The Creation of Iraq, 1914-1921 9780231509206

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Maps
Foreword
Introduction
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

Citation preview

The Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921

The Sykes-Picot Agreement

The Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921

Edited by Reeva Spector Simon and Eleanor H. Tejirian

c o l u m b i a

u n i v e r s i t y

p r e s s

n e w

y o r k

c o l um bi a u niv er s it y pr es s Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex Copyright 䉷 2004 Columbia University Press All rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921 / edited by Reeve Spector Simon and Eleanor H. Tejirian. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0–231–13292–1 (cl. : alk. paper) — ISBN 0–231– 13293–X (pa. : alk. paper) 1. Iraq—History—1534–1921. 2. Iraq—History—Revolt, 1920. 3. Great Britain—Relations—Iraq. 4. Iraq—Relations— Great Britain. I. Simon, Reeva S. II. Tejirian, Eleanor Harvey DS77.C74 2004 956.7⬘03—dc22

2004045639

A Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web Sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the editors, the contributors, nor Columbia University Press is responsible for Web sites that may have expired or changed since the articles were prepared.

Contents

List of Maps vii Foreword by Gary Sick Introduction

ix

1

Reeva Spector Simon and Eleanor H. Tejirian

1. The View from Basra: Southern Iraq’s Reaction to War and Occupation, 1915–1925 19 Judith S. Yaphe

2. The View from Baghdad

36

Reeva Spector Simon

3. Mosul Questions: Economy, Identity, and Annexation

50

Sarah Shields

4. The Evolution of the Iran-Iraq Border

61

Lawrence G. Potter

5. A Kemalist Gambit: A View of the Political Negotiations in the Determination of the Turkish-Iraqi Border 80 David Cuthell

6. Kurds and the Formation of the State of Iraq, 1917–1932 M. R. Izady

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vi

Contents

7. The Oil Resources of Iraq: Their Role in the Policies of the Great Powers 110 George E. Gruen

8. Russia from Empire to Revolution: The Illusion of the Emerging Nation State in the South Caucasus and Beyond 125 Peter Sinnott

9. Britain, France, and the Diplomatic Agreements

134

David Fromkin

10. The United States, the Ottoman Empire, and the Postwar Settlement 146 Eleanor H. Tejirian

Postscript

162

Appendix: The Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 Additional Readings

169

List of Contributors

171

Index

175

165

List of Maps

Frontispiece. Sykes-Picot Agreement (Middle East) 4.1. Iran-Iraq Boundary 64 4.2. Iran-Iraq Boundary in the Shatt al Arab 73 6.1. Sykes-Picot Agreement (Iraq) 97 6.2. Provisions of the Treaty of Sevres 101 6.3. Treaty of Lausanne 103 6.4. Mandates in Arabia 106

Foreword

Shortly after World War I, the state we know today as Iraq was invented. Some eighty years later, the United States and a few other countries invaded Iraq with the declared objective of reinventing at least its system of government. The editors of this volume (who also organized the conference that gave birth to it) chose to explore the history of the creation of Iraq, but they also implicitly posed the question of whether the British experience in the early twentieth century had special meaning and lessons for the invaders and liberators of the twentyfirst. In fact, while there were many parallels between the two, it was also striking how many differences there were. The Iraq of 1915–1925 was a much more primitive place. Iraq in 2003 had an efficient and functioning bureaucracy. Although that bureaucratic machinery was at times used for nefarious purposes, it nevertheless provided an invaluable base of expertise and experience that was almost entirely absent when the British marched north to Baghdad. By 2003 Iraq was no longer an illiterate society; mass education had penetrated almost every corner of the populace. By the twenty-first century, oil had become the centerpiece of the Iraqi economy. In the 1920s it was not. Oil changes things. It is typically regarded as a blessing, since it generates great revenue. But oil also has a perverse effect on countries that have it, since money goes directly into the central state coffers with little or none going directly to

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the people. It frees the government from dependence on the popular will, and thereby tends to discourage democratic behavior and accountability. It is as hard today to predict the effect oil wealth will have on the new Iraq as it would have been to predict the prospect of oil revenues in the 1920s. What is similar? The Americans in 2003, like the British before them, did not arrive with a game plan that was reliable. One reason for this uncertainty is that matters of local interest always trump external interests. The effect of tribes, as well as the effects of individual interests and regional interests, were no less powerful eighty years on. Inevitably, it seems, the external “liberators” came in confident of their objectives and priorities, only to be surprised, and so, in the end, find they must adjust their thinking to take account of local demands. Despite the best laid plans, the new leaders inevitably find themselves improvising. Another fact that emerged from this historical reevaluation was that the forms of democracy are an empty vessel unless endowed with genuine authority. No people will be fooled by a show of elections to positions without any power. Running for office, however democratic the process, will be meaningless unless those elected are actually running their own affairs. At the same time, that is an inherent risk, since genuinely democratic procedures may produce new leaders who are unsympathetic to the views (and interests) or the liberating power. The contradiction is not easily resolved. In these presentations, I was struck repeatedly by the fact that ethnicity is different from politics. When the British after 1915 were considering the politics of what was to become Iraq, they expected someone who was a Shi‘ite to vote one way and somebody who was a Kurd to vote another. Yet they repeatedly discovered that was not the case. I suspect that this is a lesson the United States and others will have to learn and re-learn in modern Iraq. We all have this model in our heads of a three-tier country: the Kurds in the north, the Sunnis in the center, and the Shi‘ites in the south. In reality the biggest Shi‘ite population is in the center, there are Kurds everywhere, and it is generally much more complicated than it appears. Similarly, the Law of Unintended Consequences will be no less in force now than it was then. Things have a way of going wrong, of surprising us, of turning out quite differently than anticipated.

