After a wave of new funding from the Belgian government in 1895, King Leopold ordered an expedition to be led into the Lado Enclave to expel the Mahdists and fortify Rejaf as a strategic military and trading outpost.

The rebels, numbering two thousand, had established a two-mile line across a range of hills, giving their numerically superior forces a tactical advantage over Chaltin's eight hundred men.

The victory, achieved at relatively little cost, cleared the Lado Enclave of Mahdists and secured Rejaf as a Belgian base for future operations in the surrounding territories and along the Nile.

[3][4] The establishment of the Mahdist State had provided the context for European powers to commence the invasion and colonization of Sudan, in which King Leopold desperately wanted to take part in order to expand his Congolese empire.

[5] However, a direct military campaign into the area was not an option; Leopold would not have been able to get permission from either the French or the British according to the rules laid out in the 1884 Berlin Conference, especially considering both nations were looking to annex Sudan themselves.

[3] King Leopold II therefore decided to disguise his campaign into the Sudan as an expeditionary force sent to reclaim the Lado Enclave from the Mahdists, although he intended to give his commanders covert orders to continue their advance far past the boundaries of Belgian territory, first to Fashoda and then on to Khartoum.

[7] The second, under Belgian war hero Baron Dhanis, was a much larger force of over three thousand men, mostly natives from the Tetela ethnic group, and was to take a treacherous path through the jungle to the north.

[10] The mutiny broke out in the advance guard, which had been pushed the hardest of those in the expedition, but soon spread to the main army, where the massively outnumbered Belgian officers were detained by their men and killed.

[13] After two days of waiting for the supply train and rear guard to arrive, a Mahdist force approached the Belgian camp in the evening of 16 February, and prepared to attack.

At seven o'clock, Belgian scouts sighted the two-thousand-strong Mahdist force assembled along a two-mile line that spanned a range of hills between the Nile and a parallel river.

[17] Although concrete casualty numbers are unavailable for either side, sources agree that Belgian-Congolese losses were relatively light, while several hundred Mahdist soldiers were killed in the two actions.

[11] After securing Rejaf, Chaltin and his column marched to the northernmost point of the Lado Enclave in order to establish a Belgian presence in the area and prevent Mahdist reentry.

But frequent raids outside of Lado territory by Belgian forces based in Rejaf caused alarm and suspicion among British and French officials wary of Leopold's imperial ambitions.

[20] In 1910, following the death of the Belgian king in December 1909, British authorities reclaimed the Lado Enclave as per the Anglo-Congolese treaty signed in 1894, and added the territory to Anglo-Egyptian Sudan.