Enemy on the Euphrates (2 page)

Between July 1920 and February 1921, in the territory then known to the British as Mesopotamia – the modern state of Iraq – an Arab uprising occurred which came perilously close to inflicting a shattering defeat upon the British Empire. The story of this uprising is one which once engaged the closest of attention among the British public but over many decades slipped back into the mists of exclusively academic history, almost completely erased from the collective memory.
¹
And so it would have remained had it not been for the ill-fated US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Once the ‘insurgency’ against the subsequent occupation had begun, it wasn’t long before a much older, forgotten insurgency in Iraq came to light with journalists, historians and even functionaries of the US occupation drawing lessons and making comparisons – some appropriate, some less so – with that much earlier event.
²
At the same time some of those fighting the Americans and their allies in Iraq began to portray their own violent resistance to foreign intervention by referencing that armed struggle in which some of their grandparents might have participated.
³

To the vast majority of European and American historians of the twentieth-century Middle East, the ‘Arab Revolt’ has usually meant ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and the pro-British rebellion of the Sharif of Mecca and his sons against the Turks during the First World War. However, in reality, this pro-British ‘Arab Revolt’ was a fairly puny affair involving only a fraction of the Arab combatants taking part in the
anti-
British revolt which took place in Iraq a mere eighteen months after the end of the war.

Indeed, the insurrection in Iraq of 1920, measured in enemy combatant numbers, was the most serious armed uprising against British rule in the twentieth century. At the height of the rebellion the British estimated that around 131,000 Arabs were in arms against them. Estimates by Iraqi historians are considerably greater – in one account around 567,000.
⁴
By way of comparison, the British faced perhaps a maximum of 120,000 rebel fighters in the Kenyan ‘Mau Mau’ rebellion of 1952–6,
⁵
15,000 rebel combatants during the Irish war of independence 1919–21, around 10,000 ‘regular’ Arab fighters during the Palestine insurrection of 1936–9, a similar number of jihadis in the second ‘Mad Mullah’ rebellion in Somalia in 1907–20, 8,000 guerrillas of the Communist Malayan Races Liberation Army supported by around 30–40,000 civilian support and supply forces during the Malayan ‘Emergency’ of 1948–60, and a mere 300–500 Greek EOKA fighters during the Cyprus emergency of the 1950s. As for Lawrence’s pro-British Arab Revolt in 1916–18, the maximum number of Bedouin mobilised never exceeded 27,000, supported by around 12,000 deserters from the Ottoman army; and of the Bedouin, only a small minority actually took part in combat operations.
⁶

Moreover, unlike Lawrence’s ‘Arab Revolt’, the insurrection of 1920 was no affair of sporadic guerrilla fighting. It was a war: one in which a huge peasant army led by Shi‘i clerics, Baghdad notables, disaffected sheikhs and former Ottoman army officers and NCOs surrounded and besieged British garrisons with sandbagged entrenchments and bombarded them with captured artillery; where British columns and armoured trains were ambushed and destroyed; where well-armed British gunboats were burned or captured; a war in which the insurgents established their own system of government and administration in the ‘liberated zones’ centred on the two ‘holy’ cities of Najaf and Karbela’: a war which, at one stage, Britain came very close to losing and which was won only with the help of a massive infusion of Indian troops and, especially towards the end of the campaign, the widespread use of aircraft.

In addition to tracing the course of this great anti-colonial revolt, we also consider why it occurred and, in particular, why the epicentre
of the uprising against the British was on the second of the two great Mesopotamian rivers – the Euphrates. Political events in Baghdad also made an important contribution to the revolt and, at its height, some of the tribes to the west and north-east of the capital also joined the uprising; nevertheless, it was on the middle reaches of the Euphrates and in the two ‘holy’ cities of Najaf and Karbala’ that the British faced the most violent and sustained opposition. Conversely, large areas bordering the River Tigris remained largely unaffected by the events of 1920–21.

What was it, therefore, about the mid-Euphrates region which made its more than half a million inhabitants so bitterly opposed to the continuing British occupation of Iraq after the Great War had ended? To answer this question we need to explore the region’s social, religious and political characteristics and the specific experiences of its sheikhs, tribesmen and Muslim clergy during both the war and its immediate aftermath.
⁷

During the early stages of the First World War in the Middle East, this densely populated and predominantly Shi‘i part of Iraq became the major recruiting ground for the Ottoman jihad against the British invasion, a campaign in which – for a time – the Arab tribes threw their considerable weight behind the military operations of their Turkish overlords. However, after the defeat of the jihad in April 1915, the mid-Euphrates region enjoyed a two-year respite of almost complete freedom from both British and Turkish control and its inhabitants experienced an unprecedented period of anarchic independence. As a consequence, the imposition of British rule at the end of the Great War – in spite of wartime promises of ‘complete liberation’ – was felt to be particularly onerous among the region’s landlords and peasants alike. The manner in which this resentment grew and gradually came to express itself in armed resistance therefore forms a central part of our story. And, perhaps not surprisingly, it was from the ranks of the 1914–15 mujahidin that some of the foremost tribal leaders of the 1920 uprising emerged.

