Enemy on the Euphrates (21 page)

While Britain’s military situation in the Middle East was transformed during the late summer and early autumn of 1918, those officials responsible for determining the political status of the territories whose ultimate conquest now seemed certain became increasingly bogged down in trying to untangle the complex web of promises made and obligations undertaken which had been so casually adopted in the general struggle to defeat the Turks. Without exception it was agreed that, with Russia reduced to revolution and chaos, the need for a French ‘buffer’ at Mosul against future tsarist territorial expansion had become irrelevant and therefore this particular element of the Sykes–Picot Agreement was no longer of any utility; but the problem was that the French were giving every indication that they had no intention of abandoning
any
part of the agreement.

At the same time, Sharif Husayn, who by now had learned the full details of the agreement, which had been widely disseminated by the Arabic-language press in Cairo following its publication by the Bolsheviks, was now angrily complaining that its contents bore little resemblance to the description Sykes and Picot had previously offered
when they met him the previous May. Furthermore, news of the Balfour Declaration advocating a ‘Jewish Home’ in Palestine was now raising anxieties and outright opposition among Arab public opinion from Cairo to Baghdad. The British, it was said, were ‘going to give Palestine to the Jews’.

The entry of the USA into the war on 6 April 1917, however welcome from a purely military point of view, also brought with it major complications for Britain’s postwar objectives in the Middle East. President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ address to Congress on 8 January 1918 had spoken unmistakably of the right to ‘self-determination’ of the subject peoples of the Central Powers when the war was won. What impact would it have upon those ‘subject peoples’ of the former Ottoman Empire for whom Britain and France had their own plans? Equally threatening was the ‘Bolshevik Menace’, whose grip on Russia might yet be prised loose, but whose anti-colonial propaganda could meanwhile wreak havoc among the untutored minds of the ‘natives’ from Egypt to India.

The decision was therefore made that what was needed was some kind of vaguely worded statement which would indicate that Britain and France renounced any overtly imperialist objectives in the Middle East and that any aspirations they had as to incorporating the conquered Ottoman territories into ‘spheres of influence’ etc. were motivated only by the desire to assist these territories to achieve their ultimate ambition of ‘self-determination’. Of course, the reality would be that the Allies would continue to control, but indirectly, behind a façade of native rulers.

So Sykes was now put to work on a declaration of Allied intentions towards the postwar Middle East. His task was to find some form of words which would, more or less, satisfy all parties. After much editing and re-editing and an exchange of notes between the foreign secretary, Balfour, and Cambon, his French counterpart, a joint Anglo-French proclamation was made on 8 November 1918, just over a week after the Turkish armistice. It began by declaring:

The end which France and Great Britain have in view in their prosecution in the East of the war let loose by German ambition is the complete
liberation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national Governments and Administrations drawing their authority from the initiative and free choice of indigenous peoples.

It went on to state that France and Britain were agreed

to encourage and assist the establishment of indigenous Governments and Administrations in Syria and Mesopotamia which have already in fact been liberated by the Allies, and in countries whose liberation they are endeavouring to effect and to recognize the latter as soon as they shall be effectively established. Far from wishing to impose any particular institution on these lands, they have no other care but to assure by their support and effective aid the normal working of the Governments and Administrations, which they shall have adopted of their free will.
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‘Complete liberation’, ‘free choice of indigenous peoples’, ‘Governments and Administrations … adopted of their free will’: this was heady stuff indeed, going even further than General Maude’s 1917 Baghdad proclamation, even if it rather obviously omitted any reference to Palestine.

Arnold Wilson was appalled by the declaration. Since Sir Percy Cox had left Baghdad for London on leave in March and had subsequently been seconded to Persia as the British minister, Wilson was now the acting civil commissioner of Mesopotamia. He received the French text of the statement on 8 November with instructions from the India Office to give it the widest publicity, but having read it he immediately concluded that ‘nothing in the political situation in Syria or Iraq rendered such a declaration necessary’ and that ‘its promulgation was a disastrous error, the perpetration of which was forced upon the Allied Powers by President Wilson.’

