, a pretty tough lot’.
    He reminisced about a Circassian officer commanding an Ottoman force near the Iraqi city of Fallujah who refused to surrender until the British sent a plane over and dropped artillery shells on him. ‘The
gentleman sent us a message to say that honour was satisfied now that the angel of death was hovering over him and that he was willing to surrender. I saw him when he was brought in in a thick black uniform in the height of summer and thought he was one of the toughest and most attractive creatures that I had met in the course of the campaign.’
    His note formed part of a memo suggesting that the Circassians might be trained up as an anti-communist force to be secretly despatched from the Middle East to fight Moscow. The idea apparently originated from émigré Circassians from the Soviet Union. The suggestion was rejected, as likely to cause severe embarrassment if the local Arab governments found out about it, but does show the regard with which the world viewed the Circassians’ prowess.
    The plan would probably have failed, however, for the simple reason that Circassian loyalty does not know borders. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the local Circassians were equally loyal to the Russian state and had been since before 1864, and would have resisted insurgents. Regiments of Circassian cavalry were raised from the region of Kabarda for all the nineteenth century, and the tribesmen in their national costume regularly formed the honour guard for the emperor, as they do now for the king of Jordan.
    With great irony, Alexander II – whose armies destroyed the Circassians and conquered the Caucasus – had a Circassian bodyguard in 1881 when he rode through St Petersburg. As he passed, an anarchist hurled a bomb at his carriage. The bomb bounced off, exploding on the street and fatally injuring one of his Circassian guards. This emperor, who had so uncaringly sent the Circassians into exile and seized their homeland, was now overcome with compassion for this individual. He descended from his carriage, presenting an irresistible target to another anarchist who had kept a bomb in reserve. The bomb was thrown and the emperor killed, victim of his regard for a loyal Circassian.
    The Circassians fought for the tsars again in the First World War, raising the Caucasus Cavalry Division even though they, as Muslims, were exempt from conscription.