Enemy on the Euphrates (8 page)

Whatever Kitchener meant by his curious reference to the caliphate – and it seems that he probably thought of the caliph only as some kind of Islamic pope – to Sharif Husayn it meant only one thing: that, should he join them, the British were willing to make him the sole ruler of a vast Arab empire whose boundaries would broadly coincide with the historic territories of the medieval caliphs, stretching from Palestine and Lebanon, through Syria and Iraq to the border with Persia and as far south as the Yemen.
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Needless to say, this was not at all what Kitchener and Sykes had contemplated when they mused over the possibility of a creating a loose collection of pliant ‘friendly native states’ under the protection of the British Empire. But from this point on, Britain was
drawn into an increasingly labyrinthine exchange of communications with Husayn which slowly but surely committed it to accepting a much greater degree of ‘Arab independence’ in the Middle East than had ever been contemplated by either Kitchener or Sykes.

So, in Mecca al-Mukarrama, the revered city of the Ka‘aba, the sixty-year-old diminutive white-bearded Sharif Husayn must have read the words of Kitchener’s message with growing pleasure. In his small plain white turban and black outer robe, he retired to his private chamber where he could make himself comfortable on his couch and study the communication in more detail.

Small white turban and black robe – it hadn’t always been like that. This modest attire of the Sharif had been an innovation of one of Husayn’s predecessors, his uncle Sharif ‘Awn al-Rafiq, at a time when the old uncontaminated oriental life was beginning to be replaced and the bravura of the Sharif’s court reduced in tone. Husayn could still remember those earlier days. When he was only three years old, already proud in the knowledge that he was a sharif – the Sunni equivalent of a sayyid – he had travelled from Istanbul to Mecca to witness the investiture of his grandfather Muhammad ibn ‘Awn. Then, the Sharif had been dressed in a scarlet and gold gown with huge hand-concealing wide sleeves and a gigantic turban. Ostrich-feathered fans, armoured black slaves, swordsmen and trumpeters paraded to announce the Sharif’s rising for the dawn prayer. A phalanx of pikemen before him, blind reciters of the Qur’an intoning around him, the Sharif paraded before his people throwing largesse as he rode by, followed by his fearsome black-faced executioners.
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Now the age-old panoply had gone – for good, Husayn had no doubt; but today not only the panoply but the wealth, power and prestige of the Sharifate were under threat.

Husayn’s appointment as sharif by Sultan Abdul Hamid in November 1908 had occurred in the very midst of the fractious political manoeuvring of the Young Turk revolution. The military officers who had led that revolution had shied away from deposing the old sultan while he, in turn, had originally feigned acceptance of the return of a liberal constitution, parliament and a free press. A failed counter
revolution in April 1909 saw Abdul Hamid sent into exile and replaced by his more pliable younger brother, Mehmet, but in the intervening period, Abdul Hamid had been able to continue exercising many of his traditional powers of patronage. Among these was his right to appoint the Sharif of Mecca, and when the existing incumbent had been chased out by the local CUP and Abdul Hamid’s first choice of replacement unexpectedly died, the sultan chose Husayn. In doing so he ensured that the Sharifate rested in the hands of someone he knew to be a social and religious conservative like himself.

Over the next six years, Sharif Husayn grew increasingly hostile to the government in Istanbul. All his instincts were contrary to the innovative spirit of the movement which now held power there and he suspected that they intended to abolish shari‘a law and the powers of the Sharif’s courts. Husayn also feared for his wealth. The income of his stony, unproductive fiefdom depended crucially on the subsidies which, from time immemorial, had flowed from Istanbul – subsidies which reflected the honour and prestige of the Sharif’s office and the recognition throughout Sunni Islam that the ashraf (plural of sharif) were the nearest thing to an aristocracy of the blood which existed in their theoretically egalitarian Sunni Muslim world. Yet the signs were growing unmistakably that the CUP, with their reforms and railways, were seeking to undermine his power and privilege, might reduce his subsidies and even replace him by a rival candidate from the ashraf, something that had happened on numerous occasions in the past. So now he was seriously considering rebellion.

