WORLD WAR I AND THE BRITISH MANDATE (Part One)
Courtesy Ronald L. Kuipers
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Ottoman
territories had become the focus of European power
politics. During the previous century, enfeebled Ottoman
rule had invited intense competition among European powers
for commercial benefits and for spheres of influence.
British interest in Iraq significantly increased when
the Ottomans granted concessions to Germany to construct
railroad lines from Konya in southwest Turkey to Baghdad
in 1899 and from Baghdad to Basra in 1902. The British
feared that a hostile German presence in the Fertile
Crescent would threaten vital lines of communication to
India via Iran and Afghanistan, menacing British oil
interests in Iran and perhaps even India itself.
In 1914 when the British discovered that Turkey was enter-
ing the war on the side of the Germans, British forces
from India landed at Al Faw on the Shatt al Arab and moved
rapidly toward Basra. By the fall of 1915, when British
forces were already well established in towns in the south,
General Charles Townshend unsuccessfully attempted to take
Baghdad. In retaliation, the Turks besieged the British
garrison at Al Kut for 140 days; in April 1916, the
garrison was forced to surrender unconditionally. The
British quickly regrouped their forces, however, and
resumed their advance under General Stanley Maude in
December 1916. By March 1917 the British had captured
Baghdad. Advancing northward in the spring of 1918, the
British finally took Mosul in early November. As a result
of the victory at Mosul, British authority was extended to
all the Iraqi wilayat (sing., wilayah-province) with the
exception of the Kurdish highlands bordering Turkey and
Iran, the land alongside the Euphrates from Baghdad south
to An Nasiriyah, and the Shia cities of Karbala and An
Najaf.
On capturing Baghdad, General Maude proclaimed that Britain
intended to return to Iraq some control of its own affairs.
He stressed that this step would pave the way for ending
the alien rule that the Iraqis had experienced since the
latter days of the Abbasid caliphate. The proclamation was
in accordance with the encouragement the British had given
to Arab nationalists, such as Jafar al Askari; his brother-
in-law, Nuri as Said; and Jamil al Midfai, who sought
emancipation from Ottoman rule. The nationa- lists had
supported the Allied powers in expectation of both the
Ottoman defeat and the freedom many nationalists assumed
would come with an Allied victory.
During the war, events in Iraq were greatly influenced by
the Hashimite family of Husayn ibn Ali, sharif of Mecca,
who claimed descent from the family of the Prophet
Muhammad. Aspiring to become king of an independent Arab
kingdom, Husayn had broken with the Ottomans, to whom he
had been vassal, and had thrown in his lot with the
British. Anxious for his support, the British gave Husayn
reason to believe that he would have their endorsement
when the war ended. Accordingly, Husayn and his sons led
the June 1916 Arab Revolt, marching northward in
conjunction with the British into Transjordan, Palestine,
and Syria.
Anticipating the fulfillment of Allied pledges, Husayn's
son, Prince Faisal (who was later to become modern Iraq's
first king), arrived in Paris in 1919 as the chief
spokesman for the Arab cause. Much to his disappointment,
Faisal found that the Allied powers were less than
enthusiastic about Arab independence.
At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, under Article 22 of the
League of Nations Covenant, Iraq was formally made a Class
A mandate entrusted to Britain. This award was completed
on April 25, 1920, at the San Remo Conference in Italy.
Palestine also was placed under British mandate, and Syria
was placed under French mandate. Faisal, who had been
proclaimed king of Syria by a Syrian national congress in
Damascus in March 1920, was ejected by the French in July
of the same year.
Iraq Part Two
Courtesy Ronald L. Kuipers
The civil government of postwar Iraq was headed originally
by the high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and his deputy,
Colonel Arnold Talbot Wilson. The British were confronted
with Iraq's age-old problems, compounded by some new ones.
Villagers demanded that the tribes be restrained, and
tribes demanded that their titles to tribal territories
be extended and confirmed. Merchants demanded more
effective legal procedures, courts, and laws to protect
their activities and interests. Municipal authorities
appealed for defined powers and grants-in-aid in addition
to the establishment of public health and education
facilities. Landlords pressed for grants of land, for the
building of canals and roads, and for the provision of
tested seeds and livestock.
