Enemy on the Euphrates (33 page)

By now, the members of al-‘Ahd al-‘Iraqi were by no means united as to the manner whereby the British were to be persuaded to accept an independent Iraq. Some, like Colonel Ja‘far al-‘Askari and Lieutenant Nuri al-Sa’id, felt some residual loyalty towards their former British allies and favoured a cautious, diplomatic approach to achieving their independence objectives. Others, like the twenty-nine-year-old Mosulborn artillery commander Jamil Midfa‘i, had also deserted to the British during the war but now had no scruples about using force to drive them from Iraq. And there were other Iraqi officers who had remained in the
Ottoman ranks throughout the war in spite of their membership of al-‘Ahd – men like General Yasin al-Hashimi – who continued to remain hostile to the British in spite of their seemingly sympathetic attitude towards Faysal’s administration in Syria. So, towards the end of 1919 divisions had begun to appear in the ranks of al-‘Ahd al-‘Iraqi, the more radical members of which were more inclined to put the resolution of the British to the test.

Some of these radicals decided to begin a series of small-scale operations probing the western borders of Colonel Wilson’s new colony. In this they were supported by Emir Zayd, Sharif Husayn’s youngest son who was deputising as Syrian head of state for his brother Faysal, currently in Europe.
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The first target of the radicals was the town of Dayr az-Zawr.

Dayr az-Zawr lies on the Upper Euphrates, 300 miles to the northwest of Baghdad and twenty miles north of the point where the Khabur river flows into the Euphrates from the north-east. In 1919 it was a rather insignificant walled town of around 5,000 inhabitants with flat-roofed mud-brick houses and a skyline punctuated by six white minarets. The town had received some embellishment during the 1860s when an enterprising Ottoman pasha constructed a broad, straight main street through the town with half a dozen two-storey houses and a small public garden. More recently a number of schools had been built, including a polytechnic.

However, Dayr az-Zawr had one particularly important political characteristic. During Ottoman times, the town and its surrounding province, which stretched as far south as ‘Ana on the Euphrates, had belonged to neither the vilayet of Baghdad nor the vilayet of Aleppo but constituted a mutasarriflik – a special jurisdiction governed directly from Istanbul. After the armistice with Turkey, the British had rather thoughtlessly added Dayr to Baghdad province and supplied the town with a resident British PO and small bodyguard with two armoured cars; but as a consequence of its uncertain geopolitical status and its apparent lack of economic significance, by September 1919 the British government was signalling that it intended Dayr to eventually pass back into Syrian – and therefore ultimately into French – control.

On 19 November 1919 Wilson received a telegram from the Arab Bureau in Cairo informing him that their agents in Aleppo had reported the departure from that city of a certain Ramadan al-Shallash – reputedly a particularly hot-headed member of al-‘Ahd al-‘Iraqi – with orders to proceed to Dayr and seize the town and surrounding areas for the Arabs. Before the war he had been one of the leading men in the al-Sarai section of the Aqaidat, a tribe that occupied lands to the north and south of Dayr. He was also distinguished by one other unusual characteristic – a remarkably realistic celluloid nose.

By 25 November Shallash had reached the ancient walled town of Raqqa on the northern Euphrates, where he distributed to the local tribal leaders personally sealed letters from Emir Zayd proclaiming that he had been appointed ‘Governor of the Euphrates and Khabur’. From there, in early December, he set out for Dayr with forty camel corps troops. Having got wind of Shallash’s approach the APO and governor of Dayr, Captain Chamier, arrested the town’s mayor on suspicion of collaborating with the enemy and telegraphed Baghdad and the British base at Abu Kamal, sixty miles to the south-east, for help. Soon afterwards, the telegraph wire was cut by Arab raiders.

As Shallash continued his advance on Dayr, on 11 December its townspeople and around 2,000 local tribesmen, who had been informed of Shallash’s approach, rose in rebellion. A number of public buildings were attacked and ransacked including the British Political Office where the safe was blown open and its contacts seized. The petrol dump was also blown up and all prisoners in the local jail were released.

The APO had only the two British-crewed armoured cars and sixty local Arab levies under his command, so he immediately took refuge with his little force in the military barracks to the north of the town. At sunrise one of the armoured cars was sent from the barracks to make a reconnaissance of the town but received heavy rifle fire and had to retreat, its gun damaged beyond repair. Then, at 10.00 a.m., the barracks itself came under attack.

