Enemy on the Euphrates (51 page)

Although it was not obvious at the time to the Iraqi insurgents, the death of a neighbouring Arab government at the end of July 1920 was probably one of the factors leading to their own ultimate defeat. At dawn on 24 July a rag-tag Syrian army composed of no more than 600 regulars and around 2,000 mujahidin – volunteer townsmen and Bedouin – deployed on high ground at Maysalun, a khan on the road from Beirut to Damascus. They faced an advancing French colonial army composed of Senegalese and French infantry, Moroccan cavalry, tanks and aircraft. By noon most of the Syrian defenders had been killed or put to flight, leaving the Syrian war minister, Yusuf al-Azmah, dead on the battlefield. He had known that defeat was inevitable, yet had bravely taken his place on the front line. The French lost a total of fifty-two men killed and 200 wounded.

That this catastrophe for Arab independence appears to have been shrugged off with remarkable insouciance by the Iraqi insurgents is probably because these events occurred at the moment of one of their great military successes – the destruction of the Manchester Column. Yet in the longer term it would isolate the Euphrates region from a potential source of military supplies and must have eventually damaged the Iraqi insurgents’ morale.

The British tut-tutted about the French action but had long since lost interest in fulfilling any undertakings made to the Arabs during the war. Indeed, Churchill’s main complaint against the French was that their operations in Syria had been largely conducted ‘by black African troops’. In any case, the British already had far more urgent matters to attend to in their own new Arab protectorate where, unlike the French in Syria, they faced a well-prepared and well-armed opponent, imbued with a passionate belief in the rectitude of its struggle for independence and Islam. As we shall see, they were also facing problems at home.

It was not until 9 July 1920 that the British public first learned of the Arab uprising in Iraq. On that date, under the title, ‘Mesopotamian Arabs’ Outbreak’,
The Times
carried what it described as a ‘semi official statement’ concerning ‘an outbreak of disorder on the Lower Euphrates valley around Samawa’.
¹
Three days later, a ‘special correspondent’ in Tehran, under the title ‘Mesopotamian Rising – Fighting Continues’, reported that ‘the situation in Lower Mesopotamia remains serious’ and that the railway between Basra and Baghdad had been cut. The rebels were described as being under the influence of ‘Pro- Turkish agitators’.
²

Having presumably read the same article the previous day, on 13 July Mr William Ormsby-Gore, Conservative Member for Stafford, asked the war minister in the House of Commons to confirm ‘whether an Indian garrison stationed to the west of the Euphrates had been ‘cut off by rebel Arabs’; whether several unsuccessful attempts to relieve it had been made; and ‘whether the rising is more than purely local in character’. He also asked Churchill ‘what was its chief cause?’
³

He might well have asked. By now the British public, the press and the majority of MPs were becoming both confused and angry about exactly what was going on in British-occupied Iraq. They knew that the government had some kind of plan for local Arab rule; they knew that a considerable number of Arab sheikhs in Iraq and throughout the Middle East generally were receiving hefty subsidies; they also knew that some Arabs were sporadically attacking British soldiers and
there had been a number of casualties; and they knew that the whole thing was costing the British taxpayer a huge amount of money.

Since the end of the war the government had done its best to conceal the events in Mesopotamia from the British public. Indeed, Wilson’s rejection of Yusuf al-Suwaydi’s request for freedom of the press and the removal of restrictions on the postal and telegraph services at the confrontation of 2 June in Baghdad was less out of consideration for local public order than for the purposes of concealing the deteriorating situation in Iraq from British journalists. The only newspapers allowed to be published in Iraq were run by the Civil Administration; had a critical Arab press been allowed to function it would not have been long before unfavourable reports on the situation reached the British press and the swelling number of domestic opponents to what were increasingly seen as the government’s covert operations in the Middle East, uncontrolled by Parliament and contemptuous of public opinion.
⁴

