In the course of WWI, the French recruited over 300,000 soldiers from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco for service on the Western Front. North African soldiers took part in some of the worst fighting of the war, suffering high casualty rates on behalf of their colonial occupier. Thousands more were taken prisoner, where they were interned in a special German POW camp for Muslim prisoners. In the Zossen Camp, Muslim prisoners were subjected to intense Jihad propaganda and encouraged to volunteer for the Ottoman Army. At least 3000 North Africans chose to join the Ottoman army and were posted to Mesopotamia. When the British occupied Baghdad in 1917, the North Africans found themselves prisoners of war for the second time. This paper follows the experiences of these North African soldiers, to examine the effectiveness of wartime religious propaganda, North African loyalties to such alien masters as the French Republic and the Ottoman Empire, and the massive dislocations in the Middle East and North Africa that resulted from the Great War. It draws on British, French and American archival sources, the Arabic war poetry of North African soldiers, and references to Maghribi soldiers in contemporary memoirs and diaries.