War Stories (2 page)

      
Iraq, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

      
5000 B.C. to the twentieth century

V
iewing Iraq today, the land along and between the Tigris and Euphrates seems an improbable place for the start of civilization. A few hundred miles north of where the two rivers merge, treacherous mountains rise to snow-covered peaks more than ten thousand feet high. Less than fifty miles west and south of the fertile land that lines the rivers are stark, unforgiving deserts. To the east, inhospitable malarial swamps and marshes make travel and navigation all but impossible.

Yet, if archaeologists are correct, this is the place where it all began at least five millennia ago. Here, an ancient Sumerian first carved written words onto clay tablets with a stylus. In the verdant terrain close to these riverbanks, seasonal planting of crops, animal husbandry, astronomy, irrigation, wheeled transportation, metallurgy, stringed
musical instruments, pharmacology, masonry, ceramic engineering, brewing, algebraic mathematics, and warehousing of harvests were all invented or begun by the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Assyrian founders of Mesopotamian culture.

The place, also described as the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis, is thought to be near the site of present-day Al Qurnah, where the Tigris and Euphrates meet to form the Shatt al Arab waterway, less than fifty miles north of modern-day Basra.

Abraham and Sarah, the patriarch and matriarch of the world's three monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are widely believed to have begun their long journey west to Canaan from the ancient city of Ur, on the west bank of the Euphrates, around 1850 B.C. Less than a century later, a Babylonian king named Hammurabi, the world's first emperor, decreed a code, prescribing punishments for infractions of his edicts that were less harsh than the practices of his day, but draconian in modern-day eyes. His code—and the determination that the law should apply equally to all—is the foundation of the whole Western legal system.

In 586 B.C., another Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, descended on Jerusalem with his army, torching the city of David, leveling the temple, and driving the people of Israel into bondage in that same space between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Some believe that Jewish slaves, during their seventy-year Babylonian exile, built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, acclaimed as the second wonder of the ancient world, with irrigation canals, terraces, and bridges over the Euphrates. A towering ziggurat in the center of the city, which came to be known as the Tower of Babel, was probably erected to honor the Babylonian god Baal.

Less than 250 years later, Babylon fell to the Medes and Persians under Cyrus the Just. He dispatched the Israelites back to Jerusalem to rebuild their temple, thus earning favorable mention in the Old Testament even though he worshiped the Babylonian god Marduk.

Next came the Greeks. In 331 B.C., Alexander and his disciplined army of Macedonians seized the city-state between the rivers on the way to Persia. Eight years later the young king returned only to die—from poison, some say—in Nebuchadnezzar's crumbling palace.

For the next half-millennium the land through which the Tigris and Euphrates flow was ruled by a succession of invaders—Romans, Seleucids, Parthians, and Sassanids—all seeking dominion over the region. All brought their own tongues and religions, yet by the end of the sixth century, Christianity was probably practiced by more people in Mesopotamia than any other faith. But then came Islam.

According to many of his biographers, Abu al-Qasim Muhammad was an orphan raised by a grandfather and then an uncle near Mecca, in present-day Saudi Arabia. Consigned to life as a camel herder, the young man was fortunate to marry a wealthy widow. One day, at the age of forty, he returned from meditating alone on Mount Hira with a message from the angel Gabriel.

Proclaimed as a prophet by many in Mecca, Muhammad began to preach that there was only one God, and admonished his tribal, nomadic, Bedouin countrymen to reject idolatry and greed and to submit to the will of Allah. Thus, Islam, meaning “submission to God,” the world's third major monotheistic religion, began. By 630 A.D., Muhammad was in effect the political and spiritual leader of an Islamic state that encompassed most of the Saudi Arabian peninsula. When he died on June 8, 632, his successor, Abu Bakr, was appointed caliph. He resolved to spread Islamic theology, with its message of equality and strict rules for behavior, throughout the world by force of arms.