Moreover, suspicions were growing about the influence of ‘oil syndicates’. Those who knew something about the potentially rich oilfields in northern Iraq suspected that continued occupation had something to do with that. Indeed, only a few weeks before news of the insurrection broke, Herbert Asquith, former prime minister and now, in effect, leader of the parliamentary opposition to Lloyd George’s coalition, had accused the government of planning to spend over £35 million over the coming year on the military occupation of Iraq and ‘for what’, he asked the prime minister, ‘are we spending it?’ The answer, according to Asquith, was, ‘There are oil-bearing strata and possibly other mineral resources in Mesopotamia,’ although, ‘It seems to me that this … is a fundamental violation of the principles upon which we entered into a covenant with other nations of the world in the League of Nations that those should be considerations which are determining British or any other policy.’
⁵

However, Lloyd George was not deterred and later in the debate he acknowledged that ‘the administration of Mesopotamia will be an expensive one for some years,’ but asked the House, ‘Is it not desirable that any natural product of that kind should be developed for the benefit
of the whole of Mesopotamia?’ adding that, ‘the whole of those resources will belong to the Arab State we set up. There are all sorts of suggestions that arrangements have been made with private companies. There is no arrangement of any sort made with any company,’ an assertion which was disingenuous, to say the least, since the agreement of the British and French to share Iraq’s oil between them, made at San Remo two months earlier, would necessarily involve the participation of British and French oil companies; and on the British side, at least, there were only two such companies capable of the job – Anglo-Persian and Shell, both partners in the old Turkish Petroleum Company. Indeed, even as Lloyd George was speaking, the Petroleum Department of his own government was urging that ‘the rights secured by the Turkish Petroleum Company before the war should be recognised’ and that in this company a moderate additional participation should be given to the Shell Group ‘in order to secure British control over that company’.

Nevertheless, when backbenchers volubly expressed their scepticism, the prime minister reasserted his claim that whatever arrangements about Mosul’s oil reserves had been made at San Remo, ‘the whole of the property will be vested in the Arab State and will not belong to any company.’ The precise size of the oil reserves was uncertain, Lloyd George added, ‘but the general opinion is that they are valuable. If that is so, I think it essential for the development of its territory that the Arab State should have these oil wells and deposits at Mosul, not merely for the development of Mosul but for the development of Mesopotamia.’
⁶

For the time being the House seems to have been unable to respond to the prime minister’s assurances that the oil would belong to the ‘Arab State’ and that it would ‘not belong to any company’. But, here again, Lloyd George was being disingenuous. There never was any question of the sub-surface oil deposits in Iraq ‘belonging’ to anyone other than the state, Arab or British, which would have rights of eminent domain over them – just as in Persia or in other parts of the oil-producing world (except for the exceptional case of the USA where, for historical reasons, sub-surface minerals were owned by the surface landowner).
⁷
Indeed, the matter of who ‘owned’ the sub-surface minerals was largely irrelevant
from an economic point of view: the most the ‘owner’ could ever claim or was expected to claim was a royalty (12.5 per cent
ad valorem
in the US oilfields). It was not in the ownership of oil reserves that the profit lay but in their
extraction
and the terms of access to them. When Iraqi oil did, after a long delay, begin to flow, the Turkish Petroleum Company (later the Iraq Petroleum Company) initially received around 94 per cent of the net profit, leaving the ‘owner’ – the ‘Arab State’ – with the tiny remainder.
⁸

Yet ultimately the ‘oil question’ was not so much a matter of private profit as an affair of state. There were those in government and on its periphery who had a financial interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and through that company, in its affiliate, the Turkish Petroleum Company. But for the prime minister, the War Office and the Admiralty what really mattered was the strategic advantage which the control of Middle East oil would confer. They had witnessed the great power of oil on the battlefield and upon the oceans. Oil supplies were now the lifeblood of the British Empire and – as the First Lord of the Admiralty had rather injudiciously put it a few weeks earlier – ‘If we secure the supplies of oil now available in the world, we can do what we like.’
⁹

But for now, it was the unpleasant reality of the uprising which dominated the debate on Iraq. Answering Ormsby-Gore’s question’s about the attack on Rumaytha, Churchill – himself clearly uncertain at this stage as to the gravity of the events – confirmed the attack and the fact that the railway had been cut above and below the town. He also confirmed that a relief column had ‘suffered some casualties’ but he reassured the House that ‘the rising appears to be local in character’ and was ‘probably the outcome of religious agitation in Najaf’.