Finally, in discussing the causes of the 1920 uprising, some serious consideration must also be given to the reasons why – two years after the defeat of the Ottoman armies – Britain was still occupying Iraq and
appeared to have every intention of remaining in de facto control for many years to come. This was in spite of the fact that in 1920 public opinion in Britain itself was strongly opposed to any continuing involvement in the Middle East generally and in Iraq in particular.

Although the men who ran Britain’s great empire quarrelled bitterly about exactly
how
Iraq should be held in the imperial grasp, they were generally agreed about
why
. When Britain, France and Russia went to war with Germany and Austro-Hungary in August 1914, these Great Powers did not have any plans to permanently dismember and retain each other’s territory (with the exception of France’s desire to recover Alsace-Lorraine – lost to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71). But when the Ottoman Empire entered the war as an ally of Germany at the end of October 1914, the Allies had no such reservations about carving up that vast and venerable empire. After all, in the conventional European imperialist mindset, the Ottomans – Turks, Arabs, and Kurds – were ‘Orientals’ with a long history of lassitude, improvidence, corruption and cruelty and could not be allowed to continue to govern themselves in such an irresponsible manner. So, by early 1915, Russia had made it clear that, when the Ottomans were defeated, it expected to receive their capital, Istanbul, along with the Turkish Straits and two islands in the northern Aegean. France and Britain were therefore invited to identify which parts of the Ottoman Empire
they
would like to acquire.

The response of the British government was rather more subtle. It wasn’t so much
territory
Britain required (although that might eventually be necessary) but economic opportunities and access to natural resources. Perhaps these could be obtained without the actual partitioning of the Ottoman Empire? – at least that was the initial view of the government committee established to consider the matter in April 1915. And of all those tempting economic prospects which that committee considered, there was one to which its deliberations devoted more attention than any other – oil: specifically, the potentially huge oil resources which were believed to exist in the Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad and Mosul. In short, Britain’s presence in Iraq, which was initially prompted by threats
to its nascent oil industry at the head of the Arabian Gulf, might need to be perpetuated for a number of years until suitable arrangements had been made for those, as yet unexplored, oil reserves to fall into the hands of British-controlled companies.

For a time – during the middle years of the Great War – this imperial quest for oil slackened somewhat as other, conflicting, objectives came to the fore, in particular the complexities of satisfying the territorial demands not only of Britain’s existing ally, France, but also those of a new ally, the Sharif of Mecca. However, by 1917 it had become clear to all that the nature of war had fundamentally changed: henceforth wars would be increasingly mechanised and oil-fuelled. Indeed, as the secretary to the Committee for Imperial Defence put it, ‘oil in the next war will occupy the place of coal in the present.’ Therefore, obtaining ‘possession of all the oil-bearing regions in Mesopotamia and Southern Persia’ would be ‘a first class British war aim’.

So, by early 1918 the War Office was conducting detailed geological surveys of Iraq’s petroleum resources in those parts of Iraq already under British occupation and, as hostilities came to an end in November of that year, the British government ensured that the frontiers of their new ‘friendly native state’ would encompass all those parts of ‘Mesopotamia’ which were believed to contain oil.

None of this is to claim that oil was the
only
motivating force behind British military and diplomatic policy towards Iraq as the First World War drew to a close: establishing a secure air route to India, countering the new ‘threat’ of Bolshevism and simply maintaining imperial prestige were also factors requiring some form of control over Iraq for the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, as our story will demonstrate, the ‘imperial quest for oil’ runs like a sinuous black thread through this particular piece of historical tapestry during the years 1914 to 1921, and beyond.

Arabist, explorer, travel writer. In 1920, oriental secretary in Baghdad. Originally an ally of Wilson but later turned against him. Friend of Lawrence.

First Lord of the Admiralty, responsible for the part-nationalisation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1913. Resigned from the Liberal government after the failure of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. In 1920, minister of war in the coalition government, where he was responsible for dealing with the revolution in Iraq.

Chief political officer in Iraq during the Great War. High commissioner for Iraq after his return to Baghdad in October 1920.

Commander-in-chief of British forces in occupied Iraq, 1920–21.

Secretary to successive War Cabinets. Friend and political ally of Sir Mark Sykes. Member of the De Bunsen Committee which established Britain’s economic objectives in the war against the Ottoman Empire.

Self-aggrandising hero of the Arab Revolt against the Turks in the Hejaz in 1916–18. Between 1918 and July 1920 close confidant of Emir Faysal, ruling a semi-independent Arab government in Syria. By 1920 a fierce critic of Arnold Wilson’s administration in Iraq.