The holy cities of An Najaf and Karbala and their satellite
tribes were in a state of near anarchy. British reprisals
after the murder of a British officer in An Najaf failed
to restore order. The Anayzah, the Shammar, and the Jubur
tribes of the western desert were beset by violent infight-
ing. British administration had yet to be established in
the mountains of Kurdistan. Meanwhile, from the Hakkari
Mountains beyond Iraq's northern frontier and from the
plains of Urmia in Iran, thousands of Assyrians began to
pour into Iraqi territory seeking refuge from Turkish
savagery. The most striking problem facing the British was
the growing anger of the nationalists, who felt betrayed
at being accorded mandate status. The nationalists soon
came to view the mandate as a flimsy disguise for
colonialism. The experienced Cox delegated governance of
the country to Wilson while he served in Persia between
April 1918 and October 1920. The younger man governed Iraq
with the kind of paternalism that had characterized
British rule in India. Impatient to establish an efficient
administration, Wilson used experienced Indians to staff
subordinate positions within his administration. The
exclusion of Iraqis from administrative posts added
humiliation to Iraqi discontent.
Three important anticolonial secret societies had been
formed in Iraq during 1918 and 1919. At An Najaf, Jamiyat
an Nahda al Islamiya (The League of the Islamic Awakening)
was organized; its numerous and varied members included
ulama (religious leaders), journalists, landlords, and
tribal leaders. Members of the Jamiyat assassinated a
British officer in the hope that the killing would act as
a catalyst for a general rebellion at Iraq's other holy
city, Karbala. Al Jamiya al Wataniya al Islamiya (The
Muslim National League) was formed with the object of
organizing and mobilizing the population for major
resistance. In February 1919, in Baghdad, a coalition of
Shia merchants, Sunni teachers and civil servants, Sunni
and Shia ulama, and Iraqi officers formed the Haras al
Istiqlal (The Guardians of Independence). The Istiqlal
had member groups in Karbala, An Najaf, Al Kut, and Al
Hillah.
Local outbreaks against British rule had occurred even
before the news reached Iraq that the country had been
given only mandate status. Upon the death of an important
Shia mujtahid (religious scholar) in early May 1920, Sunni
and Shia ulama temporarily put aside their differences as
the memorial services metamorphosed into political rallies.
Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, began later in
that month; once again, through nationalistic poetry and
oratory, religious leaders exhorted the people to throw
off the bonds of imperialism. Violent demonstrations and
strikes followed the British arrest of several leaders.
When the news of the mandate reached Iraq in late May, a
group of Iraqi delegates met with Wilson and demanded
independence. Wilson dismissed them as a "handful of
ungrateful politicians." Nationalist political activity
was stepped up, and the grand mujtahid of Karbala, Imam
Shirazi, and his son, Mirza Muhammad Riza, began to
organize the effort in earnest. Arab flags were made and
distributed, and pamphlets were handed out urging the
tribes to prepare for revolt. Muhammad Riza acted as
liaison among insurgents in An Najaf and in Karbala, and
the tribal confederations. Shirazi then issued a fatwa
(religious ruling), pointing out that it was against
Islamic law for Muslims to countenance being ruled by
non-Muslims, and he called for a jihad against the British.
By July 1920, Mosul was in rebellion against British rule,
and the insurrection moved south down the Euphrates River
valley. The southern tribes, who cherished their long-held
political autonomy, needed little inducement to join in the
fray. They did not cooperate in an organized effort against
the British, however, which limited the effect of the
revolt. The country was in a state of anarchy for three
months; the British restored order only with great
difficulty and with the assistance of Royal Air Force
bombers. British forces were obliged to send for reinforce-
ments from India and from Iran.
Ath Thawra al Iraqiyya al Kubra, or The Great Iraqi
Revolution (as the 1920 rebellion is called), was a
watershed event in contemporary Iraqi history. For the
first time, Sunnis and Shias, tribes and cities, were
brought together in a common effort. In the opinion of
Hanna Batatu, author of a seminal work on Iraq, the build-
ing of a nation-state in Iraq depended upon two major
factors: the integration of Shias and Sunnis into the new
body politic and the successful resolution of the age-old
conflicts between the tribes and the riverine cities and
among the tribes themselves over the food-producing
flatlands of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The 1920
rebellion brought these groups together, if only briefly;
this constituted an important first step in the long and
arduous process of forging a nation-state out of Iraq's
conflict-ridden social structure.
The 1920 revolt had been very costly to the British in both
manpower and money. Whitehall was under domestic pressure
to devise a formula that would provide the maximum control
over Iraq at the least cost to the British taxpayer. The
British replaced the military regime with a provisional
Arab government, assisted by British advisers and answer-
able to the supreme authority of the high commissioner for
Iraq, Cox. The new administration provided a channel of
communication between the British and the restive
population, and it gave Iraqi leaders an opportunity to
prepare for eventual self-government. The provisional
government was aided by the large number of trained Iraqi
administrators who returned home when the French ejected
Faisal from Syria. Like earlier Iraqi governments, however,
the provisional government was composed chiefly of Sunni
Arabs; once again the Shias were underrepresented.
