Enemy on the Euphrates (60 page)

After returning to India and retiring from the army, Major General Leslie lived quietly with his wife and daughter, moving to England in the late 1920s. In August 1930 Leslie sent Arnold Wilson a copy of some of the letters, originally written to his wife during the 1920 revolution, in which he had recorded his personal experiences, including his fraught relations with General Haldane. In 2003 the letters were deposited in the Asia, Pacific and African Section of the British Library. General Leslie died in Bournemouth, aged sixty-nine, in 1936.

One of Churchill’s final acts before the fall of the Lloyd George coalition was to advocate the use of gas bombs against a recrudescence of Kurdish insurgency and continuing outbreaks of Arab tribal resistance in Iraq. Sir Percy Cox and Sir Hugh Trenchard had requested a clear statement of Colonial Office policy on the question and Churchill declared, ‘I am ready to authorise the construction of such bombs at once … In my view they are a scientific expedient for sparing life which should not be prevented by the prejudices of those who do not think clearly.’ However, in the event, it was decided that ‘ordinary bombing’ was sufficiently effective. By now Churchill’s popularity in the country had sunk to depths even lower than in the immediate aftermath of the Gallipoli campaign and in the 1922 general election he came fourth in the poll at Dundee. Although he later joined the Conservative Party and in 1925 became chancellor of the exchequer, during the 1930s he became increasingly estranged from many of his party colleagues and, in his opposition to Nazi Germany, widely viewed as a warmonger. In 1940 he replaced Chamberlain as wartime prime minister. The remainder of his career has been recorded by many historians, of which the most comprehensive is the series of volumes by Churchill’s official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert.

The origins of this book go back more than twenty-five years. Around that time I developed a fascination for the economics, history, culture and religions of the Middle East and North Africa and, as an avid bibliophile, I set out to build a personal library of this material. There followed innumerable visits to second-hand bookshops and book fairs, during which I was invariably accompanied by my oldest friend, the military historian John Ellis, seeking to add to his own specialised collection. Many of the books I discovered have provided crucial reference material for
Enemy on the Euphrates.
So thank you, John, for being such a companionable fellow book-searcher and long may your own collection flourish.

Having embarked on my quixotic journey, the next step was clearly to learn Arabic. (I suppose it could have been Persian or Turkish but that would have restricted me to those countries only.) After a lonely battle with textbooks of varying utility, I sought out a personal tutor and found one in the person of Haytham Bayasi, formerly of Damascus and now a citizen of Sheffield. Haytham spent many gruelling hours trying to teach me the vocabulary, grammar and syntax of standard Arabic while providing endless cups of his delicious cardamom-flavoured coffee, a taste for which has remained with me to this day. I still retain my notes from those sessions and frequently re-read them. Without the help you gave me I would never have been able to tackle the Arabic texts which made
Enemy on the Euphrates
possible. Let us hope that one day, when the insanity of Syria’s civil strife has ended, you and your family may be able to visit your beloved Damascus again in peace.

Remaining with the subject of my bibliography, I must give special thanks to my former PhD student Loriane Yacoub, and her family in Baghdad who furnished me with one particularly rare historical work which has cast light on one of the more obscure corners of the 1920 revolution – the spread of the uprising to the Diyala region of north-east Iraq. Thank you Loriane, and may your own wounded country one day soon return to the ideals of some of those 1920 revolutionaries whose stories I have tried to relate.

Many libraries and archives were invaluable in the assistance they gave me, especially in the area of Arabic texts on the uprising and its historical background. My thanks are therefore extended to the libraries of the School of Oriental and African Studies London University, Exeter University, the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College Oxford, and Sheffield University Library for allowing me to use their inter-library loans system. Needless to say, this book would never have been written without having access to the exceptionally rich archives of the British Library’s India Office Collection and the National Archive at Kew. I should also like to thank the librarians at the RAF Museum Hendon and Ashton-under-Lyne public library, which houses the archive of the Manchester Regiment. Finally, I must thank Newcastle University for putting the whole of the Gertrude Bell Collection online thereby saving me both considerable expense and hours of travelling.

