Enemy on the Euphrates (57 page)

In practice, the extent and degree of the ‘punishment’ meted out to the insurgents depended on certain circumstances. In those areas where the tribes refused to submit and carried on fighting the policy would
be simply one of ‘general slaughter’ – although it seems that women and children were not to be
deliberately
included in this policy. In areas where the tribes had formally submitted, they were to be compelled to surrender all their rifles – the quantity required being assessed by the British and frequently at an amount which exceeded the number of rifles actually in the tribesmen’s possession; the ‘deficit’ would then be demanded in the form of cash payments. If the tribe in question refused to surrender their rifles or persisted in handing over only a quantity smaller than the specified number – or old unserviceable weapons – then, after due warning, their village would be burned to the ground, their livestock killed or confiscated and, should there be any sign of resistance – the ‘general slaughter’ policy would come into play.

In fact there was nothing particularly novel about this manner of dealing with recalcitrant Arab villagers. It dated back to the beginning of the Mesopotamian campaign in 1914. However, for obvious reasons, not mentioned in official military records, the brutality meted out to the despised ‘Budoos’ was sometimes recorded by individual soldiers who had few reservations about informing their families and friends about what happened.

For example, shortly after the capture of Basra in 1914, a British infantry private related how the army dealt with suspected ‘unfriendly’ Arab villages. First, the village in question would be surrounded by a strong cordon of troops during the night. Then, at dawn, the troops would storm into the village with fixed bayonets, breaking down doors and searching for weapons. ‘Those who attempt to run away are caught by our ring of men outside the village. These are treated as combatants and meet their end on the scaffold.’ Similarly, any of the inhabitants who actually put up armed resistance ‘are hanged in the market square’.
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As for minor offences, such as stealing army property, flogging was the usual procedure, one which an Indian Army medical officer described as ‘a most pleasant sight’.
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Haldane’s own account of the manner in which ‘the punishment’ was carried out in 1920 largely restricts itself to the burning of villages, for which he provides a detailed prescription including the cautionary advice
that ‘burning a village takes a long time, an hour or more according to the size from the time the burning parties enter’.
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However, we can get a fairly good idea of the more general
modus operandi
of ‘punishment’ from Major General Leslie’s letters to his wife both before and after the capitulation of the holy cities. On 20 August he writes:

The column on the railway has been attacking and burning every village within reach … Walker’s column is slowly working its way back here ravaging the country on his way … Three men with rifles taken. Rifles belonged to headman. Today I had all four tried by a military court and tomorrow they die.

And on 10 October,

Building blockhouses … to keep the lines of communication open and unharassed, but the rate of advance is delayed … so that the column will not actually advance more than four or five miles a day, but they will utilise their leisure time in destroying villages within a couple of miles or so on each side, killing Budoos and generally enjoying themselves.

And on 19 October,

Killing Budoos and burning villages seven miles to the west and five miles northwest of Hilla … there was very little opposition … Meanwhile General Sanders has continued punitive methods from Tuwairij and has laid bare the country almost up to Karbela’ … He has done splendidly.
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For the insurgent regions outside the mid-Euphrates we have less verbatim evidence, but we learn from the laconic report of the commander of the Scinde Horse that in a punishment meted out to a certain Arab village on the Diyala, the 45th Sikhs ‘bayoneted a few Arabs, but otherwise not much damage was done’.
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No information is provided as to whether the Arabs bayoneted were putting up any form of resistance, but the contextual information suggests not. Meanwhile, near Falluja, special treatment appears to have been reserved for the Zauba‘ tribesmen, whose sheikh’s son had killed Colonel Leachman. According to Leachman’s colleague
Harry Philby, they suffered ‘a terrible vengeance exacted by Leachman’s fellow soldiers’.
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Whether this ‘terrible vengeance’ was more terrible than that inflicted in other rebel villages, and in what manner it was enacted, we cannot tell, but clearly Philby thought it was worthy of mention.

