This year, 2005, marks the 73^rd anniversary of the League of Nations’ decision (1932) to admit Iraq to membership, thus terminating the mandate that was handed to Britain by the San Remo Conference in April 1920.  At the same time, to cries of foul play by France, a concession was granted over the proven but not yet active oil fields of the Turkish Petroleum Company (later the Iraq Oil Company). That event more than any other sealed Britain’s fate as the major custodian of the Arab territories of the Middle East, a role that was taken over with almost indecent enthusiasm by the United States in January 1991.

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A year after troopships dropped anchor 16 miles off the date plantations of Fao in 1914, a substantial part of that army would be trapped with their Commanding Officer at a village on a bend of the Tigris known as Kut al-Amara, at the start of the longest siege in the history of the British army, at any rate up to that time.  But after four year of war, the Turkish army was finally driven from the territory it had occupied for four centuries..   

The most active figure in the ensuing campaign for Iraqi independence was the Englishwoman Gertrude Bell, whom local citizens knew simply as Al Khatun, the Lady. She schemed, along with her friend TE Lawrence, the wartime hero she called her ‘little one’, and with the approval of Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, to make Faisal bin Husain, son of the Sharif of Mecca, king in Baghdad. But powerful forces gathered in Paris for the Peace Conference had an altogether broader agenda. 

President Woodrow Wilson's 14 points were about to be put to the test. Self-determination was America's prior condition for a peace settlement. But oil, opportunism and the fear of Pan-Arab solidarity already dominated the political scene. The secret Sykes-Picot agreement negotiated during the war by Britain, France and imperial Russia had included Mosul, the oil-rich Kurdish region of Turkey, in the French zone of control. In December 1918 Lloyd George had met French prime minister Clemenceau in London with the aim of agreeing a common position on the Middle East in anticipation of American plans for ‘self-determination’. Britain’s last Liberal premier was determined to reverse that agreement and make the entire Kurdistan region part of British-controlled Iraq. He also insisted that Palestine should have a British rather than international administration.

Clemenceau agreed impatiently to the proposed changes on the understanding that France received a fair share of Mosul oil and a substantial stake in the Mosul (Turkish) Petrolem Company. He also demanded that Britain should fully support France against any American objections to its oil share, while the whole of metropolitan Syria would remain under French mandate. When the two leaders met again, in Paris in April 1919, Lloyd George let it be known that Britain regarded the term ‘Mosul’ as covering the entire Kurdish area within the frontiers that defined the new Iraq. Clemenceau told Lloyd George angrily, ‘If you had told me in December (1918) that the cession of Mosul would entail, in addition, the cession of an immense territory I should, from that moment, have declined to assist you on Mosul’.

Though American and British politicians are keen to deny it, oil has dominated the political scene from that moment to the present day.

The broader agenda pursued at Paris took account of Zionist claims for the recognition of a Jewish state and a Jewish stake in the reconstitution of the Middle East. It would take another 25 years, however, for that dream to be realized.  Since the end of the Second World War, the presence of Israel in the region as the dominant military force backed by America has been a constant reminder that nations which were potentially, and in some cases actually, the richest in the world would be forever powerless to determine their own destinies. A permanent affront to the Arab world brought in its train inevitable and endless reaction. Those who fought for their national independence and freedom were labelled simplistically as ‘terrorists’ by the Anglo-American-Israeli troika.

The scene was set for a conflict that would cut across existing loyalties and old alliances, that would take place across and within the accepted frontiers of nation states. That would led inexorably to Suez, 9/11 and Chechnya.

On June the 12th, 1920, the Baghdad Civil Commissioner A.T.Wilson sent the Secretary of State for the Colonies in Whitehall an account of a meeting between Britain's Oriental Secretary in Iraq, Gertrude Bell, and a much respected local political figure, Suleiman Faidhi. It was a friendly but salutary message that the Arab delivered. He told Miss Bell: 'Since you took Baghdad you have been talking about an Arab government, but three years and more have elapsed and nothing materializes. You say that you can do nothing until peace with Turkey has been signed, but as far as we know that may be months or even years ahead. You say that you can't do anything until the mandate has been granted. You said in your declaration [on entering Baghdad] that you would set up native government drawing its authority from the initiative and free choice of the people concerned, yet you proceed to draw up a scheme without consulting anyone...'.

