On March 11th, 1917, British and Indian soldiers of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force (MEF) marched into Baghdad and occupied it in order to restore order and halt the looting that had followed the city’s evacuation by Ottoman forces the previous day. On March 12th, the War Cabinet in London authorized Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, Commander-in-Chief of the MEF, to issue a proclamation to the inhabitants of Baghdad. This flowery document, drafted by Sir Mark Sykes in London, pledged that ‘our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators’.
The language is strikingly similar to the rhetoric employed to justify the invasion of Iraq in 2003, nine decades later.
The occupation of Baghdad marked the high point of the British campaign in Mesopotamia that had begun on November 6th, 1914, when HMS Odin opened fire on an Ottoman fort in the Faw Peninsula, and ended with the occupation of Mosul and the surrounding oilfields on November 10th, 1918, one day before hostilities ceased in Europe but eleven days after the armistice of Mudros had officially ended the war with the Ottoman empire. The action was part of a hasty late advance intended by Sir Arnold Wilson, acting civil commissioner in Baghdad, ‘to score as heavily as possible on the Tigris before the whistle blew’.
The logistical requirements of maintaining and supplying the MEF, which peaked at 420,000 combatants and non-combatants in 1918, made enormous demands on local resources of manpower, food and fodder. The British authorities had to penetrate local political, economic and social patterns and divert civil resources to military ends. The occupation of Baghdad was the decisive turning point in the construction of a civil administration to regulate the extraction of local resources. The heavy loss of shipping due to U-boat activities in the Mediterranean meant that the development of local resources became the guiding focus of British policy in Mesopotamia. The War Office emphasized this in a telegram to Maude on the day that Baghdad was captured, and Maude consequently continued his offensive operations in order to gain control over the agricultural hinterlands. He achieved this through the occupation of Baquba on March 18th, Falluja on March 19th and Samarra on April 23rd.
The archaeologist and orientalist Gertrude Bell, who had been seconded to the MEF, reckoned the capture of Falluja to be particularly significant, for it secured British control over the fertile districts of the Middle-Euphrates region. These districts had long produced food supplies for Baghdad and the surrounding area, and Bell reported that ‘the fact that the Turks have lost this rich food-producing area is to them one of the most disastrous consequences of the fall of Baghdad’.
After March 1917 the emphasis of operations in Mesopotamia shifted from the military and strategic campaign against the Ottomans towards the pacification of the British-occupied areas and the introduction and extension of civil machinery designed to regulate the mobilization and extraction of the manpower, food and fodder needed in ever greater quantities for the military. This became the ‘double aspect’ of the campaign as noted in a pamphlet published by the Arab Bureau in May 1917 entitled The Pax Britannica in the Occupied Territories of Mesopotamia and involved the ‘submission by political means’ of local tribes and the visible downward penetration of British control to all levels of society. The impact of this downward penetration was sharpened by the administrative vacuum left behind by the retreating Ottomans, and it involved the new administration in conflict with tribal and nationalist elements who resented the construction of an administrative framework based on the lines of an Indian Province and wholly unsuited to local conditions in Mesopotamia.
British control over the tribes was achieved directly by dispatching political officers to local towns and, in the case of the Shi’a holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, indirectly through collaborative local sheikhs. These political agents, many of whom were drawn from the British officer ranks of the Indian Army and were wholly unaware of local cultural and societal norms, were aided by generous subsidies of gold to induce tribes to cooperate and by a military arm that dispensed ‘severe punishment’ on tribes that resisted the imposition of control. By December 1917 the dispatch of troops to garrison posts throughout the Euphrates region completed the process of pacification in the Baghdad vilayat (province), and the civil administration began to organize the collection of local resources in earnest. The political officers worked with officers from the newly established directorates of local resources, labour, agriculture and irrigation to mobilize a workforce and extract vast quantities of foodstuffs for the military effort, causing great hardship to a populace already weakened by poor harvests in 1916 and 1917, the commercial dislocation caused by three years of war and the disruption of intertribal trade by the splitting of Mesopotamia into British and Ottoman zones.
