Enemy on the Euphrates: The British Occupation of Iraq and the Great Arab Revolt 1914-1921

439 Pages·2010·4.83 MB·English

by  Rutledge Ian

ENEMY ON THE EUPHRATES
ENEMY
ON THE
EUPHRATES
The British Occupation of Iraq
and the Great Arab Revolt 1914–1921
Ian Rutledge
SAQI
Published 2014 by Saqi Books
Copyright © Ian Rutledge 2014
ISBN 978 0 86356 762 9
eISBN 978 0 86356 767 4
Ian Rutledge has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as
the author of this work.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired
out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than
that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the
subsequent purchaser.
Every effort has been made to obtain necessary permission with reference to copyright material. The
publishers apologise if inadvertently any sources remain unacknowledged and will be happy to correct this
in any future editions.
First published 2014 in Great Britain by
Saqi Books
26 Westbourne Grove
London W2 5RH
www.saqibooks.co.uk
A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed and bound by Bookwell in Finland
For Diana, as always.
And for my beloved children,
Joanna, Daniel, Zoe and Emilie
What we want is some kind of modicum of Arab institutions which we can
safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves, something which won’t
cost very much … but in which our influence and political and economic
interests will be secure.
Sir Arthur Hirtzel, February 1920
Whereas most westerners have no knowledge of the 1920 uprising,
generations of Iraqi schoolchildren have grown up learning how nationalist
heroes stood up against foreign armies and imperialism in towns like
Falluja, Baquba and Najaf – the Iraqi equivalents of Lexington and
Concord.
Eugene Rogan, The Arabs: A History
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Note on Arabic Transliteration
Glossary
Abbreviations
Preface
The Principal Actors
PART ONE: INVASION, JIHAD AND OCCUPATION
1 Indications of Oil
2 Lieutenant Wilson’s First Mission
3 ‘Protect the oil refineries’
4 Arab Mobilisation on the Euphrates
5 The Jihad Defeated
6 Pacifying Arabistan
7 Imperial Objectives in the East
8 The Menace of Jihad and How to Deal with It
9 The Lieutenant from Mosul
10 The Peculiar Origins of an Infamous Agreement
11 Two British Defeats but a New Ally
12 Colonel Leachman and Captain Lawrence
13 Mosul and Oil
14 ‘Complete liberation’
15 Najaf 1918:First Uprising on the Euphrates
16 Britain’s New Colony
17 The Oil Agreements
18 The Independence Movement in Baghdad
19 General Haldane’s Difficult Posting
20 Trouble on the Frontiers
PART TWO: REVOLUTION AND SUPPRESSION
21 The Drift to Violence
22 The Revolution Begins
23 Discord and Disputation
24 General Haldane’s Indian Army
25 ‘The situation has come to a head’
26 The Destruction of the Manchester Column
27 ‘Further unfavourable developments’
28 The Structures of Insurgent Power
29 Trouble on the Home Front
30 The Siege of Samawa
31 Defeat
32 A Death on the Baghdad Road
33 The Punishment
34 A ‘friendly native state’
Afterword
Appendix: Some Biographical Notes
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
List of Illustrations
Sir Mark Sykes, 1913
Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, 1912
Lord Kitchener, War Minister 1914–1916
Captain Arnold Wilson, 1916
Colonel Gerard Leachman, c.1912
T. E. Lawrence, 1918
Gertrude Bell, 1921
Ja‘far Abu al-Timman, c.1920
Sheikh ‘Abd al-Wahid al-Sikar, 1918
General Aylmer Haldane, 1921
Indian cavalry on patrol, c.1918
A Rolls Royce armoured car, used in Iraq in the 1920s
A DH9A aircraft
The gunboat HMS Firefly
Sayyid Muhsin Abu Tabikh, c.1924
List of Maps
The Ottoman Empire c.1900
Iraq, within Its Postwar Mandate Borders, and Neighbouring Regions of Syria,
Turkey and Persia
Sykes’s 1915 Proposed Scheme for the ‘Decentralisation’ of the Ottoman
Empire’s Eastern Possessions
The Division of the Ottoman Empire’s Eastern Possessions According to the
Sykes-Picot Agreement 1916
The Division of the Ottoman Empire’s Eastern Possessions into the British and
French Mandates 1920
The Middle Euphrates Region, Epicentre of the 1920 Revolution
The Scene of the Manchester Column Disaster, July 1920: the Camp on the
Rustumiyya Canal