In late April 1916, Townshend came up with a desperate plan to bribe the Ottomans into letting him and his men leave Kut, an offer that Halil Pasha took up, engaging in talks with Captain Thomas Edward Lawrence of the Cairo Intelligence Staff, before publicising the British offer to humiliate them.Knight, Paul The British Army in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918, Jefferson: McFarland, 2013 page 77. Halil Pasha knew the Anglo-Indian garrison was starving to death, and he had the upper hand. Having run out of food for the Garrison, General Townshend yielded Kut-al-Amara to the besieging Turks on 29 April 1916, the 6th (Poona) Division surrendering en masse. During the siege, the 6th Division had lost 1,746 men between 9 December 1915 – 29 April 1916.Perry, James Arrogant Armies, Edison: Castle Books, 2005 page 269. The Division ceased to exist at this point and was removed from the British Empire's Order of Battle for the remainder of the conflict. When negotiating the surrender of Kut to General Halil Pasha, Townshend's main concern was to make certain that the Ottomans would not mistreat Spot (who they promised they would send back to Britain, a promise that Halil Pasha kept). Townshend found it deeply humiliating to surrender to a Turkish Muslim like Halil Pasha rather than the German Lutheran Goltz as he would have preferred. Major Barber described the victors as: "Their uniforms were ragged and patched in all directions. Their boots were worn beyond hope of repair, and they were generally the most disreputable-looking specimens of a modern army. But they were good-natured fellows-broad, strong as oxen, with plenty of bone, ruddy complexions and in many cases blue eyes and ginger whiskers. They looked like what they were, I suppose-just easy-going, illiterate Anatolian peasantry". The news of the fall of Kut was received with enormous sadness all over the British Empire while prompting jubilation all over the Ottoman Empire with Enver Pasha telling a vast cheering crowd waving the Ottoman flags in Istanbul that Allah was truly with the Ottomans as He had humbled the British first at Gallipol and now at Kut.Gingeras, Ryan The Fall of the Sultanate: The Great War and the End of the Ottoman Empire 1908–1922, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2106 page 130. The German Emperor Wilhlem II praised Townshend's defeat in a press statement as a "shining monument to German-Turkish brotherhood in arms", claiming that it was Goltz who had done most of the work at Kut, a statement which offended his Ottoman allies who disliked the implication of the Kaiser's press statement that they would have failed at Kut on their own, and needed German officers to lead them to victory. All of the people of Kut who were deemed to have collaborated with the British during the siege were publicly hanged as an example to those who would betray the Ottoman Empire.Knight, Paul The British Army in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918, Jefferson: McFarland, 2013 page 78.