A few days later, Wilson received another telegram from the India Office informing him that the Inter-Allied Conference was about to assemble in Paris as a preliminary to peace negotiations, that Arab issues might be discussed and that a representative of Sharif Husayn might be present. He was asked to immediately telegram any points relating to Iraq which ‘should be borne in mind by the British Representatives’.

Wilson took up the invitation with gusto. Firstly, he felt it his duty to record his conviction that, ‘the Anglo-French Declaration … bids fair to involve us in difficulties as great as Sir Henry McMahon’s early assurances to the Sharif of Mecca’. ‘In years to come’, Wilson pronounced, ‘we shall be faced with the alternatives of evading the spirit whilst perhaps keeping within the letter of the Declaration, or of setting up a form of Government which will be the negation of orderly progress and will gravely embarrass the efforts of the European Powers to introduce stable institutions in the Middle East.’

Indeed, the Declaration placed ‘a potent weapon in the hands of those least fitted to control a nation’s destinies’. According to Wilson it was only ‘a handful of amateur politicians in Baghdad’ who wanted an independent Arab government in Iraq. In fact he could ‘confidently declare that the country as a whole neither expects nor desires any such sweeping scheme of independence’. On the contrary, ‘the Arabs are content with our occupation’ and ‘the world at large recognises that it is our duty and privilege to establish an effective protectorate’. And this point he repeated in his concluding paragraph: ‘I submit, therefore, that our best course is to declare Mesopotamia to be a British Protectorate.’
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Gertrude Bell, who, in Cox’s absence, was now working for Wilson, was equally perturbed by the Anglo-French Declaration. Writing to her father on 28 November, she described how ‘The French-British Declaration has thrown the whole town into a ferment. It doesn’t happen often that a people are told that their future as a State is in their hands and asked what they would like.’ However, she contented herself with the belief that, in reality, the Iraqis ‘are all practically agreed. They want us to control their affairs and they want Sir Percy as High Commissioner.’ But then, Miss Bell’s views about public opinion in Baghdad were formed largely by discussions with people like the Jamil Zadah family, described in a previous letter to her father as ‘landowners, very rich, upright honest people, staunchly pro-English’; in other words the wealthiest elements who feared any disruption which might endanger their property rights and social status.
¹⁹

In one respect Arnold Wilson was perfectly correct about Iraqi public opinion. Until the very last year of the war only a very small minority of Iraq’s many and varied peoples wanted ‘independence’. In the three main cities, Baghdad, Basra and Mosul, educated public opinion still thought of itself as ‘Ottoman’: its
watan
, its homeland, was the great Islamic state into which they had been born and under whose aegis they had carried on their traditional business, social and deeply religious lives. Outside the three cities – in the countryside and in the two major Shi‘i shrine centres of Karbela’ and Najaf – the people mostly just wanted to be left alone. And until that final year of the war the people of the mid-Euphrates region in which the two holy cities were situated
had
largely been left alone as the British and Indian troops fought their way up and down the Tigris. Indeed, the only serious attempt to move up the Euphrates beyond Nasiriyya had been defeated. On 14 January 1916 a British and Indian column advancing towards the Shatt al-Muntafiq had been suddenly attacked at a village called Butaniyya by around 17,000 Arabs led by Sheikh Khayyun al ‘Ubayd and forced to retreat, losing 183 men dead or ‘missing’.
¹

Consequently, for much of the war, a vast area of roughly 180 miles by 80 miles stretching from Nasiriyya in the south to Musayib in the north and encompassing the land surrounding the two main branches of the Euphrates – the Hilla and the Hindiyya – remained largely outside British control. However, since the capture of Baghdad, as the British fanned out, bringing more and more of Iraq under their control, it had become
abundantly clear to the settled and semi-settled tribal people under their sheikhs and to the inhabitants of the shrine cities under their mujtahidin that they were no longer going to be left alone but systematically ensnared in the net of control which the British were now casting wider and wider.