Although machine guns had been mounted on its roof, these were soon put out of action and forty of the Arab levies deserted, having
dropped over the wall in twos and threes. Captain Chamier and his men were now forced to surrender and for a time were threatened with execution by the tribesmen. However, by chance, two British aircraft, which had been sent out on a routine patrol from Mosul flew over Dayr, quickly appreciated that the tiny British garrison had been attacked and began to machine-gun the town. Fearing further attacks from the air, the rebels agreed a truce and their British captives were left unharmed.

Ramadan al-Shallash reached Dayr later in the afternoon, proclaimed independence for the region and raised the Arab flag over the government building. Later that afternoon he began negotiations with Captain Chamier. He demanded that the British permanently withdraw from the town and its surrounding area, contending that the Syria–Iraq border should rightfully pass through Wadi Hawran, south of ‘Ana. Since he was unable to offer any further resistance, Chamier stated that he was prepared to withdraw from Dayr provided that no reprisals were taken against any locals who had worked for the British. To this, Shallash initially agreed, but the following morning he added his own conditions, demanding assurances from the British that, after being allowed to leave peacefully, British forces would not return and take reprisals against his own men or the townspeople. Without such assurances, Chamier and his handful of British troops would be kept as hostages.

At noon, another aircraft appeared over the town and was persuaded to land. The pilot was instructed by Chamier to return to Mosul with a message from the rebels that he and his men were being held hostage and would be killed if the town were attacked again by British forces. Meanwhile, Shallash began appointing local Arab notables to positions of authority within the town.

Wilson was now in a quandary. He was aware that the political status of Dayr az-Zawr was, to say the least, unclear. He was also aware that General MacMunn, who was soon to hand over his command to Haldane and depart for India, had insufficient troops available to mount a serious counter-attack on this distant and seemingly unimportant British outpost. Meanwhile, on 21 November the War Office had sent a cable to Baghdad informing Wilson that the Allies had agreed that Dayr
az-Zawr was not to be included in the ‘British sphere of influence’ and should be evacuated. Unfortunately, on arrival in Baghdad the telegram was undecipherable. On request, it was telegraphed again but still could not be understood.

Finally, on 20 December Wilson did receive a decipherable version of the telegram from the War Office,
dated 21 November
, informing him that it had been decided at the Paris Peace Conference that Dayr az-Zawr would categorically
not
be included in the British mandate of Iraq. Wilson was furious. If the India Office had telegraphed him directly instead of through the War Office, and if the War Office telegraph service had been more competent, the telegram would not have been delayed by a month and the entire unhappy episode could have been avoided. Instead, British lives had been endangered, property destroyed and a serious ‘loss of face’ had occurred. But when this wholly justifiable complaint was relayed to both the India Office and the War Office the latter responded angrily, stating that Wilson’s attitude was ‘particularly unfortunate’ and that it hoped that secretary of state for India would ‘take such steps as are necessary to correct the attitude of that officer, which, in the opinion of the Army Council is insubordinate’.
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The India Office did no such thing and the stage was now set for a protracted period of strife between Wilson and the army.

Meanwhile, Wilson had been compelled to send a message by aircraft to Ramadan al-Shallash indicating that if his British hostages at Dayr az-Zawr were released and allowed to travel to the nearest British outpost at Abu Kamal there would be no attempt to retake the town. The prisoners were duly released on Christmas Day 1919.

However, the failure of the British authorities to reoccupy Dayr az-Zawr only emboldened both the Arab government in Damascus and the more radical elements of al-‘Ahd al-‘Iraqi. The former now demanded that the frontier of their Arab state be pushed even further south-east, to include Abu Kamal itself. The radicals, in the person of Ramadan al-Shallash, went even further, declaring that the British should retire beyond Abu Kamal, to a position fifty miles south of ‘Ana. And although this exercise in putting pressure on the British was couched in terms of
extending the frontiers of Syria, it was now becoming clear that these moves had a much more ambitious objective – to drive the British from as much of Iraq as possible. Indeed, on 11 January 1920 Shallash’s tribal forces mounted a sustained attack on Abu Kamal, where, for a time, they succeeded in entering the suburbs, killing a number of Arabs in British service and looting their houses. And although Shallash was recalled to Damascus in the middle of January, his replacement, Maulud Pasha al-Khalaf, an Iraqi from Mosul, turned out to be an even more militant adherent of al-‘Ahd al-‘Iraqi. A further attack on Abu Kamal was mounted in mid-February and the British lines of communication on the northern Euphrates were raided as far south as Al Qa’im.