Enemy on the Euphrates
would never have got into print without the invaluable assistance of four individuals. My literary agent, John Parker, of Zeno Agency Ltd, was the object of a controlled experiment – my very first attempt at writing in a ‘popular’ style. To my great relief he didn’t treat this with derision, although he did advise me to forgo some of my more excessive stylistic endeavours and ridiculously lengthy early versions of the book. Saqi Books’ anonymous referee amazed me with some incredibly generous comments on an earlier draft while at the same time disabusing me of the prejudice that academic experts in a particular field are reluctant to accept intruders into their own speciality. Without that support, the book might have ended in the waste-paper basket. Trevor Horwood was responsible for the meticulous copy-editing which
went far beyond the customary functions of the profession, providing advice on some important substantive issues and suppressing some of my stylistic infelicities. Finally, I am eternally grateful to my publisher at Saqi, the charming, kind and super-efficient Lynn Gaspard, who somehow finds time to run an international business, reply promptly to every email, read every word of your work more than once and offer invaluable advice about structure and style.

Over many years of writing, so many other individuals helped me that I beg their forgiveness if I have neglected to include their names. My old friend Walter Little cautioned me against an excessive use of Arabic words and reminded me about Britain’s long-standing foreign policy towards the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth century. I look forward to reading the latest fruits of Walter’s own labour – a biography of Sir Charles Napier (of Sindh) – when it appears in print. My brother-in-law Peter Hodgson read and commented on one of the key chapters while also assisting in a difficult search for biographical information. But above all, I must thank my wife, Diana Rutledge, not only for helping me with the search for additional biographical data but also for putting up with my frequent dereliction of domestic duties, closeted in my office, in pursuit of an objective which I suspect she frequently doubted would ever come to fruition.

Preface

1.
   Until the mid-1970s the only published English-language accounts of the uprising were those of the two senior British officers directly involved in its suppression, Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Haldane,
The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920
, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London, 1922, and Sir Arnold T. Wilson,
Mesopotamia, 1917–1920: A Clash of Loyalties
, Oxford University Press, London, 1931. Mark Jacobsen makes the point that the uprising ‘was the largest British-led military campaign of the entire interwar period, but it has escaped the attention lavished upon many smaller scale episodes’. See Jacobsen, ‘“Only by the Sword”: British Counter-insurgency in Iraq, 1920’,
Small Wars and Insurgencies
, vol. 2, no. 2, 1991, p. 323.

2.
   See, e.g., Niall Ferguson, ‘This Vietnam Generation of Americans Has not Learnt the Lessons of History’,
Daily Telegraph
, 10 April 2004; Robert Fisk, ‘Iraq 1917’,
Independent
, 17 June 2004; also, before his replacement, Paul Bremner, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority set up to administer Iraq following the invasion, was reported as opining that the great mistake of the Shi‘is had been to rebel against the British in 1920.

3.
   One of these groups called itself the ‘1920 Revolution Brigades’, but see the comments of Abbas Kadhim in
Reclaiming Iraq: The 1920 Revolution and the Founding of the Modern State
, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2012, p. 42, on the dubious credentials of this group.

4.
   Unfortunately these estimates are also much more vague and regrettably unreliable. For example, ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani in
Al-thawra al-‘Iraqiyya al-kubra, sana 1920
(The Great Iraqi Revolution of 1920), 3rd edn, Matba‘ al-‘Irfan, Sidon, 1972, notes that the three divisions of occupied Iraq most seriously affected by the uprising were Diwaniyya, Shamiyya and Hilla while the Muntafiq and Ba’quba divisions were also affected on a lesser scale. He then suggests that the size of the ‘nationalist forces’ can be estimated by taking the combined population figures (and therefore including non-combatants) of the Diwaniyya, Shamiyya and Hilla divisions for the year 1920 (567,500),
but excluding those of Muntafiq and Ba’quba divisions. By this method, he states, ‘perhaps we reach an understanding of the number of rebels’ (p. 136). Presumably his assumption is that the over-estimation involved in counting the
whole population
of the three most seriously affected divisions is offset in some way by
not including any
of the population of Muntafiq and Ba’quba. But this cannot be regarded as a satisfactory method.

