The Iraq War (3 page)

A final complexity of the Ottoman system in Iraq was that rule was exercised, until the nineteenth century, through a slave, or
mameluke
, class. The
mameluke
principle had been devised in early Islam to evade the Koranic prohibition on Muslim fighting Muslim; since conflict is an irrepressible feature of human life, pious Muslims sought to get round the ban by buying slaves to fight for them. Boys were purchased from the Steppe horse people, trained as soldiers and inducted into the Caliph’s army; after the conquest of the Balkans boys were forcibly recruited there from Christian families and taken to Constantinople, where they formed the formidable Janissary corps. Inevitably slave soldiers soon came to exercise power. In Constantinople the Janissaries dominated the court; in Egypt and Iraq, farther from the centre, the
mamelukes
achieved autonomous power. Outwardly obedient to the Caliph, effectively they governed in their own right. It was a peculiarity of the
mameluke
régime in Iraq that its members were brought from the mountain region of Georgia, to which the recruiters constantly returned to refresh their numbers. The position of
mameluke
was not hereditary.

Even though not hereditary power-holders, Ottoman government slaves, Janissaries and
mamelukes
alike, were deeply reactionary in outlook. Their position depended upon resisting change of any sort and theirs was the principal influence which kept Ottoman society static and increasingly backward. By the beginning of the
nineteenth century, after several hundred years of military success, the Ottoman Empire – Turkey as it was now often called – faced defeat by the Christian world. The Caliphs bestirred themselves. In 1826 the Janissary corps was bloodily disbanded and Western institutions introduced. The reforms spread progressively to the empire’s outer provinces. In Iraq, in 1831, the
mameluke
governor of Baghdad was turned out of office for disobedience and by 1834 all three provinces, Baghdad, Mosul and Basra, had been brought under the direct rule of Constantinople. The new Ottoman officials brought with them procedures designed to recruit soldiers to the imperial army by conscription, to superimpose secular courts over those of the religious and tribal authorities and to organize land-holding, the basis of the economy, through a government-controlled land register. All these reforms met local resistance, often local revolt, but the
tanzimat
(reforms) proceeded inexorably and by the last decades of the nineteenth century the Nizam-i Celid (New Order) was established.

What impeded its complete realization was reaction at the centre, as so often the response of traditional power to a reform movement. Abdul Hamid II, who became Sultan-Caliph in 1876, was temperamentally absolutist and resented the rate at which central power was slipping from the absolute ruler’s hands. He attempted a confrontation with the reforming Young Ottomans, as the reformists were known, and suspended the constitution his predecessor had been obliged to grant. Too late; in 1908 a new group of reformists, the Young Turks, members of the undercover Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), formed largely of Ottoman subjects from the European provinces, staged a revolution and seized power. They accelerated the pace of reform but without conceding power to the empire’s non-Turkish subjects. That was to prove a mistake. The Young Turks looked to Europe for example, to Germany for alliance and sought to heighten the Westernization of the empire. They were secularists, not practising Muslims, were ethnic Turkish nationalists devoted to the idea of a greater Turkey pushed into Central Asia (Turanianism) and they adopted an imperialist policy towards the empire’s Arab
subjects. As Ottoman Arabs equalled or even outnumbered the empire’s Turks, the policy was unpopular and was particularly resented by the educated Arabs who, though few in number, were influential, particularly in Syria and Lebanon. There lay the heartland of what was to become known as ‘the Arab Awakening’, a movement mounted by idealists who looked forward to the reunification of the Arab lands as a single political unit, to the liberation of the Arabs from imperialist rule, Ottoman, British, French and Italian, and to their intellectual emancipation through the pursuit of Western education but within Muslim belief. Many of the nationalists were Ottoman officers who by 1914 had formed a secret society within the army’s ranks, al-‘Ahd (the Covenant). To it belonged several men destined to become prominent in post-Ottoman Iraq, notably Nuri al-Sa’id.

The first stage in the detachment of Iraq from Turkish rule came in November 1914 when, following the Ottoman entry into the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Britain despatched an expeditionary force from India to seize Basra. The move had two aims: to open a front against the Turks to assist the Russians, but also to protect British oil interests at the head of the Gulf. The expeditionary force was well received in Basra, where many of the merchant houses had a long association with their British and Indian equivalents, going back to the Honourable East India Company. The ease of occupation tempted the British to push farther and by November 1915 the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force (MEF) had advanced to within fifty miles of Baghdad. There it was counter-attacked and pushed back to Kut on the Tigris and besieged. Kut proved a humiliating disaster. After four months the garrison was starved into surrender. Not until 1917 did the advance resume. Progress then accelerated and by October 1918, when the Ottomans agreed to an armistice, the whole of Iraq came under British occupation, including the oil-rich north around Kirkuk and Mosul, ethnically Kurdish territory.

In the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman collapse the British imposed a military and semi-colonial administration, proclaiming
regulations based on those operating in the Indian empire. It was clear that the arrangement would be only temporary, though there was a nascent acceptance among many Arab Iraqis of the idea of Iraq becoming a unitary state. It was not shared by the Kurds who quickly began to demand separate political status. The most prominent Kurdish leader, Shaikh Mahmud Barzani, was appointed governor of part of Kurdistan but proclaimed independence in May 1919. After his removal by military force, the British resumed control.

In Baghdad and the surrounding central provinces, the al-‘Ahd society, of which the Iraqi branch was now localized in the city, attracted considerable support from the urban notables, who were anti-British and opposed also to the aspirations of both the Kurds and the southern Shi’a; another Sunni faction, however, of which Nuri al-Sa’id was a leader, while better disposed to the British, advocated unification under Faisal, one of the sons of the Sharif of Mecca who had led the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. Nuri and many of his associates had served under the Sharif and looked to his Hashemite family to head the future Arab kingdoms. Nuri enjoyed the advantage of intimacy with the officials of the British administration, from whom he had detected that they too were divided over the future of Iraq. While some favoured maintaining direct rule, others hoped to elevate the Hashemites to kingship, chiefly as a means of curbing the Islamicism of the southern Shi’a.

