This paper explores the reorganization of the terrain of the Sinai Desert by Ottoman military authorities during the First World War, with a particular emphasis on its social- environmental aspects. Ottoman governors had taken several initiatives to expand state control along the southern edges of Palestine before the Great War. In particular, they had sought to reorganize this region starting with the early twentieth century for the purposes of penetrating into Bedouin life, disciplining the nomadic population, and building up the security of the Ottoman-Egyptian frontier against an encroaching British Empire. However, the exigencies of war kindled further the ambitions of Ottoman military governors to expand control over the region and its topography. A particular example of this shift in policy was Beersheba, which became a strategic military point and the main base for the Ottoman army during the war. However, Ottoman attempts at colonizing the landscape had extended farther south of Beersheba to the Sinai Desert. In the case of operations along the Sinai Desert and the Suez Canal, Ottoman forces attempted to re-engineer nature to gain a military advantage through the digging of water wells and the construction of military bases, railways, roads, tracks, hospitals, telegraph lines and even the growing gardens, plantations and eucalyptus trees in the arid region. This paper, in other words, deals with how the Ottoman military governors perceived the environment and landscape of Sinai Desert as a ‘natural enemy’ in the context of war, and how these perceptions led the Ottoman and German military authorities to take a position towards changing the landscape and reorganizing space that prioritized military requirements over civil needs. By focusing on engineering projects in the desert, this paper aims to address the social- environmental aspects of the “occupation of the desert” that impacted the territories and populations beyond the Sinai Desert and reached to the Anatolian provinces of the empire. These projects in the desert required huge amounts of labor and animal forces to be accomplished, and relied on natural resource extraction. Thus, this paper particularly addresses the recruitment of (forced) labor and the requisitioning of camels and horses from the populations of Greater Syria and Anatolia, and the extraction of timber from the forests of Lebanon and Palestine by tracing the larger question of how Ottoman war mobilization shaped the relations between the state and different classes of Ottoman society.