Enemy on the Euphrates, page 5
However, throughout September and October 1914 consultations between London and the government of India continued as to how best to protect the nascent British-owned oil industry should hostilities with the Ottoman Empire commence. Although the government of India was reluctant to do anything which might ignite Muslim passions – and there were already reports of strong anti-British sentiments among the population in Baghdad and Basra6 – feelings in favour of a landing in southern Iraq grew in strength, fortified by the view that Britain must do all it could to protect its client sheikhdoms at Kuwait and Muhammara, especially since it was Sheikh Khaz’al of Muhammara who was the British oil industry’s ‘landlord’ at Abadan. On 2 October the crucial decision was made. A brigade-strength expeditionary force of Anglo-Indian troops in five transport ships supported by the old battleship HMS Ocean would put to sea on 16 October with orders to make what was described as a ‘demonstration’.7
Meanwhile, on 29 September, the Royal Navy sloop HMS Espiégle, mounting six 4-inch guns and four 3-pounders, was ordered to enter the Shatt al-‘Arab, followed by the armed merchantman Dalhousie, while another sloop, the Odin, stayed to patrol the mouth of the estuary. Espiégle then sailed up the Shatt al-‘Arab and anchored off the Sheikh of Muhammara’s capital at the mouth of the Karun. Whatever was intended by this exercise in gunboat diplomacy, its impact only exacerbated the growing tensions between Britain and the Turks. The governor of Basra, Subhi Bey, demanded the ship’s departure by 21 October, threatening to blockade it if it didn’t withdraw by that date. So Espiégle dropped back to Abadan; but it did so under heavy small-arms fire from the Ottoman side of the river.
At the same time, the small expeditionary force of one British battalion and three Indian battalions with two 10-pounder mountain batteries, from Sir Arthur Barrett’s 6th (Poona) Division, which had put to sea on 16 October for the purpose of making the ‘demonstration’, sailed for the Shatt al-‘Arab with the following orders:
1) Protect the oil refineries, tanks and pipelines.
2) Cover the landing of reinforcements.
3) Assure local Arabs of our support against Turkey.8
The landing force was commanded by Brigadier General W.S. Delamain of the Indian Army and accompanying him as chief political officer was Arnold Wilson’s superior, Sir Percy Cox. The brigade arrived at the sandbar which obstructs the mouth of the estuary on 3 November and, after sweeping for mines, sailed up to Abadan. Meanwhile the sloop Odin bombarded the Turkish fort on the Fao peninsula which was later stormed and occupied by Royal Marines from the battleship Ocean. After making a difficult landing without barges or landing stages, the Anglo-Indian force deployed at a small Arab village called Saniyya on the right bank of the Shatt where, on 11 November, it was briefly and ineffectually attacked by around 400 Ottoman troops. A few days later, the remainder of the 6th Division under Lieutenant General Sir Arthur Barrett arrived to reinforce Delamain’s men and on 19 November, in a driving rainstorm, General Barrett ordered his men forward through a sea of mud to attack the old Turkish fort of Zayn, where the Ottoman troops had concentrated. With the support of a battery of royal field artillery the 4,000 Turkish and 1,000 Arab defenders were overwhelmed and fled back towards Basra. However, two Indian battalions were quickly loaded onto the sloops Espiégle and Odin, which steamed rapidly up to Basra, arriving unopposed at the port before the retreating Turkish troops on 21 November. Barrett’s force then pursued the Turks to Qurna, at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates, which was captured on 9 December after some heavy fighting.
During this first, successful phase of the invasion the British forces suffered one small but significant loss. In an inconclusive skirmish on 17 November, Sir Percy Cox’s assistant political officer (APO), Captain R.L. Birdwood, was killed. At the time Lieutenant Arnold Wilson was in London, having just completed an arduous journey along the Turko-Persian frontier as part of an expedition to delineate the border between the two territories which had been a bone of contention for many years. News of the outbreak of hostilities between Russia and the Ottoman Empire reached him as he and his companions crossed the Ottoman-Russian border on 29 October and he straightway made for Archangel, from where he took ship to England. He was expecting to be sent to the front in France but suddenly received orders to set off immediately for Basra, where he was to replace Birdwood as Cox’s APO. He arrived there on 28 December 1914. An obscure British junior officer had been killed in action. A barely less obscure British junior officer had replaced him. But within a few years this seemingly unremarkable event was to have major repercussions.
