Thousands of Australians and New Zealanders gathered in northwestern Turkey
Thousands of Australians and New Zealanders gathered in northwestern Turkey early on Friday to honour the memory of soldiers killed in the 1915 Gallipoli battle, one of the bloodiest in World War I. The dawn ceremony marks the time of the first landings of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzac) at the Gallipoli peninsula in the ill-fated Allied campaign to take the Dardanelles Strait from the Ottoman Empire.In the ensuing eight months of fighting, about 11 500 Anzac troops were killed, fighting alongside British, Indian and French soldiers.
Turkey, the successor of the Ottoman Empire, puts its own losses at some 86 000. Every April, thousands of Australians and New Zealanders, many of them young backpackers, make the pilgrimage to the historic peninsula to commemorate the gruelling battle that was their first real test of World War One.
Australian Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon, New Zealand's Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Turkish officials participated in the solemn service. Fitzgibbon paid tribute also to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who at the time led the Ottoman forces as a young lieutenant colonel and was to become the founder of modern Turkey eight years later
Turkish soldiers read out, both in Turkish and English, Ataturk's memorable message to the mothers of foreign soldiers killed at Gallipoli: "Your sons have now become also our sons... They are now lying in the soil of a friendly country." The national anthems of Australia, New Zealand and Turkey were played after prayers and officials from the three countries laid wreaths at Anzac Cove. Hundreds of thousands of Australians and New Zealanders are honouring their war dead on Friday at dawn services across the two nations and at battlefields around the globe where their soldiers have fallen. 26/04/08
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