Battle of Kafr Tutha (658)
battle that took place during the First Fitna between the forces of Ali and Mu'awiya I in the Jazira region
The Battle of Kafr Tutha was a military confrontation in the region of Al-Jazira between the forces of Mu'awiya I under Abd al-Rahman ibn Qubath and the forces of the fourth Rashidun caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib under Kumayl ibn Ziyad. The conflict resulted in the victory of Ali's forces.
Background
Mu'awiya had taken a number of measures to strengthen his position during the First Fitna. He refused to integrate any personnel outside of his stronghold of Greater Syria into his army even if they had expressed support for him. In contrast to the critics of Uthman, there were also people in Basra and Kufa who considered Ali's authority as illegitimate and defected to the Umayyads, however despite his unwillingness to recruit them, Mu'awiya enlisted the seceders while keeping them separate from the Syrian army by establishing garrison cities in Jund Qinnarsin, originally a part of Jund Hims, to accommodate them. Al-Jazira and Mosul were the other regions where they settled. The Banu-al Arqam who opposed Ali's rule in Kufa defected to Mu'awiya and settled in Al-Jazira.
Conflict
Kumayl ibn Ziyad was stationed at Hit during Sufyan ibn Awf's raid on Anbar. Kumayl proceeded to Circesium after stationing a deputy in charge of Hit to confront a group of raiders who he heard had agreed to assault the city. When Sufyan's army approached Hit, many of the troops stationed at Hit began fleeing, leaving only fifty troops to defend Hit.
The public source identifies “Battle of Kafr Tutha (658)” as battle that took place during the First Fitna between the forces of Ali and Mu'awiya I in the Jazira region. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Battle, Kafr and Tutha.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q134282965. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Battle of Kafr Tutha (658)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.