Enemy on the Euphrates (37 page)

Further demands were now made upon the recalcitrant sheikh of the al-Sufran but, owing to a temporary lack of aircraft, the British authorities in the division remained impotent. As a result, the rebelliousness of the al-Sufran spread to the 900-strong al-Barakat, a neighbouring tribe of the Bani Huchaym confederation, and from the Barakat to the Antar, a section of the Albu Jayash.

It was not until May 1920 that aircraft became available. Subsequently, the al-Sufran villages were bombed intermittently for two days, killing and wounding twenty men, women and children and destroying about a hundred sheep.
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But in spite of this brutal retaliation, the British acknowledged that ‘no permanent settlement was effected and the position remained unsatisfactory’.

‘The position’ also remained ‘unsatisfactory’ elsewhere. By late May and early June there were attempts to derail trains passing through the mid-Euphrates region. Arabs in government service began to desert their posts. More tribal sheikhs refused to pay their taxes. Then, on 12 June 1920, in Karbela’, a massive demonstration was held in the courtyard of
the mosque of Imam Husayn in which rousing religious and patriotic poetry was declaimed calling for an uprising, and the following evening a similar mass demonstration took place in the courtyard of the mosque of ‘Abbas.
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On 17 June, the last day of the month of Ramadan, the upsurge of opposition to the continuing occupation spread to Hilla, where notices were posted on the walls of the town calling upon the residents to rise up and defy the British.

The PO for the Hilla Division (which also included Karbela’), was Major H.C. Pulley. Since his arrival in Iraq in June 1917, he had served as APO in a number of different localities including Baghdad, Karbela’, Tel ‘Afar and Hilla itself. He was an officer of some experience but he had only very recently been appointed to the more senior, political officer post. Faced with an unprecedented breakdown of British control in Hilla Division, he decided that he had to take decisive action to stem the rising tide of resistance. So the leadership of the independence movement in Hilla town was arrested and dispatched to a prison camp on the small barren island of Henjam in the Persian Gulf, a locality described by the official
Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf
as having a summer climate which is ‘barely tolerable’, the heat being terrific and aggravated by moisture, sandflies and other insects.

Meanwhile, in Karbela’, another great demonstration was held in the courtyard of the mosque of Husayn on 21 June at which another mujtahid, Sheikh Muhammad al-Khalisi, gave a rousing speech in which he called upon the assembled crowd to prepare for a jihad against the British which should commence the following day.

By now British forces at Pulley’s disposal had blockaded Karbela’. Pulley invited Shirazi’s son Mirza Muhammad Ridha and a number of other leading figures in the independence movement of Karbela’ to a conference. Whatever his reservations – and some of those invited to attend withdrew, fearing British intentions – Muhammad Ridha apparently felt obliged to meet with Pulley in an attempt to avoid bloodshed; such, after all, was the non-violent strategy which his father had consistently pursued since the beginning of the independence movement. In the event, on 22 June Ridha and eleven companions were
seized and also sent to Britain’s island prison camp in the Gulf.
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Wilson was predictably jubilant. ‘Mirza Muhammad Ridha is at Henjam,’ he telegrammed to Mr H. Norman, the British minister at Tehran deputising for Cox, who was paying a brief visit to Baghdad. ‘We have got the wolf by the ears.’
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And a few days after the events at Karbela’ he was informing the India Office, ‘The effect of these arrests has been excellent: agitation has subsided, confidence among chiefs and tribes restored, revenue income in regularly and situation is now once more practically normal on Middle Euphrates.’
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In fact all the available evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Wilson was now living in a fantasy world of his own imagining. Meanwhile, a distraught and embittered Shirazi made one more attempt to diffuse the situation and obtain the release of his son. The Grand Mujtahid wrote to Major Pulley demanding a face-to-face meeting with him. Pulley bluntly refused, telling Shirazi that the purpose of the blockade and the arrests was to maintain law and order.

Once more the aged Shirazi wrote to Pulley. The letter began in tones more of sorrow than anger. He expressed his ‘surprise’ at the contents of Pulley’s previous message. He stated how he believed that Pulley had been deceived by influential persons who wished to exacerbate the tension between the Iraqi and British people. He explained how the meeting he had requested had been intended ‘to remove your suspicions of us’ and that ‘our perspectives on matters of state are more sound and practical than the resort to violence.’ But then the tone of Shirazi’s letter changed.

