Thousands of Australians and New Zealanders on Saturday held a dawn service in north-western Turkey to commemorate the 94th anniversary of an ill-fated World War I campaign in which thousands of their compatriots were killed, the Anatolia news agency reported.
The service marked the first landings of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) at the Gallipoli peninsula in an Allied campaign to take the Dardanelles Straits from the Ottoman Empire. In the ensuing eight months of fighting, about 11,500 ANZAC troops were killed, fighting alongside British, Indian and French soldiers.
Turkey, the successor of the Ottoman Empire, puts its own losses at around 86,000. Each April, thousands of Australians and New Zealanders, many of them young backpackers, make the pilgrimage to the historic peninsula to commemorate the battle.