Two years later, a poorly armed but zealous Islamic army was on the attack against Christian Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia throughout the area that we now call the Middle East. In 637, at the small town of Qadisiyah on the west bank of the Euphrates, ten thousand Islamic warriors defeated a force of eighty thousand Persians.
The land between the rivers would thereafter have no god but Allah.

The new rulers of Islamic Mesopotamia encouraged Bedouins from Arabia to move their herds of cattle, goats, and camels to the fertile river plains. They did so in a series of massive migrations, displacing the previous occupiers and destroying much of the ancient art and cultural treasures that had accumulated in the area.

History wasn't finished with the land between the rivers. The great schism in Islam that divided the religion between the Sunni and Shia sects was also played out here.

In 656 A.D., a bitter dispute over the leadership of the religion started by Muhammad broke out in the small town of Kufa, on the west bank of the Euphrates, about forty miles south of ancient Babylon. Ali, Muhammad's cousin and the first convert to Islam, was named caliph that year, and took up residence in Kufa in an attempt to avoid the enmity of other Islamic leaders in Medina and Damascus. It didn't work.

As Ali made his way home from prayers one night in the late summer of 661, an assassin felled the unsuspecting holy man. Nineteen years later, Ali's son, Hussein, the grandson of Muhammad, claimed the mantle of Islamic leadership as a familial right of succession. The rulers of the Islamic empire in Damascus rejected Hussein's claim and his accusations that they were using their power to amass great personal wealth while the people suffered.

In 680, Hussein and seventy-two of his family members and followers were confronted just west of the Euphrates, at Karbala, by four thousand soldiers dispatched from Damascus by the ruling Islamic elite. Hussein and all of his entourage, including women and children, were slaughtered. The severed head of the grandson of the prophet Muhammad was delivered to Damascus by horseback. Since that day, Islam has been divided between Sunni Muslims—supporters of consensual leadership—and the Shi'ite followers of Ali and Hussein.

Despite the internal split and three successive Mongol invasions, Islam continued to spread. By 1553, a century after the Ottoman Turks captured the Orthodox Catholic capital of Constantinople and changed its name to Istanbul, the Arabic language and the Muslim religion were both being taught and practiced in Asia Minor, the Balkans, the periphery of the Caucasus, northern and east-coastal Africa, southern Spain, and throughout what we now call the Middle East.

As Europe foundered through the Dark Ages, flourished during the Middle Ages, and began its Renaissance, Sunni sultans in Istanbul, espousing a pan-Islamic ideology, attempted to unify their dynastic holdings through religion, language, education, and common law. Where appeals to common philosophy failed, military coercion was employed—a strategy that prompted repeated bloody uprisings in Shi'ite controlled areas of Mesopotamia and Persia.

If not for corruption, costly military suppression of dissenters, and forays of European colonialism, the Ottoman Empire might still exist; and the country known as Iraq might never have arisen had the “Young Turks” who seized control in Istanbul in 1908 not chosen the wrong side in World War I. Infatuated by the Kaiser's militarism and feeling threatened by Orthodox Russia to the east, they opted to join the Central Powers in hopes that the alliance would help check both the czar's ambitions in Persia and British and French colonial expansion in the Middle East and Africa.

It was a costly mistake. The Young Turks found themselves having to contend with rebellions fomented by Shi'ite religious activists and Arab nationalists seeking independence from Istanbul while simultaneously trying to protect their fraying empire from the Triple Entente.

Though threatened from the outside and weakened by internal dissent, the Turks still fought back. In January 1916, conscripts recruited throughout the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, including Mesopotamia, inflicted a devastating defeat on British troops at
Gallipoli. While London was still reeling from the collapse of the Dardanelles campaign, a British expeditionary force attempting to advance from Basra to Baghdad was cut to pieces. On April 26, 1916, more than thirteen thousand starving British troops surrendered after enduring a 140-day siege at Al Kut, on the banks of the Tigris.

