British and Egyptian forces invaded Sudan and suppressed the Mahdi rebellion in 1898. The body of Caliph Abdullah Abdullah, who was killed in battle at Omdurman on the other side of Khartoum.

 　　After British General Gordon was defeated and beheaded in 1885, the British gave up control of the Sudan for about 10 years. Eventually, General Kitchener invaded by rail and thoroughly suppressed the Mahdi rebellion in 1898. In the foreground is the corpse of Caliph Abdullah Abdullah, who was killed in battle at Omdurman on the other side of Khartoum. The Mahdi's Rebellion was an Islamic uprising against the Egyptian government in Sudan that broke out in 1881 and was suppressed in 1898. Mahdism, an eschatological branch of Islam, indoctrinated Muhammad Ahmad with the idea that the Mahdi, whom he called the Guided One, would restore the glory of Islam on earth.

　　In 1822, Khartoum became the capital of Egyptian-occupied Sudan and a distant outpost of the Ottoman Empire.Egyptian control of Sudan was accompanied by the imposition of high rates of taxation, the expropriation of slaves from the local population, and absolute domination of the Sudanese trade, which destroyed livelihoods and indigenous customs. In the process of conscripting Sudanese, tens of thousands of Sudanese men and women lost their lives on the march from the Sudanese interior to Aswan, Egypt; in 1863, the anti-slavery campaign of the new Egyptian governor Ismail began, intensifying unrest among the Sudanese for whom human trafficking was essential. Sudanese Arab leaders saw the British efforts as undermining Arab rule by Muslims.

　　On June 29, 1881, Muhammad Ahmad, a Sudanese Muslim cleric, called himself Mahdi. Disillusioned with decades of Egyptian rule and with renewed resentment toward the British, Ahmad soon turned it into a religious political movement. by 1882, the Mahdist army was in full control of the areas surrounding Khartoum. in 1883, a British-Egyptian Joint Military Expeditionary Force, commanded by Colonel William Hicks, launched a counterattack against the Mahdist army. The battle was a lengthy siege, and the British-Egyptian forces defending Khartoum were finally overrun by the Mahdist army on January 28, 1885. General Charles Gordon, commander of the British-Egyptian forces, was beheaded in the counterattack.

　　In June 1885, Ahmad, a self-proclaimed Mahdi, died. The Mahdist movement was quickly dissolved as infighting broke out between rival claims to leadership. 11,000 Mahdists were killed and 16,000 wounded in the final battle at Karari on September 2, 1898. the Mahdist state officially ended in November 1899. ten years earlier, CharlesKitchener dug up Ahmad's body and pulled out his fingernails in revenge for the death of General Gordon.