Iraq Part Three
Courtesy Ronald L. Kuipers
Beginning in 1923, British and Iraqi negotiators held
acrimonious discussions over the new oil concession. The
major obstacle was Iraq's insistence on a 20 percent
equity participation in the company; this figure had been
included in the original TPC concession to the Turks and
had been agreed upon at San Remo for the Iraqis. In the
end, despite strong nationalist sentiments against the
concession agreement, the Iraqi negotiators acquiesced
to it. The League of Nations was soon to vote on the
disposition of Mosul, and the Iraqis feared that, without
British support, Iraq would lose the area to Turkey. In
March 1925, an agreement was concluded that contained
none of the Iraqi demands. The TPC, now renamed the Iraq
Petroleum Company (IPC), was granted a concession for a
period of seventy-five years.
In 1925 the League of Nations decided that Mosul Province
would be considered a part of Iraq, but it also suggested
that the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty be extended from four to twenty-
five years as a protection for the Kurdish minority, who
intensely distrusted the Iraqi government. The Iraqis also
were to give due regard to Kurdish sensibilities in matters
of culture and of language. Although reluctant to do so,
the Iraqi assembly ratified the treaty in January 1926.
Turkey was eventually reconciled to the loss by being
promised one-tenth of any oil revenues that might accrue
in the area, and a tripartite Anglo-Turco-Iraqi treaty was
signed in July 1926. This settlement was to have important
repercussions, both positive and negative, for the future
of Iraq. Vast oil revenues would accrue from the Mosul
Province, but the inclusion of a large number of well-armed
and restless Kurds in Iraqi territory would continue to
plague Iraqi governments.
With the signing of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty and the settling
of the Mosul question, Iraqi politics took on a new dynamic.
The emerging class of Sunni and Shia landowning tribal
shaykhs vied for positions of power with wealthy and
prestigious urban-based Sunni families and with Ottoman-
trained army officers and bureaucrats. Because Iraq's newly
established political institutions were the creation of a
foreign power, and because the concept of democratic
government had no precedent in Iraqi history, the
politicians in Baghdad lacked legitimacy and never
developed deeply rooted constituencies. Thus, despite a
constitution and an elected assembly, Iraqi politics was
more a shifting alliance of important personalities and
cliques than a democracy in the Western sense. The absence
of broadly based political institutions inhibited the early
nationalist movement's ability to make deep inroads into
Iraq's diverse social structure. Thus, despite the widely
felt resentment at Iraq's mandate status, the burgeoning
nationalist movement was largely ineffective.
Nonetheless, through the late 1920s, the nationalists
persisted in opposing the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty and in
demanding independence. A treaty more favorable to the
Iraqis was presented in December 1927. It remained
unratified, however, because of nationalist demands for
an unconditional promise of independence. This promise
eventually was made by the new high commissioner, Sir
Gilbert Clayton, in 1929, but the confusion occasioned
by the sudden death of Clayton and by the suicide of
Abd al Muhsin as Saadun, the most powerful Iraqi advocate
of the treaty, delayed the writing of a new treaty. In
June 1929, the nationalists received their first positive
response from London when a newly elected Labour Party
government announced its intention to support Iraq's
admission to the League of Nations in 1932 and to
negotiate a new treaty recognizing Iraq's independence.
Faisal's closest adviser (and soon-to-be Iraqi strongman),
Nuri as Said, carried out the treaty negotiations. Despite
widespread opposition, Nuri as Said was able to force the
treaty through parliament. The new Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was
signed in June 1930. It provided for a "close alliance,"
for "full and frank consultations between the two countries
in all matters of foreign policy," and for mutual
assistance in case of war. Iraq granted the British the
use of air bases near Basra and at Al Habbaniyah and the
right to move troops across the country. The treaty, of
twenty-five years' duration, was to come into force upon
Iraq's admission to the League of Nations. The terms of
the treaty gained Nuri as Said favor in British eyes but
discredited him in the eyes of the Iraqi nationalists,
who vehemently opposed its lengthy duration and the leasing
of air bases. The Kurds and the Assyrians also opposed the
treaty because it offered no guarantees for their status
in the new country.
Data as of May 1988