The anxieties of honourable members were not assuaged. ‘Is the garrison in fact surrounded or not? I could not quite gather whether that is so from the reply,’ asked Lord Robert Cecil, himself a government minister, to which Churchill admitted that ‘it has not yet been relieved’ although ‘it is still holding out and a considerable column has gone out from Baghdad to join up with the garrison to establish order in the district.’

During the following days, as more news of the uprising appeared in the press, Churchill had to face a battery of questions in Parliament. By 15 July the House of Commons was particularly perplexed and anxious. ‘Are rail communications between Basra and Baghdad still cut?’ demanded Earl Winterton, an Irish Peer and Conservative Member for Horsham and Worthing; and how many British and Indian casualties had been suffered? How much material and rolling stock had been destroyed by the insurrectionists? And what damage had been done to our armoured trains?

In the circumstances Churchill did his best to present an honest and factual account of the current military situation in Iraq while at the same time presenting a broadly optimistic perspective as to its future outcome. He acknowledged that, to date, six trains had been either captured or derailed between Samawa and Diwaniyya; that garrisons at Rumaytha and Samawa were currently ‘isolated’; that the railway line above Diwaniyya was cut, although not ‘seriously cut’; that there had been no report of any British (as opposed to Indian) casualties to date; and that a ‘considerable force’ of British and Indian troops was now ‘moving downwards from Baghdad’ to relieve the ‘isolated’ garrisons. Meanwhile, the situation in the Shamiyya region was ‘reported to be delicate’.

Not surprisingly, news of the Manchester Column disaster added fuel to the flames of parliamentary disquiet, in particular among those MPs whose constituents included anguished parents of 2nd Battalion men. Attempts to discover what exactly had happened to their sons were met by disconcertingly obvious stonewalling on the part of Churchill and the War Office. Indeed, it was not until 24 September – two months after the event – that the War Office disclosed the names of the casualties, categorising them as 127 missing, 76 prisoners, 2 missing believed killed and 2 dead.
¹⁰
This did nothing to assuage the anxieties of the relatives of the prisoners, or those of the suspiciously large number of ‘missing’. It took a further two months for the worst fears of these families to be confirmed when, at last, it was acknowledged that all of the ‘missing’ were actually dead. Such was the fate of the parents of Private J.H. Heathcote (aged eighteen) of Audenshaw, a small cotton-spinning
and silk-weaving town five miles east of Manchester, whose death was not reported in the
Ashton Reporter
until 20 November.
¹¹

As the summer wore on, the pressure on the government to withdraw from Iraq steadily mounted, fanned by a series of remorselessly gloomy headlines in the press. On 4 August, the readers of
The Times
were told of:

MESPOTAMIA FIGHTING: SHARP CONFLICT WITH ARABS: 300 BRITISH CASUALTIES

And on 14 August:

BAD TO WORSE IN MESOPOTAMIA: BLOCKHOUSES ON BAGHDAD ROAD: BRITISH POLITICAL OFFICER KILLED

On 18 August:

LINES OF COMMUNICATION WITH PERSIA CUT

On 23 August:

MESOPOTAMIA: A SERIOUS WAR BEFORE US

And on 8 September:

ANARCHY IN MESOPOTAMIA: TRIBES HOSTILE AND ALERT: EXTENSIVE DAMAGE TO COMMUNICATIONS

Meanwhile, on 8 August, in the
Observer
, there appeared the following letter from T. E. Lawrence under the title ‘France, Britain and the Arabs’. It began with a bitter attack on the French overthrow of Faysal’s ‘Arab State’ in Syria; but then sarcastically pointed out that the British could hardly complain about French actions when they were doing little different in Iraq, where they were ‘fighting battles near Baghdad and trying to render Mesopotamia incapable of self-government, by smashing every head that raised itself among them’. ‘These risings take a regular course’, said Colonel Lawrence, and continued,