In fact, matters had already come to a head in Najaf. In October 1917 the long reach of the British Civil Administration finally brought the Shi‘i shrine city within its grasp. A PO was designated for the town and its surrounding region and a pro-British Indian-born notable, Agha Hamid Khan, was appointed as governor while a small detachment of Indian troops was posted at Kufa, seven and a half miles north-east of Najaf on the Hindiyya branch of the Euphrates.
²

However, the Najafis did not take kindly to this interference in their customary way of life. Since April 1915, when they had driven the Turkish authorities out of the city on account of their overzealous and coercive conscription of their men into the regular army, the citizens of Najaf had run their own affairs. Admittedly, the manner in which they ran their own affairs would have seemed abominably anarchic and ‘oriental’ to the young gentlemen from the Home Counties who typically made up the personnel of the British Civil Administration in Iraq and who had learned most of what they needed to know about ‘handling the natives’ in India or the Sudan.

Indeed, the very appearance of Najaf must have seemed strange and daunting to its new rulers. Lying seven miles west of the Euphrates, the ancient city stood on a ridge of reddish sandstone gravel on the very edge of the desert. It was surrounded by massive thirty-foot-high walls, strengthened at regular intervals by rounded bastions fifty feet in diameter and further protected by a moat. To the south-west, the city overlooked an ancient, partially dried-up marsh called the Bahr Najaf lying forty feet below the ridge, and to the north lay the huge, ever-growing cemetery of Wadi as-Salaam.
³
In the centre of Najaf stood the golden-domed shrine of ‘Ali, reached by a broad thoroughfare running through a thirty-foot-high covered bazaar from the main gate of the city in the Eastern Wall, the Bab al Husayn. Elsewhere the streets were a maze of narrow huddled alleyways, connecting around 5,000 brick-and-mortar
houses as well as some seventy khans providing accommodation to visiting Shi‘i pilgrims. Even the houses seemed threatening and mysterious to the British: most of them contained catacomb-like sirdabs, cellars which were sometimes two or three storeys deep, where their occupants could escape the midday heat; and many of these were interconnected by passages, some of which had exits outside the city walls.

Najaf’s regular population of around 30,000, lived in four mahallas – self-governing quarters whose organisation strongly reflected the heavily tribalised nature of this city on the edge of the desert. The self-identity and loyalty of the inhabitants of each mahalla were to their quarter and its sheikh or headman, rather than to the city as whole, and they often quarrelled and sometimes even fought against other mahallas. Mahallas even had their own constitutions by which the citizens of the quarter pledged their allegiance to its headman and acknowledged certain rules, in particular the old tribal principle of
fasl
, the settlement of cases involving murder by the payment of blood money.
⁴

It was only at the religious level that the city conceived of itself as a united, common entity. Najaf was a holy city; indeed the holiest city of the Shi‘is. There resided the most revered of the mujtahidin, some of whom were Persian or of Persian origin and it was the traditional base of the Grand Mujtahid whose religious judgments were endowed with the greatest respect and sanctity. And around the gold-tiled shrine of ‘Ali were the madrasas, the religious schools where hundreds of students studied their Qur’ans and keenly debated with their teachers the ethical, political and philosophical topics of the day in the light of their own theological precepts.

To the British, however, the Shi‘i shrine cities were the epitome of theocratic backwardness and oriental obscurantism. Major Bray, who spent some months in Najaf’s twin city of Karbela’ during 1918, considered the city’s mujtahidin ‘rapacious clerics … steeped in ignorance’, whose ‘bigotry’ held their followers in ‘medieval subservience’. Gertrude Bell often expressed similar opinions: Najaf was ‘mysterious, malign, fanatical’.
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Among the younger, more recent recruits to the political service in Iraq, Najaf had an even worse reputation. Based presumably, on lurid gossip in the officers’ mess, the city was perceived as being barely distinguishable from Sodom and Gomorrah. One clean-living twenty-six-year-old Balliol-educated assistant political officer (APO), Captain J.S. Mann (having arrived in Iraq only a few weeks earlier), wrote to a fellow officer in England that, ‘it goes without saying that such a city is unbelievably corrupt, obscene, treacherous and inflammable’.
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Precisely why such a description should ‘go without saying’ was not elaborated upon. A few weeks later Captain Mann was writing to his father describing, with considerable relish, that Najaf ‘is a city so vicious that the most sober account of it could not be printed in England: one can only say that every vice known to the most unpleasant Greek and Roman authors … flourishes there publicly’.
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