Ironically what precipitated the decisive postwar crisis was not division between the Sunni and Shi’a but a sudden recognition by some of them of shared interests. During 1919 the victorious Allies, meeting at the Versailles conference, had begun to formalize plans for imposing European rule on the former possessions of the German and Ottoman empires, under authority devolved by mandate from the new League of Nations. The mandate for Iraq was to be allotted to the British. Foreseeing a return to imperial subject status in a new guise, the southern Shi’a, under their religious leaders, and then the Baghdad Sunni, showed their opposition. There were large-scale demonstrations which led to armed resistance. British garrisons
were brought under attack. By June 1920 the revolt affected most of the Sunni centre and the Shi’a south, while there was a recurrence of rebellion in the Kurdish north.

Support for the revolt, however, proved patchy; many notables and tribal leaders were chiefly concerned to safeguard their traditional position. By July the revolt had largely subsided, though at the cost of 6,000 Iraqi deaths and 500 in the British and Indian Army garrison. The Shi’a had suffered the brunt of the repression, an experience that heightened their disaffection from the Sunni minority in and around Baghdad.

The British, now empowered by the League of Nations to administer the Iraq mandate, chose to react to the revolt by establishing a form of indirect rule, which it was hoped the population would find more acceptable than the military administration. A council of Iraqi ministers was appointed, with Iraqis also replacing British political officers in the old Ottoman districts. Perhaps inevitably, however, a majority of the appointees at all levels were chosen from the Sunni minority, since they were identified by the British as more dependable and experienced than Shi’a or Kurds. Sunni domination was particularly evident in the new Iraqi army, which was officered almost exclusively by men who had held rank in the Ottoman army; the Chief of Staff was none other than Nuri al-Sa’id, the most prominent Sunni in the old al-‘Ahd society.

In a typical exercise of imperial divide-and-rule practice, moreover, the British decided to create a parallel army to the new national force, which would be under their direct control. The Iraq Levies, which during the first decades of the mandate would be the real instrument of central power, were raised not from the major but the marginal Iraq communities. Those chosen were Kurds, Marsh Arabs and Assyrians, a Nestorian Christian people who had fled Turkey during the First World War and were not Iraqi at all. The Assyrians nevertheless made excellent soldiers and proved fiercely loyal to the British. Eventually history caught up with them and almost all left post-mandate Iraq, where they had acquired a reputation as colonial lackeys, to make a new communal life in the United States.

The creation of the council of ministers and the national army did not solve the principal problem in postwar Iraq: sovereignty. The mandate system was posited on the principle that the countries adopted by the League of Nations for mandate rule were already sovereign and, as soon as sufficiently developed, should emerge into independence. The most evolved were to be furnished with appropriate heads of state from the outset. In the case of Iraq, by reason of the sophistication of its urban population and its potential wealth clearly a candidate for early release from mandate rule, the choice fell upon the Amir Faisal, a Hashemite prince and son of the Sharif of Mecca, who had taken part in the Arab Revolt and had originally been appointed to the throne of Syria (until the French, who administered the Syrian mandate, fell out with him). There was much to favour him as a future king of a sovereign Iraq. He descended from the family of the Prophet and so, though a Sunni, enjoyed respect among the Shi’a; he had authentic nationalist credentials, as a leader of the Arab Revolt; and he was well-known to the British, among whom he had friends. He was, moreover, personable, charming and politically astute. Nevertheless he was not by birth or affiliation Iraqi; by origin he was an Arab of the distant deserts, by upbringing a child of Ottoman society in Istanbul.

Little wonder, therefore, that he was to find it difficult to establish the legitimacy of Hashemite authority over the old land between the two rivers. In the eyes of Iraqi nationalists he was too closely associated with the British; to Kurds and Shi’a he depended too heavily for domestic support on his comrades of the Arab Revolt, who were overwhelmingly Sunni and often former officers of the Ottoman army. Under the mandate constitution Iraq became notionally a democracy, with an elected parliament; but the franchise was indirect and the vote consistently manipulated both by the British and the royal government to assure a compliant majority. Manipulation ensured that the constituent assembly, forerunner of the national parliament, voted in 1922 to ratify an Anglo-Iraqi treaty giving Britain executive
authority over the foreign and security policies of a nominally co-equal Iraqi kingdom.

Britain’s desire to secure the passage of the treaty was greatly assisted by two extraneous factors, one of which was to persist in importance – apparently in perpetuity. The first was Turkish intervention in Iraqi affairs. The new Turkey, since the collapse of Ottomanism, was an ethnically exclusive Turkish state, but it retained territorial ambitions. They included that of incorporating northern Iraq’s oil-bearing regions, with their Kurdish population, into Turkish national territory. Britain was unwilling to see Iraqi territory ceded to a foreign power, even though its holdings in the Turkish Petroleum Company (soon to be the Iraq Petroleum Company) would ensure its access to the oil reserves. Iraqis of most communities recognized that acquiesence in the passage of the treaty offered the best means of blocking Turkish predation. The second factor was Kurdish rebellion. Seeing in Turkey’s intervention an opportunity to further their ambition for independence, some Kurds rose against the mandate administration, forcing the British first to stage a costly campaign of repression and then to install the chief Kurdish strongman as regional governor. The expedient did not endure. Shaikh Mahmud, the new governor, rapidly demonstrated that he intended to make himself Kurdish King, forcing the British to take military action in Kurdistan again, which resulted in Mahmud’s flight to Iran.