At the end of the war, Mesopotamia remained under British occupation. With President Woodrow Wilson and the peace-makers in Paris championing self-determination, the British administration in Baghdad sought to find ‘up to date reasons’ for continued British rule that would make them ‘both indispensable to, and acceptable by, the native community’, even as they entrenched themselves more firmly in the region. British demands for labour and foodstuffs continued throughout 1919 and 1920 and the methods of collection became more effective. They combined with the cumulative impact of food shortages, high price inflation and the introduction of taxation to create significant pools of discontent as British control became increasingly visible. The setting up of an administrative framework to coordinate and manage the penetration and exploitation of local resources was the most potent factor in the creation of the multitude of grievances held by a wide range of social and economic groupings that eventually found their outlet in violent unrest. The speed and ferocity with which the revolt took root and spread between July and October 1920 shook the foundations of British rule in Mesopotamia and necessitated a level of financial and military expenditure that London could ill afford at a time of significant discontent in India, Ireland and elsewhere.
From the start, British tribal policy in Mesopotamia had been based on the flawed assumption that the tribes constituted a homogeneous bloc. British policy-makers were unaware of the wide variations in tribal structure and exposure to central government control before 1914 that reflected the unevenness with which Ottoman authority had been projected in Mesopotamia. Thus the tribes on the Tigris consisted typically of large homogeneous units that had long been exposed to a measure of central authority. Their condition was very different from that of the Marsh Arabs and the mainly Shi’a tribes of the Euphrates valley, whose physical and geographical isolation had ensured relative freedom from Ottoman control.
In addition, these tribes were fragmented into numerous sub-tribal units, making it more difficult to project central authority, and had long histories of rebellion against central authority, born out of a fierce desire to protect their agricultural land at a time when Ottoman neglect had caused the silting up of canals and rivers and the blighting of productivity. However it was only in August 1920 that Gertrude Bell, by now Oriental Secretary to the British administration in Baghdad and the principal author of the voluminous tribal lists that were issued as guidance to the political officers, realized the error of British policy. She admitted that ‘I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes which can’t as yet be reduced to any system.’
These were important points for they ensured that the impact of military demands for labour and agricultural produce was most fiercely resented in the Shi’a tribal regions of the Euphrates valley. In November 1917 British officials in Baghdad attempted to alleviate the critical food shortages in the city by securing supplies from the surrounding tribal agricultural lands. This had the effect of shifting the scarcity to smaller towns such as Hillah, Musaiyib and Najaf, which had previously depended on the tribal produce for their own supplies. It proved extremely unpopular, and discontent was strongest in Najaf where local civilians seized stocks of grain destined for the British and set in motion a cycle of violence that culminated in the murder of its political officer, William Marshall, in March 1918 and a subsequent British blockade of the town.
British relations with the Shi’a were further complicated by a lack of direct contact with their religious scholars, the mujtahid. The Shi’a had long been excluded from positions of power by the Ottomans, and the British continued this policy after 1917, preferring to rely on established figures among the Sunni notables of Baghdad and Basra and broadly collaborative elements in the mercantile and Jewish communities. British administrators also suspected that the mujtahid posed ‘a direct challenge to British influence and state-building’ in Mesopotamia and described them as ‘aliens, Persians, who owned neither loyalty nor commitment’ to the state. Curiously similar allegations of Iranian manipulation of Iraq’s Shi’a communities would also be a feature of the post-2003 occupation of Iraq by a new generation of foreign administrators.
Bellfurther described how the mujtahid ‘are very hostile to us, a feeling we can’t alter because it’s so difficult to get at them … Chief among these are a family called Sadr.’ Once more a remarkable parallel may be drawn with the problem of communications between the US-led occupation and the Shi’a religious hierarchy since 2003, as Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has refused any interaction with the coalition and the Americans in turn have refused to talk to Moqtada al-Sadr, the great-grandson of Bell’s Sadr.
In July 1920 the Shi’a and tribal communities formed two of the four broad groupings that came together in a loose coalition of disaffected communities, foreshadowing the diverse beginnings of the post-2003 insurgency. The other two groups were the urban notables in Baghdad who noted with resentment and alarm the divergence between the lofty statements of self-determination and the practical evidence that the administration was deepening its roots in the political and economic fabric of the occupied territories, and the many local army officers who returned embittered to Mesopotamia in 1919–20 from Syria, where they had served with Faisal’s Northern Arab Army and witnessed at first hand the gradual breakdown in relations between the French and Faisal’s fledgling administration.