Even if, for a moment, we allow for the fact that in some cases the inhabitants of recalcitrant Arab villages escaped – or were actually allowed to escape – before their dwellings and sources of livelihood were burned to the ground, it is worth considering the impact the ‘laying waste’ of villages and crops would have had upon the women, children and old people. Autumn was already upon them and cold, wet winter was approaching. Hiding out in the marshes, without shelter or food (and, of course, without even the semblance of medical care), their plight must have been terrible. The casualty figures which the British attributed to the Arab participants in the uprising – around 8,000 – related only to the combatants; but thousands more non-combatants must have perished from this particular counter-insurgency strategy alone. However, Haldane’s ‘nutmeg-grater’ methods – methods which one Iraqi historian has aptly described as ‘The English Terror’
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– involved a lot more than just that.

As we have already seen, the indiscriminate bombing of Arab villages which resisted the various impositions of British rule was already a feature of the Civil Administration’s policy even before the uprising (and was one of its causes). However, in the months following the defeat of the insurgent’s main forces and the submission of the holy cities, the policy really came into its own, especially since liaison between aircraft and ground forces had now much improved, as Squadron Leader Gordon Pirie described in a staff college lecture at Hendon in 1925:

At Diwaniyya a halt for a week was made to carry out punitive expeditions in the Daghara and Afej regions. These were spectacular operations. The column would leave Diwaniyya at about 0200 hours. Aeroplanes leaving the base so that they would arrive over the column when its outposts were a quarter of a mile from the village to be attacked, would swoop down on it, drop 30 or 25lb bombs and pour hundreds of rounds of small arms
ammunition into it. Panic-stricken, the inhabitants fled and in a minute the column would enter the village without a shot being fired. The usual procedure then was to drive towards Diwaniyya all the flocks and herds, setting fire to all that was left. This had a most salutary effect on the tribes north of Diwaniyya.
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Such ‘spectacular’ operations, often carried out at night, had the advantage of catching rebel Arabs who had returned home after sniping at British troops during the day. But this also inevitably meant there would be heavy casualties among the sleeping women and children. Indeed, it seems clear that some RAF officers regarded the latter as acceptable targets. For example, in his first operational report after taking command of the RAF in Iraq in February 1921, Air Commodore A.E. ‘Biffy’ Borton, recorded how, ‘The eight machines (at Nasiriyya) broke formation and attacked at different points of the encampment simultaneously, causing a stampede among the animals. The tribesmen and their families were put to confusion, many of whom ran into the lake making good targets for the machine guns.’
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Even Churchill’s randomly oscillating moral compass could not accommodate such behaviour, and he wrote to Borton’s superior, the chief of the air staff, Hugh Trenchard, that he was ‘extremely shocked’ by this particular report. ‘To fire wilfully at women and children is a disgraceful act,’ Churchill declared, and he expressed surprise that Trenchard hadn’t ordered the officers concerned to be court-martialled.
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Yet the casual manner in which Borton had reported the incident suggests that events like this were all too common. For Borton – and no doubt for most of his officers and men – this sort of thing was merely routine: ‘a vivid, if rather ferocious glimpse of the type of warfare we have to wage’, as he commented in a marginal note to his official report.
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Having recently destroyed a genuine Arab government on the Euphrates, and while continuing to hunt down and destroy its remaining supporters, the British plan to establish their own provisional Arab government in Baghdad went ahead with the official announcement of the creation of a ‘Council of State’ on 11 November 1920. This puppet institution was headed by the venerable and conservative Sunni notable, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Gaylani, the Naqib (head of all the Sunni ashraf) of Baghdad, who had remained loyal to the British since 1917; and, cajoled by Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell, Ja‘far al-‘Askari accepted the position of defence minister. Each Arab member of the provisional government had his British ‘minder’. For example Ja‘far al-‘Askari was ‘advised’ by Major J. I. Eadie DSO; the minister of justice, Mustafa Effendi Alusi, was ‘advised’ by Sir Edgar Bonham Carter; and Sayyid Talib, the minister of the interior, was ‘advised’ by Harry Philby, recently recalled from a diplomatic mission in Najd.
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Meanwhile, around 600 former Ottoman army officers in Syria (the vast majority being Sunni) who had played no part in the uprising were allowed to return to Iraq. They included Ja‘far al-‘Askari’s brother-in-law, Nuri al-Sa’id, who, as early as August 1920, had written to the British announcing his willingness to fight with them against the insurgents.
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In February 1921 the British appointed the newly promoted General Nuri al-Sa’id, ‘chief of staff’ of the newly formed puppet Iraqi army. In the same month Sir Percy Cox announced a general amnesty for those who had taken part in the uprising, with the exception of those who had been directly
implicated in the killing of British officers in circumstances which could be construed as ‘treacherous’ – most notably that of Colonel Leachman.