5.
   There appears to be no ‘official’ figure for the number of actual combatants. Estimates range from a mere 30,000 to 120,000; the latter is quoted by
onwar.com
available at
http://www.onwar.com/aced/nation/kay/kenya/fmaumau1952.htm
. Although the purely military phase of the uprising occurred between 1952 and 1956, the British repression continued until 1960.

6.
   Eliezer Tauber,
The Arab Movements in World War One
, Frank Cass, London, 1993, p. 139.

7.
   The ‘mid-Euphrates region’ designates an area of roughly 100 miles by 60 miles stretching from the town of Musayib in the north to Samawa in the south and encompassing the land surrounding the two main branches of the Euphrates – the Hilla and the Hindiyya channels.

Chapter 1: Indications of Oil

1.
   Uriel Dann, ‘Report on the Petroliferous Districts of Mesopotamia (1905) – an annotated document’,
Asian and African Studies
, vol. 24, no. 3, 1990, p. 283.

2.
   Ibid., p. 285.

3.
   Ibid., p. 287.

4.
   Ibid., p. 291.

5.
   Roger Adelson,
Mark Sykes: Portrait of an Amateur
, Jonathan Cape, London, 1975, p. 62.

6.
   Mark Sykes,
Dar-ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey
, Bickers & Son, London, 1904, p. 178.

Chapter 2: Lieutenant Wilson’s First Mission

1.
   Quoted in John Marlowe,
Late Victorian: The Life of Sir Arnold Wilson
, The Cresset Press, London, 1967, pp. 22–3.

2.
   Antony Wynn,
Persia in the Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes, Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy
, John Murray, London, 2003, p. 42.

3.
   Zuhair Mikdashi,
A Financial Analysis of Middle Eastern Oil Concessions: 1901–1965
, Praeger, New York, 1966, p. 293.

4.
   Arnold T. Wilson,
S.W. Persia. Letters and Diary of a Young Political Officer, 1907–1914
, Readers Union, London, 1942, pp. 33–4.

5.
   Ibid., p. 42; see also J. R. L. Anderson,
East of Suez
, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1969, p. 36.

6.
   Wilson,
S.W. Persia
, p. 211.

7.
   A point made by Marian Jack, who refers to the whole episode as ‘an aberration’
in government policy. See Marian Jack, ‘The Purchase of the British Government’s Shares in the British Petroleum Company, 1912–1914’,
Past and Present
, no. 39, 1968, pp. 139–68.

8.
   There are suggestions of this kind of hypocrisy on pp. 74, 77 and 107 in Stephanie Jones,
Trade and Shipping: Lord Inchcape, 1852–1932
, Manchester University Press, 1989. However, a review of her book criticises the author’s timidity in not giving greater weight to this subject. See Gordon Boyce, ‘Reviews’,
Business History Review
, vol. 63, no. 3, 1989.

9.
   Stephen Helmsley Longrigg,
Oil in the Middle East: Its Discovery and Development
, Oxford University Press, London, 1954, p. 42. In the event, the field work planned by the company did not take place.

10.
  Jones, p. 153.

11.
  Helmut Mejcher, ‘Oil and British Policy Towards Mesopotamia’,
Middle Eastern Studies
, vol. 8, no. 3, 1972, pp. 377–91; and Helmut Mejcher,
Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq 1910–1928
, Ithaca Press, London, 1976, p. 15.

12.
  For a lengthy discussion of the protracted negotiations leading up to the formation of the final version of the TPC, see Marian Kent,
Oil and Empire
, Macmillan, London, 1976, pp. 15–113.

13.
  For an excellent account of these events see Christopher Clark, T
he Sleep Walkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
, Allen Lane, London, 2012.

Chapter 3: ‘Protect the oil refineries’

1.
   Arnold T. Wilson,
Loyalties: Mesopotamia, 1914–1917
, Oxford University Press, London, 1930, p. 3.

2.
   See Clark, p. 250.

3.
   This very abbreviated account of the events leading to war with Turkey are taken from Field Marshal Lord Carver,
The National Army Museum Book of the Turkish Front, 1914–1918
, Pan Books, London, 2000, pp. 5–7.