Occupation of Ma'an  The Occupation of Ma'an was the post-World War I occupation of the Sanjak of Ma'an, which straddled the regions of Syria and Arabia, by members of the Hashemite family, who came to power in various regions of the Near East and Arabia; they were King Hussein in the Kingdom of Hejaz, Emir Faisal representing the Arab government in Damascus (Occupied Enemy Territory Administration East and later the Arab Kingdom of Syria) and Abdullah, who was to become Emir of Transjordan. The region includes the governorates of Ma'an and Aqaba, today in Jordan, as well as the area which was to become a large part of the Israeli Southern District, including the city of Eilat. The matter developed into an international dispute between the modern states of Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and was also relevant to the inclusion of the Negev region into what became the modern country state of Israel. Benjamin Shwadran, in his history of Jordan, described the matter as "one of the most confused chapters in that country's history"; in question was to whom did the Ma'an sanjak (including the towns of Ma'an and Aqaba) legitimately belong. In June 1934 the Permanent Mandates Commission asked the British for "information as to the line of demarcation between the vilayet of the Hejaz and that of Syria in the time of the Ottoman Administration"; the report was delivered in the 1934 British Mandatory annual report and stated that:  According to Hasan Kayali, in July 1910, the time of the Young Turks and the second constitutional experiment, the Ottomans changed the administrative status of Medina from the sanjak of the Hejaz Vilayet to the independent sanjak with a view to strengthening control from the center. In 1915, the Ottoman authorities, for military reasons, pushed the southern boundary of the Syria Vilayet far into the historical Hejaz region, up to a line from al-Wajh to Mada'in Saleh (al-Ula). The international law professor Suzanne Lalonde writes that the Sanjak of Ma'an was part of the Vilayet of Damascus until 1906 when responsibility was transferred to the Vilayet of Hejaz. According to professor Gideon Biger, in 1908 the Ottoman regime had decided to change its own internal division, and to move the district of Ma’an from the province of Hijaz to the province of E-Sham (Syria)(the Vilayet of Damascus), which was centered on Damascus, although it is not clear whether the move was actually implemented.