The British knew that the ‘Council of State’ could only be a stop-gap measure until some more permanent solution was found to the enduring problem of how to hang on to Iraq without expending huge amounts of British taxpayers’ money at a time of extreme financial stringency. In the end the solution to this problem would be both military and political. On the political front there was an increasing sentiment that something a bit more ‘nationalist-looking’ than the Council of State was required to gain a sufficient degree of acquiescence among the populace towards de facto British control. There would have to be an ‘Arab Emir’ in Iraq after all, and Emir Faysal was now being widely touted as the most suitable candidate – a ‘consolation prize’ on the part of the British for their acquiescence in the French overthrow of his Syrian kingdom.

As regards the military side of things, Trenchard, the chief of the air staff, had by now convinced Churchill that controlling Iraq should be turned over to the RAF – a far more economic way of ensuring the survival of Britain’s new ‘friendly native state’ than the traditional method of large infantry garrisons. Eight squadrons of aircraft supported by six armoured-car companies should be able to do the job, Trenchard and Churchill believed. In future, all that would be required to subdue troublesome tribes, like those on the Euphrates, would be the sudden appearance of a few fighter-bombers over their villages for them to capitulate to the demands of the central government. After all, as squadron leader Arthur (later ‘Bomber’) Harris explained a couple of years later,

The Arab and Kurd … now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within 45 minutes a full sized village … can be wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.
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Subsequently, on 12 March 1921, forty British delegates were brought together in Cairo to settle the affairs of Iraq once and for all. Although many of those attending were technical and advisory personnel of lower
rank, the conference was illuminated by the presence of almost all the dignitaries who had, so far, had an interest in Iraq’s affairs including Churchill, Cox, Bell, Lawrence, Haldane, Trenchard, Ja‘far al-‘Askari and Wilson (in a new role as recently appointed managing director of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company). As expected, the decision was taken to anoint Faysal King of Iraq and the holding of a suitably designed ‘referendum’ on this fait accompli was agreed. Nobody appears to have recommended Emir ‘Abdallah for the job, who was currently occupying the town of Ma’an (on the border between present-day Jordan and southern Syria) with a small contingent of armed supporters, making bombastic threats against the French.

The referendum on Faysal’s candidature for King of Iraq was duly held, with, unsurprisingly, a majority of 96 per cent in support of the proposal and on 23 August 1921 he was proclaimed monarch. In October the following year ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Gaylani, on behalf of King Faysal and the puppet Iraqi government, signed a treaty with Great Britain whose terms were intended to last for twenty years and which, inter alia, gave Britain the right to station troops in Iraq, to control Iraq’s foreign policy, to appoint a ‘high commissioner’ and a many-tiered phalanx of British officials and police to ‘advise’ the Iraqi government, and to require Iraq to shoulder a heavy financial burden of repayments to Britain for the latter’s current and prior expenditures in the country – but all this behind a façade of sovereignty and self-determination.
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A ‘friendly native state’ had been successfully established in the ashes of the Ottoman Empire.