But Husayn was an extremely cautious player of power politics and he pondered long over the appropriate reply to Kitchener. Eighteen years at the court of Sultan Abdul Hamid – eighteen years in a condition of comfortable but unmistakably compulsory residence, verging on imprisonment – had taught him some valuable lessons in politics and diplomacy. He had to judiciously balance his grievances against the government with his fears that rebellion against it might be seen by the Muslim world as a rebellion against Islam. Successfully appropriating the caliphate would do much to allay that criticism, but how certain was he
of success? If the English really did help him – with guns and gold – that would be a different matter, but the
Ingliz
were cunning and duplicitous.

So, when war commenced between Britain and the Ottoman Empire, Husayn equivocated. He conferred with his four sons. ‘Abdallah was the most enthusiastic for rebellion; Faysal, his third son, was reluctant to break with the Turks; ‘Ali, the eldest, and Zayd, the youngest, were indifferent. So the Sharif waited, and in March 1915 he sent Faysal to Damascus to talk with a group of anti-Turkish Syrians known as Jam‘iyya al-‘Arabiyya al-Fatat (The Young Arab Society) who had recently approached him, and also to seek out the leaders of a secret organisation of Arab officers in the Ottoman army called al-‘Ahd (The Pledge), of which he had recently learned and whose exact intentions – once they were fully clarified – might help him decide whether to respond positively to what he believed to be Kitchener’s offer of a vast, independent Arab state.

IRAQ, WITHIN ITS POSTWAR MANDATE BORDERS, AND NEIGHBOURING REGIONS OF SYRIA, TURKEY AND PERSIA

In Iraq, the flotilla carrying the Arab tribesmen, which had been steadily gathering strength since the call for jihad, left Samawa in late December 1914 and sailed south, into the lands of the great Muntafiq tribal confederation, eventually reaching the agreed concentration point at Nasiriyya. By now the vessels carrying the mujahidin were packed with fighters; some – the larger safinas with their lateen sails – were between fifty and eighty feet in length and could carry up to a hundred men; others – the mashufs and flat-bottomed bellums – were little more than punts which were paddled or poled along in the shallows, carrying no more than twenty; and along the right bank of the river the fleet was accompanied by a swelling army of Arab horsemen.

However, as this Arab host was about to leave Nasiriyya the governor of the region received an order from the Ottoman Sixth Army Command in Baghdad that they should await the arrival of regular troops who were marching to support them.
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Recognising the extremity of the military situation around Basra, the High Command in Istanbul had ordered the 35th (Mosul) Division, which had previously been moved to Aleppo, to return to Iraq by forced march.
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The army chief in Baghdad had also been replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Sulayman al-‘Askari, a stout-hearted Turkish officer who had been wounded in fighting near Qurna earlier in the campaign and sent to Baghdad for medical treatment.

After a delay of forty days, some Turkish regulars arrived but to the disappointment of the Arab leaders they numbered only 1,000, albeit they were crack ‘Firebrigade’ troops armed with the latest German rifles.
The fleet of safinas and bellums then transported the combined force down the Euphrates until they reached the great Hammar lake. From there they crossed over the waters, arriving at a village called Nukhayla, halfway between Ghabashiyya and Shu’ayba, where, on 23 January 1915, they made camp on the banks of a great area of marshland. A few days later they were joined by Sheikh ‘Ajaimi al-Sa‘dun and his Muntafiq tribesmen from the lands to the north-west of Basra and ‘Umran al-Haj Sa‘dun, paramount sheikh of the Bani Hasan, whose men had travelled more than 200 miles from the Hilla region adjacent to the holy city of Karbela’.

At this point, the vagaries of Mesopotamian hydraulics intervened. As the mujahidin awaited further reinforcements of regular Ottoman troops, the water level in Lake Hammar rose unusually early and in February flooded south, inundating a vast area between Shu’ayba and the outskirts of Basra itself. The rising water level compelled both the Arabs and the British to virtually halt operations in the vicinity of Basra and it would be another two months before major hostilities in this area resumed.