4
Arab Mobilisation on the Euphrates
At the outbreak of war, the great Victorian military hero Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener of Khartoum gave up his post as consul general in Egypt to become war minister, to the delight of the British public. The tall, square-headed, sixty-three-year-old viscount, whose Maxim guns had wiped out thousands of spear-carrying Sudanese at the battle of Omdurman in 1898, was the object of almost hysterical adulation by the British public. This porcelain-collecting lifelong bachelor, with a penchant for interior decorating, was convinced that with millions of Muslim subjects within her Indian Empire, Britain faced both dangers and opportunities in a war against an Ottoman enemy which was now urging a jihad against the Allies – a holy war sanctioned by the fact that the CUP’s new puppet sultan, Mehmet V, was also the caliph, Islam’s supreme leader and nominally the ultimate successor of the Prophet Muhammad. The threat of Turkish subversion spreading throughout the British Empire’s 70 million Muslim subjects in India and millions more in Egypt and the Sudan – where Kitchener had first-hand experience of militant Islam in his war against the followers of the Mahdi – was, he believed, a very real one.
Kitchener lived at a time when fear of a mysterious religious uprising in ‘the East’ was already capturing the popular imagination. Among those who warned of such a threat was John Buchan, wartime director of information and writer of espionage novels. In his 1916 thriller Greenmantle, Sir Walter, a Foreign Office official, asks secret agent Richard Hannay to call on him.
‘There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border. Whence comes that wind, think you?’
Sir Walter had lowered his voice and was speaking very slow and distinct. I could hear the rain dripping from the eaves of the window, and far off the hoot of the taxis in Whitehall.
‘Have you an explanation, Hannay?’ he asked again.
‘It looks as though Islam had a bigger hand in the thing than we thought,’ I said. ‘I fancy religion is the only thing to knit up such a scattered empire.’
‘You are right,’ he said. ‘You must be right … there is a Jihad preparing … the question is how? … Supposing there is some Ark of the Covenant which will madden the remotest Moslem peasant with dreams of Paradise? What then, my friend?’
‘Then there will be Hell let loose in those parts pretty soon.’1
Muslim peasants dreaming of Paradise; preparations for a jihad; thethreat to the Indian border – these were all very real in the minds of Britain’s rulers at this time, especially among those whose experience had been formed largely through imperial service. But Kitchener believed that possibilities of countering the call to jihad were also present. Given the increasingly pan-Turkish nationalism and small but noticeable displays of secularism apparent among the new rulers in Istanbul, there was also the opportunity to sow disaffection among the Muslim notables in some of the peripheral Ottoman territories – in particular the Arab lands.
Some such disaffection already existed and it was beginning to coalesce with ideas of a cultural and political ‘Arab Awakening’ emanating from small groups of intellectuals in Syria and the region which would later become Lebanon.2 Although, as yet, falling a long way short of a demand for independence, it was nevertheless an embryo movement for some kind of self-determination and was beginning to reach out, not just to highly educated urban notables, but even to some of the sheikhs and landowners of distant rural backwaters like the mid-Euphrates region of Iraq.3 If Britain could play upon the anxieties of local Arab rulers with vague promises of support for some kind of devolution under the protective shield of the British Empire, it might counteract the emotional appeal of the Turkish call to jihad. As Sir Mark Sykes – recently adopted as Kitchener’s protégé – had argued in Parliament in the spring of 1914, ‘There are native states which exist in the provinces of the Ottoman Empire at the present mo.ment which could be made into independent states. If the worse came to worst, there are Armenians, Arabs and Kurds who only wish to be left in peace to develop the country.’4
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.5 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.6 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.7
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.8 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.9 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.10
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.11 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.12 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 1914.13 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.
