The Creation of Iraq, 1914-1921

Reeva Spector Simon, Eleanor H. Tejirian, Reeva Spector Simon, Eleanor Tejirian

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9780231509206
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Leading scholars consider Iraq's history and strategic importance from the vantage point of its residents, neighbors (Iran, Turkey, and Kurdistan), and the Great Powers.

1 The View from Basra:

Southern Iraq’s Reaction to War and Occupation, 1915–1925

Judith S. Yaphe

In 1914, when Britain’s Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force entered Basra, Iraq did not exist as a state. The three provinces that form modern Iraq—Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul—were part of the Ottoman Empire and had been ruled well and badly by the Turks and their Sunni Arab cohorts for several hundred years. The population of 3 million was roughly 50 percent Shi‘i Arab, 20 percent Sunni Arab, 20 percent Kurd (mostly Sunni, some Shi‘i, a few Jewish), and 10 percent “other” (including Jews, Christian Catholics, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and Turkomans). Iraq’s Arabs were the last of the multinational groups that comprised the Ottoman Empire to abandon it. Comfortable under the aegis of Islamic governance, Iraq’s power barons in city and tribe focused their attention on land tenure and water issues. Any political ambitions they may have had before the Great War were directed at becoming an autonomous state within the Ottoman Empire. Separatism as a political goal was a result of the chauvinistic racial policies of the Young Turks, and not because of repressive Ottoman policies.

By 1916, Sunni Arab political elites educated in Istanbul and working for the Ottoman Sultan and Army had either defected to the Sharif of Mecca, Husayn ibn Ali, and his Great Arab Revolt, or were thinking about accepting the British. On the other hand, Arab tribal leaders and Shi‘i clerics in southern Iraq, secure in their isolation, were considering autonomy under the Turks or outright independence. Some Shi‘i clerics in the southern towns were willing to consider going over to the British to obtain oudh benefits from the religious endowment denied them by the Turks, while the merchants of Basra had long-standing commercial ties to British and Indian merchants. The southern tribes, in particular, had a common sense of Arab identity, shared traditions and customs, and linkages to the great clans and confederations that had originated in Arabia and spread throughout the Peninsula and the Levant.

If Britain found in Iraq a society in isolation, political disarray, tribal unrest, social chaos, and economic uncertainty, its foreign policy establishment in Whitehall was in equal disarray. Whitehall had no policy for the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire, let alone the Mesopotamian provinces (vilayets). Its foreign and defense policymaking establishments—the War Office, the Foreign Office and the India Office based respectively in London, Cairo, and Delhi—were divided in outlook and mission. Britain ultimately shaped the government and borders of the new state that would emerge in 1920, but the world-view of its rulers, King Faysal and his Sunni Arab military supporters—educated in Turkish military academies and schooled in Arab nationalism—would be shaped by their common experiences in serving the Turks and in the events of the Great Arab Revolt of World War I.

War and Occupation British Style

British forces occupied Fao and Basra in southern Iraq in October 1914 to keep non-British influences (primarily Russian and German) out of the region and protect strategic interests in Iran’s oil fields, communications lines to India, and the status quo in the Arabian side of the Gulf, where Britain had been giving security guarantees to several paramount or soon-to-be paramount sheikhly families. Otherwise, Britain had little contact with the reality of Iraq prior to 1914, and few Englishmen were familiar with her language, traditions, or internal conflicts. British military commanders and civil servants from the India Office were drawn to Iraq by the lure of future political and economic wealth and strategic necessity. The campaign was long and bloody, with the British meeting armed resistance everywhere. Despite a humiliating defeat at Kut in 1916 and a forced retreat, British forces took Baghdad in 1917 and Kirkuk and Mosul in 1918. Secret agreements with Sharif Husayn (recognizing the Arabs’ right to an independent state) and the French (the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 that divided the Middle East into British and French spheres of influence) ensured Britain would be the dominant power in the Persian Gulf region. The Kurdish highlands bordering Turkey and Iran, the Euphrates region from Baghdad south to Nasiriyya, and the cities of Karbala and Najaf were left unpacified and unoccupied. Najaf, which had been virtually independent under the Turks, was self-governing after 1916. Also ignored were Iraq’s southern Arabs who had been educated in the shrine cities and were fast on their way to becoming Arab and Iraqi nationalists. Arab nationalism was particularly strong in Najaf and Karbala, where students and scholars were encouraged to study the history of Arab civilization and culture. These became the most unstable areas of Iraq in the mandate period, after independence in 1932, and after the Gulf war in 1991.

Responsibility for defining and implementing British policy on Iraq fell to several disparate centers. The India Office controlled military operations and policy in the first two years of the war, after which the War Office assumed control of military operations and the Foreign Office over policy. Civil administration remained with the India Office. The Arab Bureau, part of the Intelligence Division of the Foreign Office, tried to coordinate policy on Iraq through its advisers to the Civil Administrator. They were viewed with hostility by the India Office, which had particularly proprietary views towards Basra. The War Office, Foreign Office, Arab Bureau, and India Office all urged different priorities and policies and issued proclamations and aims that were unclear and contradictory. Many Arabs and Iraqi nationalists, however, were eager to have hopes and ambitions confirmed and accepted their promises.

The policy debates in Whitehall were framed by two questions: would the acquisition of new territory make England stronger or weaker? and should allowance be made for the strong feeling in the Muslim world that Islam had a political as well as a religious existence? The Foreign Office and the Arab Bureau advocated creation of an Arab caliphate and state in Arabia under indirect British control. It would include southern Iraq, Mecca, and Medina, and was labeled the Hashimite School because of its support for the claims of the Sharif of Mecca.¹ In contrast, the India Office viewed Iraq through the prism of India’s Muslims and needs.² India would absorb Iraq to protect and extend imperial interests into Arabia; Abd al-Aziz ibn-Sa‘ud of Najd, the Wahhabi tribal leader who would ultimately rout the Sharif and create the modern state of Saudi Arabia, was viewed as the Arab ruler most fit to lead—and be led. In any event, the British Army sought the cooperation of local tribes and sheikhs to harass the enemy, and Whitehall issued proclamations beginning in 1916 to the Arabs of Iraq and the Gulf that “this War has nothing to do with religion.”

While the Foreign Office and Arab Bureau ultimately won the debate by placing an unemployed Hashimite prince on the throne of Iraq, the India Office succeeded in shaping governmental and social controls that would last until the 1958 revolution. The debate was irrelevant to the Iraqis, be they Arab and Iraqi nationalists bent on independence, southern tribal sheikhs, merchants and traders concerned only with their personal and property rights, or religious clerics intent on creating a new Islamic government. Years of British occupation and manipulation would result in the rise of nationalist groups resenting British cooptation and usurpation of rights and, ultimately, a disturbing pattern of military revolts, political repression, ethnic cleansing, and civil unrest.

Establishing Democracy without Democrats

Even before the end of the Great War, British military and civil administrators had put in place mechanisms by which they would exercise control over the new “state-in-waiting” that would become Iraq. The tone was set by British administrators sent out from the India Office who sought to model Iraq on Britain’s imperial style of rule in India. They were guided by the nineteenth century’s philosophy of the “white man’s burden.” They believed in direct British rule and distrusted the “natives” capacity for self-rule. Many believed in the inherent inferiority of the Arabs and their inability to rule wisely or justly. One India Office administrator described “Arab propensities for brutal murder and theft” but expressed his optimism that “if conditions could be moulded aright men would grow good to fit them.”³ They opposed appointment of local Arabs to positions of responsibility, preferring young, inexperienced military officers to “advise” local Arab leaders.

On March 19, 1917, Major-General Sir Stanley Maude, then Commander-in-Chief of British Forces in Iraq, issued a proclamation to the people of Baghdad promising that the British Army had not come as “Conquerors or enemies but as Liberators.” Britain, he said, could not remain indifferent to Iraq but did not wish to impose alien institutions on the people of Baghdad. They were, rather, to “flourish and enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and their racial ideals.” He invited the nobles, elders, and representatives of the Baghdad province to participate in the management of their civil affairs in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain. The proclamation, which Maude personally rejected, reflected the romantic vision of the Foreign Office, and not the more control-minded vision of India Office practitioners. It would, Maude observed, only encourage Arab nationalism and confuse the Arabs regarding British intentions. Six months later Maude was dead of cholera. His successor, Sir William Marshall, was tasked with the singular mission of enlisting the Arab tribes of central and southern Iraq to harass the Ottoman enemy wherever possible. Postwar guidance would be more candid. A Foreign Office memorandum issued in November 1920 promised the people of Iraq “to recognize and support the independence of the inhabitants, and to advise and assist them to establish what may appear to be the most suitable forms of government, on the understanding they seek advice and guidance of Great Britain only.”

Iraq remained under British military rule after the war, but the administration of government shifted to the Chief Political Officer of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, Sir Percy Cox. As Civil Administrator, Cox was responsible for establishing relations with the Iraqis and setting up the machinery of government.⁴ Without stating its policy objectives in Iraq and without publicly acknowledging the once secret and now public agreements with the French, Britain installed an administration based on its Indian model.

In September 1918 the occupied territories of the Basra and Baghdad provinces were combined under one civil commissioner. Political officers were placed in charge of districts, and administrative centers were established in the main towns of the provinces. They administered justice, maintained law and order, settled disputes between town and tribe, and attempted to pacify quarrelsome tribes. They also recruited labor for irrigation and flood control projects, collected supplies for the military, determined compensation for war damages, and protected communication lines. The political officers were, for the most part, young and inexperienced in either military or civil administration. Many were former military officers demobilized in 1918. They knew little of Iraq, its languages, law codes, customs, or traditions.

Although Britain had promised to create an indigenous Arab government under British “guidance,” it continued to directly administer the provinces according to India Office policies and procedures. It abolished elected municipal councils that had been established by the Ottomans. Instead, the new political officers in the districts worked directly through local notables on whom they relied to maintain order. Justice was based at first on Indian and Turkish civil law codes and administered by the district political officer in tribal courts. After the war, the British drew up a tribal criminal and civil disputes regulation that gave the political officer authority to convene a tribal council (majlis) to settle disputes involving tribesmen according to tribal custom.⁵ Tribal sheikhs designated by the British were empowered to settle all disputes with and between members of their tribe and charged with collecting taxes on behalf of the government. Turkish courts and laws replaced the Anglo-Indian civil code. The taxation code was Turkish; the Indian rupee was the official currency. The political officer relied on civil police constables recruited from Aden and India, as well as native soldiers, tribal levies, and local police recruited from the Arab tribes of the district. The tribal levies served as escorts, messengers, jailers, policemen, and soldiers. Although tribal leaders could find some satisfaction in this use of tradition, law as administered by the British Civil Administration came to represent a foreign, rigid, and inflexible system of control.⁶

Tribal Policy in Southern Iraq

Turkish tribal policy had been one of divide-and-rule—dealing with individual tribesmen and tribal subsections rather than the sheikhs and powerful confederations to weaken their traditional power and prestige. It also served to instigate intratribal and intertribal rivalries, all of which played to the benefit of the Turks. British policy aimed at restoring the power and prestige of a select group of sheikhs, considered “natural” leaders, who were officially accorded legitimate status after they submitted to British authority and agreed to work for the Civil Administration. Each sheikh was given responsibility to keep peace in his tribe, arrest wrongdoers, protect lines of communication, collect revenue, and during the war, cut off supplies to the Turks. In return, he received arms, agricultural loans, subsidies, the support of a prestigious British political adviser, and relief from taxes. Most importantly, the British established a land tenure policy based on Ottoman law and custom and excluded the tribes from national law. Regardless of how they acquired their leases to land, sheikhs and townsmen holding rights to property became virtual owners and landlords of tribal lands. Usages developed by the Ottomans—sheikhs as landlord and tribesmen as peasants—were thus legitimized by the British.

Turkish policy had aimed at weakening tribal leaders, who were obliged to protect their tribes, and bringing tribes under state control. Britain reversed this decline of tribal authority at the same time it tried to contain the growth of power among the more nationalist-minded, Turkish-educated city Arabs. The effect of British tribal policies was to weaken relations between sheikh and tribe. Sheikhs now came under British protection and not under tribal obligation. By restoring the sheikhs to a semi-feudal position of power and authority, the British believed they it would be easier to maintain stability and order and cut the high costs of administration. In reality, the sheikhs, endowed with new power and motivated by enhanced self-interest, reverted to autocratic authoritarianism and were increasingly alienated from their natural power base. Britain’s tribal policy had a devastating long-term impact on Iraq’s political development. It minimized interaction between town and tribe and solidified these cleavages by consolidating and officially recognizing tribal customs. From 1918 ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• The Sykes-Picot Agreement
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• List of Maps
• Foreword
• Introduction: Reeva Spector Simon and Eleanor H. Tejirian
• 1. The View from Basra: Southern Iraq’s Reaction to War and Occupation, 1915–1925
• 2. The View from Baghdad
• 3. Mosul Questions: Economy, Identity, and Annexation
• 4. The Evolution of the Iran-Iraq Border
• 5. A Kemalist Gambit: A View of the Political Negotiations in the Determination of the Turkish-Iraqi Border
• 6. Kurds and the Formation of the State of Iraq, 1917–1932
• 7. The Oil Resources of Iraq: Their Role in the Policies of the Great Powers
• 8. Russia from Empire to Revolution: The Illusion of the Emerging Nation State in the South Caucasus and Beyond
• 9. Britain, France, and the Diplomatic Agreements
• 10. The United States, the Ottoman Empire, and the Postwar Settlement
• Postscript
• Appendix: The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916
• Additional Readings
• List of Contributors
• Index