For the British, the initial phase of the invasion had been successful in protecting the Abadan refinery. However, the problem of defending the remainder of the industry – the pipeline and oilfield on Persian territory – remained; and now unexpectedly the whole area surrounding Anglo-Persian’s operations suddenly became intensely hostile. The call to jihad had also fallen on fertile ground in the Middle Tigris region, where, in January 1915, the son of the Grand Mujtahid Yazdi arrived to preach resistance.

Especially receptive were the Bani Lam, a proud and warlike confederation of tribes of great antiquity who could trace their lineage back over twelve centuries and whose lands stretched from the left bank of the Tigris to the Persian border.
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Their leading section was the Bunayya, led by Sheikh Ghadhban, a long-standing enemy of Britain’s client ruler, Sheikh Khaz’al of Muhammara. The Bani Lam were joined by the Bani Turuf of the Karkha marshes, who also had scores to settle with Sheikh Khaz’al, their nominal overlord and tax-collector. Soon, all
the Arabic-speaking tribes between the great Huwayza marsh north and east of Qurna and the Persian town of Ram Hormuz in the territory of the Bakhtiaris were in arms and sending contingents to join Turkish regulars who had advanced into Persia and seized the town of Illa only thirty miles north of Ahwaz. On 5 February 1915 raiders from another hostile tribe, the Bawi, succeeded in cutting Anglo-Persian’s pipeline and telephone wires above and below Ahwaz and looted the company’s stores. The position of the eighteen Europeans at the oilfield became precarious and only the loyalty of the company’s Arab guards prevented the pumping stations from being destroyed.

The British commander, Lieutenant General Barrett, was therefore compelled to send a ‘reconnaissance in force’ to Ahwaz consisting of two battalions of Indian troops supported by thirty men of the 2nd Dorsets, thirty of the 33rd Cavalry and two 10-pounder mountain guns. The column of about 1,000 men reached Ahwaz on 15 February 1915. Unfortunately, the small detachment which General Barrett had sent to Ahwaz was ill prepared for the kind of resistance which had been fanned to an intense heat by the call to jihad. On 2 March, in some low hills north-west of Ahwaz, the small Anglo-Indian force was badly cut up by a combined force of Turkish regulars and Arab horsemen led by Ghadhban of the Bani Lam, losing 62 killed and 127 wounded and abandoning both its mountain guns. The Arab tribesmen attacked confidently, waving their green, red and white banners, and British officers later reported how they were particularly shaken by the speed of the Arab horsemen, who easily outpaced their own troopers. Indeed, it was reported that in some cases Arabs on foot had been able to run faster than the mounted Indian cavalry and their British officers. This was amply demonstrated by the experience of an Indian cavalry officer. He was on a polo pony which had been a reserve mount for the international polo match with the USA, but he found that as he fled the field, the Arabs on foot were catching up with him; he was lucky to escape.

Others were not so fortunate. Sheikh Ghadhban had offered a reward of several gold pieces for every invader’s head brought to him and those of the British and Indian wounded who fell into Arab
hands were therefore killed. One such British officer, brought down by an Arab lance, lay wounded and unarmed on the ground. He was surrounded by Arabs who indicated to him that he must soon have his throat cut. The officer then motioned them to wait until he had removed his boots. Puzzled, and thinking that it was perhaps incumbent upon the British to bare their feet before making their final peace with the Almighty, they waited. Then, with unerring aim he threw his boots at the faces of his foes as they closed in to finish him off.
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The original motive of the British invasion had been primarily to defend the oil industry; but this situation was not to last for long. In March 1915, with Turkish reinforcements moving south towards the army’s positions, the government of India decided to reinforce its troops in southern Iraq to army corps strength and accordingly to replace Lieutenant General Barrett by a more senior officer. The choice fell upon General Sir John E. Nixon, who arrived on 9 April with the following orders: