Enemy on the Euphrates (7 page)

Lord Kitchener, War Minister 1914–1916

However, there was a critical weakness in this political strategy of Kitchener and Sykes, because one of the reasons for disaffection with the new authorities in Istanbul among many of the notables in these potentially friendly ‘native states’ was a growing belief that the Ottoman revolution of 1908 had proved singularly unable to roll back the swelling tide of European economic penetration threatening the traditional fields of activity which were the prerogative of those same notables. Indeed, if anything, the new rulers in Istanbul seemed to be facilitating this invasion of foreign capitalism. In some of the empire’s Arab provinces fears grew that they were in danger of exchanging a subordinate position within a Muslim empire for an equally subordinate position within a Christian one; and the Arabs of Iraq, in
particular, began to cast anxious glances towards that great outpost of European imperialism on their eastern flank – Britain’s Indian Empire.

In fact, only a few years before Kitchener and Sykes had begun to speculate about the possibilities of fomenting pro-British subversion in the Ottoman Empire’s Arab lands, an explosion of anti-British feeling had erupted in Baghdad in what became known as the Lynch affair.

For many years, the merchants of Baghdad had been able to send their goods down the Tigris either by using the paddle-steamers of the British-owned company Lynch Brothers or by the Ottoman steamer line, the
Nahriyya
, and the competition which the
Nahriyya
provided had compelled Lynch Brothers to keep their freight rates at levels generally accepted as satisfactory by the Baghdad merchants. However, in early December 1909 news reached Baghdad that the Chamber of Deputies in Istanbul was proposing to privatise the
Nahriyya
, selling it to Lynch Brothers. For the merchants this meant only one thing: a British monopoly of river transport and, sooner or later, much higher freight charges.

On receiving news of this proposal a group of leading Baghdad notables, including not only Sunni and Shi‘i traders but also Jewish and Christian merchants, launched an unprecedented campaign against it, a campaign which soon took on the appearance of a turbulent local uprising.
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One of the participants in this campaign was the grandson of a leading Baghdad cereal merchant, a young man named Ja‘far Abu al-Timman, who would later play an important role in opposing the British occupation of his country after the end of the Great War in November 1918.

Soon the movement spread to other Iraqi cities including Mosul and Basra and began to raise fears for their safety among the British residents of Baghdad. Rumours spread that three members of the Ottoman cabinet had accepted a bribe of £50,000 from Lynch Brothers to promote the Lynch concession and on 20 December J.G. Lorimer, the British consul general in Baghdad, telegrammed his superior in Istanbul reporting a mass meeting of between five and ten thousand local people which appointed a fifty-strong committee of leading Muslims, Jews and Christians to lead the fight against the proposed privatisation. On 26 December, so strongly were feelings running that the authorities were
compelled to reinforce police guards near the British Residency and the premises of Messrs Lynch Brothers. In the event, the Lynch affair was one of a number of issues which brought about the collapse of the first post-revolution elected Ottoman government in 1910, and with it the proposal to sell the
Nahriyya
also perished for the time being. But in the succeeding years before the outbreak of war there were further manifestations of opposition to the economic policies of the Young Turks which were equally grounded in fears of further British encroachment. So when the British exacerbated this underlying fear of foreign capitalist penetration by actual invasion, there was little appetite for pro-British collaboration against their Turkish co-religionists among the Arabs of this part of the Ottoman Empire.

Meanwhile, the fatwa of 14 November 1914 issued by the Sheikh al-Islam on behalf of the Ottoman sultan, calling for jihad against the British and French, was read out in every Sunni mosque in Iraq. The Shi‘is of Iraq did not acknowledge the authority of the Sunni caliph. According to the precepts of the Shi‘i, the true successor of Muhammad had to be a descendant of the Prophet’s closest male relative, his cousin and son-in-law ‘Ali ibn Abu Talib. Moreover, some of the Shi‘i religious leaders intensely disliked the more secular policies of the Young Turks. Nevertheless, they heeded the call to jihad, recognising that the events now unfolding constituted a threat to the whole Muslim world.
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Their response was also a reaction to the anguished appeal for help from their fellow countrymen facing invasion in the south of the country. Three days after the British seizure of Fao, the leading citizens of Basra sent an urgent telegram to the ‘ulema’ (clergy) of the holy shrine cities of Najaf, Karbela’ and Kadhimayn, urging them to mobilise the tribes:

