Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what progress they have made in identifying the graves of more than 10,000 Egyptians who died in the service of the British Empire during World War One, including those in the Egyptian Labour Corps.

In April 2021, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) published its Special Committee’s report into historical inequalities in commemoration. The CWGC continues to make good progress against the report’s ten recommendations. Documents recently discovered by the CWGC’s dedicated research team put the number of personnel from the Egyptian Labour and the Camel Transport Corps who lost their lives in the Middle East during the First World War at just over 15,550. Very few of these were known to have marked graves and the names of the majority were, and are, unknown to the CWGC.

Although one aspect of the CWGC’s response to the report is to search for missing burials (and where they can be located and marked, they will be), the CWGC is initially focused on the discovery of names so that individuals’ service and sacrifice can be properly recorded and acknowledged. The CWGC have established that records and named lists of Egyptian personnel were passed by the British Armed Forces to the then Egyptian authorities so that pensions and compensation could be paid. The CWGC hope that these records might yet be found in Egyptian archival collections and the CWGC is making progress in tracking these records down.