Enemy on the Euphrates Read Free

and Turkish control and its inhabitants experienced an unprecedented period of anarchic independence. As a consequence, the imposition of British rule at the end of the Great War – in spite of wartime promises of ‘complete liberation’ – was felt to be particularly onerous among the region’s landlords and peasants alike. The manner in which this resentment grew and gradually came to express itself in armed resistance therefore forms a central part of our story. And, perhaps not surprisingly, it was from the ranks of the 1914–15 mujahidin that some of the foremost tribal leaders of the 1920 uprising emerged.
    Finally, in discussing the causes of the 1920 uprising, some serious consideration must also be given to the reasons why – two years after the defeat of the Ottoman armies – Britain was still occupying Iraq andappeared to have every intention of remaining in de facto control for many years to come. This was in spite of the fact that in 1920 public opinion in Britain itself was strongly opposed to any continuing involvement in the Middle East generally and in Iraq in particular.
    Although the men who ran Britain’s great empire quarrelled bitterly about exactly
how
Iraq should be held in the imperial grasp, they were generally agreed about
why
. When Britain, France and Russia went to war with Germany and Austro-Hungary in August 1914, these Great Powers did not have any plans to permanently dismember and retain each other’s territory (with the exception of France’s desire to recover Alsace-Lorraine – lost to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71). But when the Ottoman Empire entered the war as an ally of Germany at the end of October 1914, the Allies had no such reservations about carving up that vast and venerable empire. After all, in the conventional European imperialist mindset, the Ottomans – Turks, Arabs, and Kurds – were ‘Orientals’ with a long history of lassitude, improvidence, corruption and cruelty and could not be allowed to continue to govern themselves in such an irresponsible manner. So, by early 1915, Russia had made it clear that, when the Ottomans were defeated, it expected to receive their capital, Istanbul, along with the Turkish Straits and two islands in the northern Aegean. France and Britain were therefore invited to identify which parts of the Ottoman Empire
they
would like to acquire.
    The response of the British government was rather more subtle. It wasn’t so much
territory
Britain required (although that might eventually be necessary) but economic opportunities and access to natural resources. Perhaps these could be obtained without the actual partitioning of the Ottoman Empire? – at least that was the initial view of the government committee established to consider the matter in April 1915. And of all those tempting economic prospects which that committee considered, there was one to which its deliberations devoted more attention than any other – oil: specifically, the potentially huge oil resources which were believed to exist in the Ottoman vilayets of Baghdad and Mosul. In short, Britain’s presence in Iraq, which was initially prompted by threatsto its nascent oil industry at the head of the Arabian Gulf, might need to be perpetuated for a number of years until suitable arrangements had been made for those, as yet unexplored, oil reserves to fall into the hands of British-controlled companies.
    For a time – during the middle years of the Great War – this imperial quest for oil slackened somewhat as other, conflicting, objectives came to the fore, in particular the complexities of satisfying the territorial demands not only of Britain’s existing ally, France, but also those of a new ally, the Sharif of Mecca. However, by 1917 it had become clear to all that the nature of war had fundamentally changed: henceforth wars would be increasingly mechanised and oil-fuelled. Indeed, as the secretary to the Committee for Imperial Defence put it,