But these bloody victories were fleeting. Eleven months after the disaster at Al Kut, British troops occupied Baghdad, and when the “war to end all wars” finally ended, in 1918, so was the Ottoman Empire. In the aftermath of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was dismantled, and British and French forces and civil administrators moved into Arab capitals to take over as “trustees” under the aegis of the League of Nations. British army regiments occupied Basra on the Shatt al Arab, and Royal Engineers started building roads, railways, and canals to Baghdad and beyond.

What the British could not build was a firewall against the glowing embers of Arab nationalism and the Shia-Sunni animus that they had helped to foment during the world war. T. E. Lawrence, the legendary Lawrence of Arabia, had played to both and had wooed Arab Bedouins to revolt against Ottoman rule with pledges of postwar self-determination. But neither Lawrence nor any of the other advocates for local sovereignty could deliver. By January 18, 1919, when the victors sat down in public at the Palace of Versailles, British and French mapmakers were already secretly redrawing the boundaries of Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the Palestine and Mesopotamian Mandates. In accord with the secretly concluded Sykes-Picot Agreement, all of these would be administered not by those who populated these lands but by British and French civil and military officers.

In the land between the two rivers this was a formula for disaster. On June 2, 1920, in a taste of things to come, Sunni nationalists in Baghdad and Shi'ite religious leaders in the south decided that as
much as they hated each other, they hated the British occupiers even more. The ensuing jihad against British rule took nine months to suppress—at a cost of more than 2,200 British casualties and forty million pounds sterling.

In the aftermath of the “Arab Revolt,” Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for colonial affairs, convened a conference in Cairo to determine the future of Britain's Mesopotamian Mandate. Without consulting with a single person who lived between the Tigris and Euphrates, the participants, including T. E. Lawrence, redrew the borders once again, renamed the territory “Iraq,” and selected Faisal, the son of the sharif of Mecca, a Hashemite and a friend of Lawrence, for the throne of the newly minted “kingdom.”

The British might have conceived of Faisal as their puppet, but they quickly learned that he had a few ideas of his own. Within months of his August 23, 1921, coronation, the new king convinced the British to send aircraft and motorized troops with machine guns to drive marauding Wahhabis back into Saudi Arabia. Though the operation required Faisal to acquiesce in yet another redrawing of the map—this time the creation of a “neutral zone” along the border of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq—security in the south meant he could start consolidating his authority over his new kingdom. By 1923 Faisal had expelled the Shi'ite mullahs and imams from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and sent them packing to Iran. A year later he handed down what he called the Tribal Disputes Regulations, suborning the rural Shi'ite sheikhs to his Sunni-dominated administration in Baghdad. In March of 1925, the oil-rich Sunni Kurdish enclave of Mosul was annexed. The British helped to make this move official by supporting the so-called Organic Law, which gave Faisal the right to convene and adjourn the Iraqi Parliament.

By 1930 the king had withstood an attempted coup and forged sufficient consensus among his fractious, multi-ethnic, multi-communal
people to permit suffrage for men, implement universal public education, create a national army, institute a system of law, and commence a program of rural electrification. The 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty, granting independence and commonwealth status to the kingdom in 1932, reflected not just British fatigue and the effects of the Great Depression, but the Hashemite king's skills as an administrator as well. And though the treaty granted the British rights to military bases in Iraq, it made Faisal the first head of state of a sovereign Arab country and a member of the League of Nations. He didn't live to enjoy the fruits of his labor. A heart attack felled Faisal in September 1933.

The day after Iraq's first monarch was laid in his grave, his twenty-one-year-old son, Ghazi Ibn Faisal (meaning “victorious son of Faisal”), assumed the throne. The playboy-turned-potentate proved predictably inept and virulently anti-British. When the Shi'ites in southern Iraq complained, he ignored them. When they rebelled in 1935 and 1936, Ghazi sent the Sunni-led army to brutally repress the uprising.

As London warily watched Hitler's rise to power in Germany and Stalin's purges in Russia, Ghazi began making regular radio broadcasts laced with anti-British propaganda. In 1936, with the monarch's acquiescence, Bakr Sidqi, an army commander with a reputation for cruelty, led a coup against the pro-British elected government.