Within two months of the Iraq mandate being received in 1920, in the fierce heat of summer in the land it had so recently liberated, the British occupiers were confronted by a full-scale insurrection. By June of that year, while politicians still argued in Paris about the niceties of peace, British tax payers were nearing the end of their patience with endless military adventures conducted in their name. Gertrude Bell had told the Government that £25 million was needed to ensure peace in the country. ‘It would be a disaster’ she said if the money was not forthcoming.  Politicians in at home, Labour and Conservative, sensed that electoral success depended on something being done to stop the wastage.  Then news broke of tribal disturbances along the middle Euphrates, a part of Iraq in which the holiest shrines of the Shia community, Karbala and Najaf, are sited. Most of the British troops on the spot were 'rookies', quickly assembled and sent to Basra to relieve the men who had fought some of the fiercest battles of the Great War and whose families had demanded their return after seemingly endless months of occupation duty.

The post-war peacekeepers became victims of a violent eruption that politicians were too insensitive to anticipate and generals too stupid to contain.  Religious fanatics, it was said, were 'fanning the flames'. The word 'terrorism' was confined in those days to the IRA and Indian and Egyptian nationalists.  But there had been sobering warnings, even before the mandate was confirmed. Rebellion was in the air. The mandated power and its provisional regime preferred to call it ‘insurrection’. It was not the last time the term would be used in Iraq. 

By July the tribes were digging trenches and tearing up railway track. The township of Samawah was besieged and the 2nd Battalion Manchester Regiment was sent with the battle hardened 87th Punjabis to Hillah near Babylon. In the fighting that ensued troops were cut off at the Shia city of Kufa with 148 killed or seriously wounded. A force consisting of Manchesters, Sind Horse, RFA, Sikh Pioneers and a combined field ambulance was forced to retreat with 200 casualties. By August there was a declaration of Jihad by the Shia clerics. On 12 August the insurgents claimed their most prized victim. Colonel Gerard Leachman, 'OC Desert' to the troops in the war and the first military governor of Kurdistan, was shot at Falluja by the son of a tribal leader, Shaikh Dhari. The Kufa garrison was cut off and besieged. Names that became familiar to the world then would hit the headlines with sinister exactness 80-odd years on.  

On 22 August, the Sunday Times in London published a letter from T.E.Lawrence, declaring that the rebellion was 'a spontaneous rising' against British oppression in Iraq. Gertrude admonished him for 'talking tosh in the papers'. Soon they were working together to turn Iraq into a constitutional monarchy.

Not until September was an armoured force under General Coningham able to relieve Samawah. More disturbances in Baghdad were followed by severe fighting. Six months after the tribes rose in the 'Euphrates triangle' the rebellion was officially declared at an end, though in fact operations did not cease until 3 February 1921, when Coningham's column entered Suq ash-Shaykh. By then the country's first Council of State had been formed, elections were in the air and Faisal ibn Husain, who had acceded to the throne of Syria but was about to be ejected by the French, was invited to become king of Iraq.

A very temporary peace reigned in the Arab lands, though Ibn Saud would soon move to assert his place in the sun and hegemony over most of the Arabian peninsula. When a peace treaty was eventually signed with Turkey in 1926, a general amnesty was declared for all prisoners under the old regime, with one exception, the murderer of Colonel Leachman. A Year later Shaikh Dhari, an elderly tribal leader, was arrested, charged with murder and sentenced to death, but in view of his age and infirmity his sentence was immediately commuted by the court to penal servitude for life. He was sentenced on January 30, 1928. Next day he was found dead in his cell, officially victim of a heart attack.  Many years later it was revealed that the old man’s son, Khamis, had fired the fatal shot.

The newly created Iraq had become hostage to a violent future.

With Compliments

Victor Winstone, Bideford Devon

Phone 01237-470849

winstone@winscribe.co.uk