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History warns us to beware of statements that say “It’s all about oil (or religion or ethnicity).” In fact, it is not all about oil, it is not all about religion, it is not all about ethnicity. It is really about all those things, and circumstances refuse to fit themselves into such a tidy package despite our fervent wishes. Finally, even a cursory look back should convince all of us to beware of predictions. People who are absolutely convinced that they know how things are going to work out are almost always wrong. They may be wrong for better or for worse, but they are going to be wrong. We cannot look at the world as a linear extrapolation when in fact the real world is extraordinary lumpy and endlessly surprising. Iraq has been—and will be—no exception. These comments are simply a personal reaction to the presentations at the original conference and in this volume. It has been a valuable learning experience for me. And I recommend these accounts to anyone who is interested in understanding just how hard it is to “liberate” Iraq, and why any outside power should approach that task with a healthy dose of humility. Gary Sick Middle East Institute Columbia University January 2004

The Creation of Iraq, 1914–1921

Introduction The Creation of Iraq: The Frontier as State Reeva Spector Simon and Eleanor H. Tejirian

Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003) reminds us that Great Britain undertook a similar process of regime change and territorial reorganization in the same region of the world early in the last century. In the thick of world conflict, its strategic interests in the balance, the British had to begin planning for the aftermath of the World War that required the redrawing of borders and the creation of new political entities. One year after the beginning of World War I, preparations for a new strategic order in the Middle East were already underway. For the Allies—Britain, France, and Russia—the task was different from that of the United States today. Unlike the Coalition forces of 2003 who proclaimed the territorial integrity of Iraq, the British had to begin from scratch, for until 1921, there was no such country as Iraq in existence. It has become a truism in writing the history of modern Iraq to say that Iraq was a country created by the British from the former Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul. But what does this statement really mean? What was “Iraq” and how did the British create it? Today, Iraq is defined as a country in southwest Asia, bordered by the Persian Gulf, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia in the south, by Jordan and Syria in the west, Turkey in the north, and Iran in the east—an area “approximately coextensive with ancient Mesopotamia.”1 Various pieces of its territory have been known by other names. “Iraq,” “Mesopotamia,” “Babylonia,” and “al-Jazira” are all terms that are and have been used

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to refer to all or part of that area in southwest Asia, but nomenclature, definitions, and usage have changed over time and historical circumstance—“a shifting mosaic of names” that reflect the diversity of the area itself.2 Under Roman-Persian rule, “Iraq” was understood to be the part of the north, primarily in eastern Turkey, that formed a province of the Roman Empire that, ironically, was outside the borders of modern Iraq. “Babylonia” was the term used for the area south of Baghdad. Arabs used the term “al-Iraq” (cliff or shore; having deep roots) for the delta or marshlands, “al-Jazira” (the island) for the area between the two rivers north of Baghdad and south of the Taurus foothills, and “al-Sawad” (the Black Ground) for the alluvial plain.3 Whatever it was called geographically, however, the country known today as Iraq has been a frontier zone between empires, defined by the rivers that run through it and the desert that surrounds it on the west and south. These particular orientations have determined the various relationships that the peoples of Iraq have had with their neighbors— especially the conflicts generated by their neighbors to control it. As a highway transmitting goods and ideas, Iraq has been the axis of trade routes and the contact point between Asia and the Mediterranean, and the Persian Gulf and the Caucasus. The rivers, and the agriculture they made possible, led to the establishment of the great cities of the ancient world in which what we call civilization began to flourish: Nineveh in the north, near Mosul; Babylon and Ctesiphon near Baghdad; and further south, Ur. The rivers and the land surrounding them create a highway that links the Anatolian plateau and the Mediterranean to India and the East, and that is religiously, ethnically, and linguistically diverse. At the same time, the river valleys are separated from other settled regions by the mountains of Kurdistan on the east and the Syrian and Arabian deserts to the west and south. All together, it became the cultural crucible of the Arab Abbasid Empire until Baghdad and the irrigation that had sustained it since ancient times were destroyed by the Mongols in the thirteenth century. To the ancient Greeks, the most important thing about Mesopotamia (the land between the two rivers), and what gives it its name (revived by the British), is that the area is dominated by two great rivers, the