Port of Basra. The infidels are encircling us. We are all in arms. We fear for all the other Muslim towns. Help us by demanding that the tribes defend us.
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In Najaf, the ‘ulema’ were among the first to declare jihad against the British invaders; but they did so on one condition. Before the outbreak
of war, the Turkish authorities had imprisoned a number of important local sheikhs suspected of ‘nationalist’ tendencies on various trumped-up charges and these men, the clergy of Najaf demanded, must be released before they would issue a fatwa calling upon the tribesmen to join the colours and prepare to march south.
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The Turks rapidly agreed, and so the leading clerics of this holy Shi‘i shrine city issued a call to arms.

The impact of the Ottoman fatwa was particularly strong among the Shi‘i tribes of the mid-Euphrates in closest contact with Najaf and Karbela’ – the al-Fatla, the Bani Hasan, the Bani Huchaym and the Khaza’il and those tribes in the marshy territory of the Lower Euphrates dominated by the Muntafiq confederation. Around 18,000 volunteer mujahidin from these areas responded to the call and joined the Ottoman colours.
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They were led by men like Sayyid ‘Alwan al-Yasari, one of those released from prison, Muhsin Abu Tabikh, a leading sayyid and wealthy landowner, and Sayyid Hadi al-Mgutar – notables who would form the backbone of a second great struggle against the British, six years later.
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Members of the sada (plural of sayyid) were especially well placed to act as recruiting agents for the jihad. They occupied a distinctive position within the social stratification of the Shi‘i world of the Middle and Lower Euphrates. A sayyid might be rich or poor – his social distinction came not from his position in the socio-economic structure but from the fact that the sada were a caste: one which traced its descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad, specifically through the line of Husayn, one of the two sons of the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. As a member of the caste, a sayyid was entitled to claim one-fifth of the income of his non-sayyid neighbours within a certain, traditionally circumscribed territory. But this seemingly parasitic arrangement was rarely seen as such by those who paid since, in addition to the general sense of reverence towards the sada, the richer members of the caste had certain important duties, as well as rights. In particular they acted as intermediaries between the ‘ulema’ of the holy cities and the rural, tribal population, often carrying out minor religious and judicial functions such as the settlement of land disputes, divorces and quarrels over inheritances. Moreover, in times of crisis like the present one, the richer sada took up leadership roles in
mobilising the local population at the behest of the ‘ulema’, a role also requiring them to provide financial and material support.

One such tribal dignitary, the thirty-six-year-old sayyid Muhsin Abu Tabikh, was to play a particularly important role in the unfolding jihad. His forebears had originally come from Hasa in the Arabian peninsula around a hundred years ago and had subsequently acquired rich rice-producing lands in the Shamiyya, the area to the east of the city of Najaf, watered by the two channels of the Hindiyya branch of the Euphrates.
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It was from these fertile lands that Abu Tabikh derived his considerable wealth and he now committed a considerable proportion of that wealth to financing the jihad.

On 21 December 1914 a huge flotilla of sailing ships carrying Abu Tabikh and a large contingent of his tribesmen set off downriver on the Shamiyya channel of the Euphrates, heading for the town of Samawa, en route for Nasiriyya, the major concentration point for Ottoman forces. However, on arriving at Samawa, Abu Tabikh found the local military governor struggling to deal with a major logistical crisis.
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Thousands of tribesmen had been pouring into the town to join the jihad but many of them – and the governor singled out the Bani Huchaym tribe in particular – were entirely lacking in food supplies, or even the cash to purchase food. Since the governor knew Abu Tabikh to be not only a wealthy individual but also a sayyid, he appealed to him to provide the resources to feed this growing army of would-be mujahidin, to which Abu Tabikh readily agreed.