To use force against the demands of the people and their petitions is incompatible with justice and prejudicial to the good government of the people. If you prevent me coming to meet with you again matters will have reached a state where my advice to the Nation with regard to the maintenance of order will be declared null and void and I will leave the people to their own ends. In this situation responsibility for any evil consequences falls upon you and your masters.
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A few days later Shirazi learned that his son had been released from prison but instead of being allowed to return home had been exiled to
Persia. This did nothing to assuage the anger aroused by the treatment of Muhammad Ridha and his colleagues, anger that was now spreading rapidly throughout the mid-Euphrates and further south into the notoriously unruly Muntafiq Division. At this point Shirazi issued another and final fatwa of immense importance. It read as follows:

It is the duty of the Iraqis to demand their rights. In demanding them they should maintain peace and order. But if the English prevent them obtaining their rights it is permitted to make use of defensive force.
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And if further clarification were necessary, replying to questions about the precise meaning of the fatwa, Shirazi said, ‘Do as you will. Now is the time to take hold of your rights.’
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In this feverish atmosphere it would take only a small spark to ignite a much larger conflagration. The fire was lit at the small town of Rumaytha on 30 June 1920.

Rumaytha is situated on both banks of the Hilla branch of the Euphrates, about twenty-eight miles above Samawa. In 1920 it had a population of around 2,500 inhabiting small houses built of sun-dried mud bricks, scattered among vegetable gardens and date palm groves. Rumaytha was also the District HQ of the same name, part of the Diwaniyya Division. Its APO was Lieutenant P.T. Hyatt, one of the more junior and inexperienced officers in the Civil Administration who had only taken up his post the previous October. On 25 June, Hyatt had reported to his divisional superior, Major C.K. Daly, that Sha’lan Abu al-Jun, sheikh of the Dhawalim section of the Bani Huchaym, was ‘inciting his people to rebel’ and ‘causing disaffection’ and asked Daly for advice on how further to proceed.
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Major Daly – an officer cast very much in the Leachman mould, albeit lacking his aura of natural authority – had no doubts about the way to deal with this type of situation. He had already been informed that same day that the Dhawalim ‘had their flags out’ (signifying refusal to obey the administration any further) so, with Wilson’s authorisation, he ordered Hyatt to arrest the sheikh and dispatch him by rail to Diwaniyya.

Daly took his duties very seriously. The collection of taxes and the mobilisation of forced labour were vigorously pursued with threats of deportation to the prison on Henjam island for those who resisted. For example, in October 1919, when the al-Sufran tribe in the division’s Samawa district refused to submit to the demands of the Civil Administration, it was he who called in air support to bomb the tribe’s
villages. Not surprisingly, Daly was hated throughout the Diwaniyya Division. According to one of Gertrude Bell’s close informants, a Baghdad notable of conservative inclination, this was ‘because of the hardness with which the people have been treated’.
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Even Wilson was bound to admit that Daly ‘causes me some anxiety. He is awfully efficient, but he is a hard man and a bit too hard for his Arabs who would like to be treated a little less justly and a little more kindly.’
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Political officer Harry Philby had a somewhat sharper appreciation of his former colleague’s qualities, describing Daly as being ‘as brutal as he was stupid’.
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It is possible Major Daly believed that Sheikh Sha’lan Abu al-Jun and the Dhawalim could be easily intimidated. The intelligence on tribes prepared for political officers by Gertrude Bell describes the Dhawalim as a ‘peaceful tribe’.
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Certainly, it would appear that neither Bell nor Daly knew that Sheikh Sha’lan Abu al-Jun had attended that crucial conference at Karbela’ on 4 May and was pledged to rebellion once it was authorised by the Shi‘i clergy. So when the sheikh presented himself at the political serai in Rumaytha at noon on 30 June and was duly arrested, he had already primed his leading men for action. At 4 p.m. the 1,200 tribesmen of the Dhawalim attacked, killing an Arab guard of the shabana, putting to flight the remainder of the Arab police and releasing their sheikh.
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Lieutenant Hyatt immediately telegrammed the British bases north and south of Rumaytha for assistance.

