His father was Şehzade Mehmed Selaheddin, son of Sultan Murad V and Reftarıdil Kadın, and his mother was Jalefer Hanım.
The Palace served as an enforced residence to his grandfather Sultan Murad, who had been deposed in 1876, and replaced by his brother, Abdul Hamid II.
[6] In April 1918, he was appointed General Commander of the African Corps,[8][10] when it was decided to send him to Tripolitania with a German submarine to organise local resistance against the Italians.
Enver Pasha took care to appoint Lieutenant Colonel Nafız Bey, one of his confdents, as Osman Fuad's Chief of Staff, given the young prince's inexperience in command.
[8] The arrival of the prince had a bolstered effect on the loyalties of local tribal leaders in resistanting the Italian occupation in Libya.
[6] A year earlier, her sister Nebile Emine Hanım married Şehzade Abdurrahim Hayri, son of Sultan Abdul Hamid II.
While there he received a letter via military courier from Mustafa Kemal Pasha, his former friend and fellow veteran of the Ottoman campaigns of the First World War.
While Marshal Erwin Rommel was in Libya, he studied the operations carried out there by Osman and subsequently imitated these tactics in his own desert warfare.
Appreciating that he had commanded the loyalty of the Libyan people, the British offered to make him a Colonel in their army and to award him full powers if he agreed to conduct a commando campaign against the Germans there.
So he instructed his son, Ömer Faruk, and Osman Fuad to request the money for the burial from Jefferson Cohn & Ranz, the company that had been officially appointed to reclaim the properties of the Ottoman family on their behalf.
After which, Seniha Sultan was buried in the cemetery of the Sulaymaniyya Takiyya, Damascus, Syria, alongside other members of her family who had died after 1924.
[16] In 1931, he and his wife Kerime played an important role in enabling his niece Princess Niloufer's marriage to Prince Moazzam Jah, second son of Mir Osman Ali Khan, the last Nizam of Hyderabad.
[19] On the death of his elder brother, Ahmed Nihad, on 4 June 1954, Osman Fuad assumed the position of head of the Ottoman family.
Unlike his brother, Osman Fuad chose to adopt an extremely modern lifestyle, and was known to be fond of his pleasures and to have a natural love for life.
As a young Imperial Ottoman Prince, he had been popular and well-loved, and had often been seen driving in an open-topped Mercedes in Istanbul, always dressed impeccably.
He possessed a large number of medals and decorations awarded for his courage and service to his country, and which covered his chest when he wore his dress uniform.
At the time, Osman Fuad was living in Room Number 6 at the Hotel Royal Bretagne in Montparnasse, Paris.
Who would have thought that General Prince Osman Fuad, the former commander of the Ottoman army in Tripoli, would one day be thrown out of a third-rate hotel in Paris as he could not afford to pay the bill?
How shameful that the Ottoman family should be living out their days far from their native country, forced to take refuge in foreign lands.