Landowning sada like Muhsin Abu Tabikh were by no means the only wealthy Arab notables who committed their own resources to the struggle against the British invasion. In Baghdad Haji Daud al-Timman, an eighty-one-year-old Shi‘i cereals merchant, spent much of his remaining capital to outfit and equip a band of volunteers to fight alongside the regular Ottoman troops. In spite of his age, he accompanied his mujahidin as they headed south towards the British front lines in late November 1914.
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In his absence, Haji Daud al-Timman left Ja‘far, his thirty-three-year-old grandson, to manage the family business as his own son had long since deserted his family and fled to Persia. On 7 December Haji Daud was captured in a skirmish with British troops near Qurna. Having learned
that his grandfather had been taken prisoner to Basra, Ja‘far wrote to the British authorities seeking permission to visit him on grounds of his age, but his request was refused and the subsequent death of his grandfather in captivity in 1917 would leave Ja‘far deeply embittered.
¹⁴
Three years later it would be Ja‘far Abu al-Timman who would come to play a leading role in Baghdad’s emerging campaign for full national independence.

Whereas the jihad was generally well supported among the sheikhs and urban notables of Iraq, the same could not be said of all the neighbouring Muslim territories. In the Arabian peninsula and the Arab lands on the Persian side of the Gulf, the call to jihad produced great uncertainty as to where their best interests lay. For example, on 19 November Sheikh Khaz’al of Muhammara, ruler of much of Persian Arabistan, received the following telegram from the aged Grand Mujtahid, Muhammad Kadhim Yazdi, the most senior Shi‘i cleric of Iraq, urging him to join the jihad.

To his honour Sheikh Khaz’al Khan, from Najaf

Salaams to the Exalted Sirdar of the Esteemed Sultanate, Sheikh Khaz’al, may His Majesty remain in perpetuity.

In the Name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful.

It is well known that one of the most important duties towards the domain of Islam is the defence, at all costs, of the Muslims’ sea ports against attack by the Infidels, and since yours is one of the most important of those ports hence it is your duty to protect that port to the utmost that you are able. Likewise you have a duty to lead the local tribes in that region and it is required of you to inform them that it is forbidden for any Muslim to assist the Infidels and that their support must be for the Muslim war effort. We trust in your zeal and sense of honour to make every effort to repel the Infidels: and if God so wills it, may he support you in vanquishing his enemies.

Muhammad Kadhim al-Tabataba’i al-Yazdi

1 Muharram 1333 h.

(19 November 1914)
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But Sheikh Khaz’al, now drawing considerable revenues from his lease of Abadan to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, ignored the Grand Mujtahid’s appeal and by now, had thrown his full support behind the British invaders.

Meanwhile, in the Hejaz, hundred of miles away on the western flank of the Arabian peninsula, another Arab potentate, who had already decided against joining the jihad, was contemplating active support for the British. Before the outbreak of war between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, the deeply conservative Emir Husayn ibn ‘Ali al-Hashimi, the Sharif of Mecca, had made it known to the British, via a meeting between his second son, the thirty-two-year-old Emir ‘Abdallah and Kitchener’s oriental secretary, Ronald Storrs, that he was fearful that the CUP government in Istanbul was planning to replace him by a candidate more favourable to their somewhat more progressive social and economic policies, and that under certain circumstances he might rebel against his Turkish overlords.
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So on 24 September 1914, Kitchener telegrammed Cairo with instructions that a secret letter should be sent to the Emir ‘Abdallah to ascertain whether, in the event of the Turks entering the war on Germany’s side, ‘he, his father and Arabs of the Hejaz would be with us or against us’. Moreover, he closed his message to Mecca with these crucial words: ‘It may be that an Arab of true race will assume the Caliphate at Mecca or Medina and so good may come with the help of God out of all the evil that is now occurring.’