In theory, the British Army of Occupation had one considerable advantage in 1920 compared with the situation when they first invaded Iraq. During the war a network of railways had been constructed to facilitate the delivery of men and supplies to the front. The steel rails and rolling stock were brought from India and initially a variety of gauges were in use including some short stretches of line which had been built by the Turks before the war. Most of the latter had been dismantled, but the network as a whole was steadily expanded. While railway construction was focused mainly on the Tigris, in May–June 1916 a one-metre-gauge line up the Euphrates was built from Basra as far as Nasiriyya, along which, for a time, two armoured trains patrolled.
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Once the war was over, some semblance of a rational railway system had to be achieved to replace the
ad hoc
pattern which military requirements had dictated. The immediate problem was to connect Basra with Baghdad, and at first sight the solution appeared to be one of filling in a gap which existed in the 2’6” gauge line between the Tigris towns of ‘Amara and Kut al-‘Amara. However, in the end, the Euphrates route was chosen as it was shorter in total length, passed through more densely populated and better irrigated regions and replaced a water transport system that was more difficult than the Tigris. Thus, with the aid of forced labour, a new metre-gauge railway linking Baghdad with Iraq’s principal port city was built during 1919 and completed by January 1920.

Rumaytha was one of a number of stations along this long railway link and on the evening of 30 June Lieutenant Hyatt had every expectation of receiving reinforcements with which order might be swiftly restored. However, the following day Hyatt learned that the railway line south of Rumaytha had been torn up in several places and a bridge destroyed while a train sent north from Samawa to investigate the situation, carrying a few sepoys of the 114th (Mahrattas) Infantry, had come under heavy fire and been forced to return to base.

Later that day, after an urgent appeal from Lieutenant Hyatt, the line was repaired and at 3.45 p.m. another train carrying two platoons of the 114th Infantry managed to reach Rumaytha from Samawa. On 2 July an under-strength company of the same regiment also got through, this time from Diwaniyya, bringing the total strength of the Rumaytha garrison to 140. Meanwhile, all the non-combatant members of the town’s local administration were moved into the serai, a two-storey brick building on the left bank of the Hilla-Euphrates channel and fifty yards from the bridge of boats from which the railway station on the opposite bank of the river, about half a mile away, could be reached.

On 3 July a train carrying a company of the 99th (Deccan) Infantry under the command of Captain H.V. Bragg, which had been dispatched from Hilla the previous day, arrived at Rumaytha carrying some railway personnel. But en route the train had been forced to stop to repair the
line and had come under fire. There had been a number of casualties among both troops and railway working parties.

On his arrival, Captain Bragg, now the senior officer, took command of the garrison and ordered his own company to occupy two Arab khans, one at each side of the town, while the 114th remained to guard the civilians in the serai. By now Captain Bragg had under his command a total of 527 men, of whom about 40 per cent were railway personnel and other civilians. But the garrison had only enough rations for two days.

By 4 July the insurgents, mainly drawn from other sections of the Bani Huchaym, numbered over 2,500 and – ominously for the defenders – had begun to construct trenches around the town. It was a clear sign that among the rebels there were a number of former Ottoman army officers or NCOs with experience of regular warfare.
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And there were other regular soldiers, men like Lieutenant ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharaf, formerly an officer in the Arab army of Emir Faysal, Ahmad ibn ‘Abdi Pachahiji, another former Arab army officer and ‘Ali Jaudat, one-time military governor of Aleppo after the war ended, who were now in the mid-Euphrates region, ‘fomenting disturbances’, according to Gertrude Bell’s agents, but most probably serving as military advisors to the rebels.
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Meanwhile, reports reached Lieutenant Hyatt that the inhabitants of a nearby village, Albu Hassan, were looting Rumaytha’s bazaar. Captain Bragg therefore ordered two platoons of the 99th into the bazaar to drive off the attackers but, having successfully achieved this objective, APO Hyatt decided that Albu Hassan should now be burned to the ground as a punishment. By the time the troops had completed this task and were returning to Rumaytha, they were ambushed by around 1,500 rebels. Virtually the whole column was wiped out with forty-three infantrymen reported ‘missing in action’ and one British officer, one Indian officer and fourteen Indian other ranks wounded – only a handful of unwounded survivors managing to escape back to Rumaytha.