These officers formed the core of a new nationalist grouping in Baghdad, the Independence Guards. Unlike older, more established nationalists, they rejected any cooperation with the British. The group’s members also included many young, educated nationalists who spread pro-independence propaganda and worked to unite the Sunni and Shi’a into a national movement against the British occupation. This was a major new development that enabled the Guards to extend their activities beyond Baghdad to the Shi’a holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and the tribal districts of the Middle-Euphrates region.
However, the British failed to identify the true degree of opposition to their presence in Mesopotamia. They manipulated and misrepresented the results of a plebiscite on ‘local opinion’ in 1919 to produce what one Cabinet member in London, Edwin Montagu, called an ‘authoritative statement’ to President Wilson and the peace conferences indicating popular local support for British policies. Their ignorance of the build-up of local temper was exemplified by the opinion of the political officer of the Diwaniyah Division, Major C.K. Daly who wrote in his annual report for 1919 that ‘the close of the year is marked by the absence of any disturbing element and a more satisfactory tribal situation than has ever before existed within living memory’. Seven months later, the tribal revolt would begin at Rumaytha, in his division.
Two events occurred in the spring of 1920 that marked the culmination of the gradual build-up of discontent and sparked the outbreak of the rising. On April 26th, the judicial secretary, Edgar Bonham Carter, published a preliminary report on a constitution for Mesopotamia. His proposals, including the creation of a council of state in which final effective authority remained in British hands, were completely unacceptable to nationalist groups. Then came, on May 5th, the announcement that Britain had accepted the mandate for Mesopotamia at the San Remo conference. Nationalists suspected darkly that these two events signalled that Britain was preparing to incorporate them directly into the Empire.
It was at this juncture that nationalist anger at the continuation of wartime powers merged with the broad range of grievances and hardships arising out of the war and occupation to provide the pivotal focus for the creation of a loose coalition of disaffected groups. During May and June a series of peaceful demonstrations in Baghdad were marked by symbolic and unprecedented cooperation between Sunni and Shi’a. The demonstrations coincided with the month of Ramadan, and the use of mosques as meeting places hampered British attempts to infiltrate and break up the agitation.
The tribal rising began on July 2nd. Daly had become a particular focus of tribal hatred towards the heavy-handed approach of the occupation forces, and the British garrison at Rumaytha was attacked and besieged. The initial success of this rising encouraged other tribal groups to join in, and three waves of tribal unrest occurred. However they lacked coordination and a coherent strategic plan, and were severely compromised when the tribes on the Tigris failed to join in. In addition, the Sunni notables became alarmed at the demonstration of tribal and Shi’a power and chose to remain loyal to the British administration to safeguard their existing privileges and social order.
Consequently the revolt, which began as a general protest against the extension of British rule, fizzled out into an uprising in the Middle-Euphrates region and a product of that area’s specific combination of socio-economic dissent and Shi’a religious dissent. This distinction between the largely Shi’a revolt and the comparative loyalty of the Sunni communities was to have major political consequences as it confirmed the British prejudice that marginalized the Shi’a from the centres of power in creating the new Iraqi state that emerged from the signing of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty in 1922. The British rewarded the Sunnis for their decision to remain loyal to the administration by constructing the new Iraqi state around them, shaping the intercommunal settlement that would dominate modern Iraqi politics throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.
The capture of Baghdad in March 1917 and the subsequent programme of civil state-building and resource extraction demonstrated the role of large-scale warfare in shaping the nature and extent of colonial penetration into society. The different responses it provoked went on to influence the nature and composition of the Iraqi state that began to take shape after the revolt was quelled in October 1920. The course of events between 1917 and 1920 is profoundly relevant to the situation in Iraq since 2003 and should have provided political and military planners with indicators of the likely response to occupation, and recognition that the entry of British ‘liberators’ into Baghdad in 1917 could provide the context in which this latest violation of Iraqi sovereignty was viewed.
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Kristian Ulrichsen is a Middle East analyst at the Gulf Centre of Strategic Studies in London.