The last Turkish veteran of the First World War, Yakup Satar, who has died at the age of 110, fought at the Second Battle of Kut in the Mesopotamian campaign. He was captured there by the British in February 1917, as Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Maude’s British and Indian army drove the Ottoman Empire’s forces back up the Tigris from Basra towards Baghdad.

The victory avenged a humiliating defeat for the British the previous year, in which a British division under General Sir Charles Townshend had been surrounded by the Turks in Kut and forced to surrender on April 29, 1916, after a five-month siege in which thousands of its soldiers perished from disease and dehydration. Several thousand more died in captivity.

Unlike Townshend, the Ottoman commander in Kut in 1917, Karabekir Bey, did not let his forces become trapped in the town but retreated to Baghdad. Maude’s troops captured what was then an important Ottoman provincial capital without a fight on March 10, 1917, several thousand Turkish troops being made prisoner in the confusion of the rapid Anglo-Indian advance.

Yakap Satar was born in Crimea in 1898 into a Tartar family. His father, Zeki Bey, had been one of the Tartar chieftains who had fought for independence from the Russian Empire.

In 1915 Satar enlisted in the Army of the Ottoman Empire, which had entered the war on the side of Germany the previous autumn. After basic training in Constantinople (Istanbul) he was selected as part of a special 200-strong force secretly trained by German instructors in the techniques of gas warfare. This was kept quiet from the Turkish authorities, and when Satar and 50 of his comrades from the unit were sent to the Mesopotamian front, orders reached them from Constantinople forbidding the use of gas.

By this time British and Indian troops under Maude, which had arrived by sea via the Persian Gulf had in December 1916 begun advancing up the Tigris from Basra, driving the Turks before them. Now fighting as infantry, Satar and his colleagues were among Turkish forces forced out of a succession of Turkish strongpoint along the river by their numerically superior enemy. Finally, in February 1917 Maude’s forces began their attack on Kut where Satar was captured on the 23rd of the month.

Released from captivity after the end of the First World War, Satar joined the forces of the Turkish National Movement under Mustafa Kemal in Anatolia which fought against the terms of the Allied partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. From 1919 to 1922 he fought in the Turkish War of Independence and the Greco-Turkish War which culminated in the declaration of the Turkish Republic in October 1923.

Satar settled in Anatolia at Eskisehir, 100 miles west of Ankara, where he married and had six children. Latterly, in failing health, he had lived with his daughter in the city.

Yakup Satar, Turkish veteran of the First World War, was born on March 11, 1898. He died on April 2, 2008, aged 110