At the end of February 1920 Colonel Leachman returned from England, having been summoned there by the India Office which had offered him the position of head of the Political Agency in Kuwait. However, Leachman had politely refused the offer; he had no liking for an ‘office job’. On 3 March Wilson ordered him to Ramadi on the northern Euphrates as PO for the Dulaym Division and to assist a weak British brigade of the 17th Division under General F.E. Coningham in putting an end to the continuing guerrilla raiding parties emanating from Dayr az-Zawr and its tribal environs.

Under his personal command Leachman had a squadron of Rolls-Royce armoured cars of the 6th Light Armoured Motor Battery (LAMB) and some mounted tribesmen of the ‘Amarat section of the nomadic ‘Anaiza tribe whose paramount chief Fayad Bay ibn Hadhal was in the pay of the British; he also enjoyed the occasional support of a few antiquated two-seater RE8 fighter-bombers. Writing to his parents on 16 March from Abu Kamal, where he arrived by aircraft, Leachman described the British counter-insurgency operations with his usual mixture of sarcasm and casual brutality:

We are now ‘learning’ the gentle Arabian who caused the trouble. The day I got here we went out 30 miles further up river and found the local Arabs doing the ‘peaceful cultivator’ stunt. So we burned ten miles of huts, drove in all the cattle, destroyed everything we could see, and incidentally
slew a few Arabs who got in the way … They are the lowest of the low but quite dangerous … I shall have to stay here until we have got them in hand and shall then go back to Ramadi.
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By 30 March Leachman was at Salahiyya, about twenty-five miles upstream of Abu Kamal, informing his parents, ‘I am still in the forefront of the battle; in fact I have the honour of being now the in our most advanced post on the Euphrates.’ In spite of the widespread unrest Leachman was still insisting on trying to collect taxes from the local tribes, who now declared that they were no longer subjects of the British occupation. Leachman’s response was to machine-gun any recalcitrant non-payers, and if that wasn’t sufficient to call in bombing raids on their villages.
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Eventually, in May 1920, the frontier line with Faysal’s Syria was stabilised just south of Abu Kamal, where it remains today. For the time being, the Arabs had achieved control over most of the territory they had been fighting for during the previous three months and Leachman had the unpleasant duty of travelling to Dayr az-Zawr to formalise the arrangements.
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The general impression given to friend and foe alike was that Britain had suffered a small but significant defeat; that it had been unable or unwilling to resist the Arab encroachments and that this, in turn, reflected the inadequate military resources available to them.

Indeed, as the British brigade withdrew from Abu Kamal they came under fierce harassing attacks. ‘The whole country seemed to arise and go for us and we had a very stiff fight all the way back to ‘Ana, 70 miles. They are raiding all over the place,’ Leachman reported. However, he added, ‘But we are in a position to deal with them. I spend hours in the air, bombing camps and Arabs. The brightest spot we have had for many a long day was when early one morning we bumped across 25 Arabians asleep in a hole in the ground. We enjoyed ourselves immensely.’ Nevertheless, by now, even the redoubtable Leachman was beginning to show signs of battle fatigue, wearily admitting to his parents that ‘I can see no end to this turmoil.’
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The ‘turmoil’ was now increasing. Forty miles west of the city of Mosul, on the ancient trading route with Aleppo, lies the town of Tal ‘Afar. In 1920 it had around 10,000 inhabitants, the majority of them
Turkmen, probably the descendants of tribes which had migrated from the region of Lake Van in Anatolia and entered Iraq in the late fourteenth century, predating the arrival of the Ottoman Turks. Over the centuries they had become to a considerable extent Arabised, and spoke both Arabic and their native Turki. As in most of the northerly parts of Iraq, in the region of Tel ‘Afar the men of wealth and power were known by the Turkish title of agha rather than sheikh, and in Tel ‘Afar itself the leading citizen was Agha ‘Abdul Rahman ibn ‘Usman. As for religion, the inhabitants of Tal ‘Afar were both Sunni and Shi‘i and relations between the two sects were generally peaceable.