to convince most of the Ottoman officers and troops to defect. In April 1884, having fought for eighteen months against the Islamist insurgents, Lupton was compelled to surrender to Kurkusawi in Deim Zubeir. After this victory Kurkusawi soon engaged in fighting against local Southern groups. However, he was recalled, following the death of the Mahdist leader Muhammad Ahmad in June 1885, and Bahr El Ghazal was abandoned by Ahmad's successors. Thus, the settlement was largely left to itself for almost one decade and "reduced to an ill-presided collection of tumbledown buildings of raw bricks", but was then all the more re-elevated to the global stage of imperialist competition around the "Scramble for Africa": Belgian Colonial Expeditions (1892-1894) According to Belgian records, it was a request in 1892 from Faki Ahmed, the Sultan of Wadai, for assistance against the Mahdist forces, which provided the occasion for the colonial strategists in Brussels to intervene for their "intention" to expand the Congo Free State up to Deim Zubeir, with the support of proxy troops from their Zande allies, who had started pushing into Western Bahr El Ghazal already two years earlier. In 1892, an expedition under Felix Foulon marched towards Deim Zubeir and signed treaties with a number of local chiefs. According to some sources, he did reach Deim Zubeir, but other accounts claim that he did not. A second mission under Xavier-Ernest Donckier de Donceel marched towards Deim Zubeir in April 1894, but retreated from there under pressure from Mahdist forces. A few months later, in August 1894, Belgium's King Leopold II ceded all territorial claims over Bahr El Ghazal to France. During the withdrawal, the Belgian officer Florent Colmant "wanted to satisfy a long-cherished wish of seeing with his own eyes Deim Zubeir", reached the place with some 80 troops on 24 December and left the next day: "he only saw half-ruined houses of sunbaked bricks." French Colonial Expeditions (1897-1900) Two years later, French military missions of Senegalese troops under Victor Liotard penetrated into Bahr-al-Ghazal from what is now the CAR, and took possession of Deim Zubeir in April 1897. Santandrea noted with reference to the account of one member of the French mission that they found "an abandoned place, where one does not even see ruins, except traces of a trench (ditch) about 100 metres by side". The colonial officer Adolphe Louis Cureau founded a new post and renamed Deim