In 1884, a Sudanese Islamic religious leader and self proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, planned and executed a series of attacks that left a British general, William Hicks, and thousands of ill-trained Egyptian soldiers dead at the hands of his supporters who he called the Ansār.

Gordon and his aide, Colonel John Donald Hamill Stewart, carried orders from both governments to evacuate the town from the Mahdi.

One of the forts was near the towns of Kosha and Ginnis, in northern Sudan, where a detachment of Cameron Highlanders and Egyptian-Sudanese troops from the Ninth Sudanese Battalion were stationed.

On the Nile, the steamer Lotus, which had mounted a Gardner gun, reported that a large body of Mahdists were moving out of Ginnis in the direction of Grenfell's column.

[2] In the ensuing skirmish, that detachment was forced to withdraw, but the Durham Light Infantry moved forward and repulsed the Mahdist attack.

After the Mounted Infantry took the Atab Defile with a bayonet charge, a general pursuit began, but Blake halted his men and the Mahdists fled to the desert.

As the First Egyptian Battalion marched through Kosha, the men noticed that some of the Mahdists, probably seeking shelter during the retreat from the town, had holed up, with their weapons, in a house.

The Anglo-Egyptian victory at Ginnis effectively ended the First Sudan Campaign and the first third of the Mahdist War, which had begun with the destruction of an Egyptian force near Fashoda in 1881.