Introduction

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Tigris and the Euphrates, which flow from the foothills of the Taurus Mountains in Turkey to the Persian Gulf. These Asian territories “resembled a fork, one tine of which passed through Syria to the Hijaz, while the other followed the Tigris and Euphrates to Basra,” allowing communication between the two via Diyarbakr or the Syrian Desert,4 and have been described also as the Fertile Crescent, a reference to the importance of well-watered land in a primarily desert region. From the desert, however, Iraq was seen as part of a large block of territory consisting of the “Arabo-Syrian desert tableland” in the south and its northeastern frontiers ending in the mountains of western Asia that produced the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.5 From this angle, the pull of the rivers was not paramount; rather it was the pull of Syria, Lebanon, and the Mediterranean in the west and Iran in the east and south outward to the Persian Gulf and India that affected geographic orientation. In this context Iraq has always been a frontier, across which the boundaries of empires have continually shifted. For much of its history, when it was not the center of empire attracting cultural, social, and political interchange as under the Achaemenids or the Abbasid caliphs, the region has been a buffer zone, a swath of territory of indeterminate width that contracted and expanded, separating empires, peoples, and families. This was certainly the situation for the six and a half centuries between the Mongol invasions and the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Under Muslim rule, the area remained a multi-ethnic, multireligious, multi-lingual zone, a “permeable cross-cultural passage,” where “people were constantly rubbing shoulders and socializing with one another only to find themselves on different sides as unwilling draftees in other peoples’ armies.”6 Irrespective of politics, the area was home to Kurds, Turks, Arabs, and Persians, Semites and Indo-Europeans, Muslims, Christians, Jews, as well as remnants of groups that had adopted syncretic forms of Christianity and Islam. For centuries, they lived together in cities, maintained tribal connections, and participated in commerce. Knowledge of several languages was common. While Arabic was primarily the language of the south and west, Turkish was necessary to deal with the Ottoman government. Merchants and traders in the north did business in Arabic, Turkish, and Kurdish, while those traveling in

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the east and south needed to know Persian as well. At home, the Kurds spoke various dialects of Kurdish; the Armenians had maintained their own language since antiquity; and Jews used an Arabic dialect called Judeo-Arabic. The provinces—Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra—came under Ottoman control in 1534 when they were conquered by Suleyman I the Magnificent (known as Kanuni—“the Lawgiver”) and were left to local families, sheikhs, and ex-Ottoman soldiers to govern until the midnineteenth century. While the imperial armies battled over the frontier, the local residents developed regional trade connections, economies irrespective of ethnicity, and linkages between the provincial capitals and surrounding hinterland. Within the imperial context, Mosul looked to Anatolia; Baghdadi Arabs became more culturally and politically connected with Damascus and Beirut; and Basra was linked to the Persian Gulf.7 For more than three hundred years, the Ottomans and Persians battled over the eastern frontier, continuing where the Byzantines and Persians had left off. The north had always been a particular point of conflict and confrontation, between Rome and Parthia in the first centuries of the Christian era, then between Christian Byzantium and Persia, and finally between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shi‘i Persian Empire, whose boundaries were contested from the Caucasus to the mountains of Kurdistan, and even to the Persian Gulf. The countryside was covered with fortifications and armies marched along the frontier that reached as far south and west as modern Jordan. Like the “marches” in eastern Europe, where small client principalities protected the German kingdom from its Slavic and Magyar neighbors to the east, the Arab Lakhmids in the Jazira were used by the Romans as clients against their erstwhile enemies the Persians, and the Arab Ghassanids performed the same function for the Persians.8 Later, Eastern Christian communities that straddled the frontier with adherents on one side of the border often owing religious allegiance to a patriarch resident on the other side, would provide the same service. Until the end of the fourteenth century, Armenia played the role of a buffer state between Byzantium and Persia.9 In the nineteenth century, local Kurdish tribal leaders defended Mosul in 1876 against Russian and Persian incursions,10 and often

Introduction

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changed allegiance from one side to the other as circumstances made this profitable, all the while maintaining regional trade and pilgrimage connections with Aleppo and Damascus.11 Wars continued as the Persian empires struggled with the Ottoman Turks for hegemony over the lowlands to the west of the Iranian plateau and for control of Baghdad, which was, to them, part of Persia.12 In the sixteenth century, the city changed hands three times. The imperial powers tried to bring security through alliances with local tribes that continually switched sides. The Ottomans looked to the Persian heartland and the Persian Qajar dynasty saw the Euphrates as its natural border.13 Both Persians and Ottomans considered the frontier “inhospitable” and difficult to defend.14 After 1501, with the establishment of the Safavid Shi‘i regime in Persia, the struggle for political hegemony over the Iraqi frontier between the Sunni Ottomans and the Shi‘i Persians took on religious overtones. The Shi‘i shrine cities (atabat) of al-Najaf and Karbala, Samarra (some sixty miles north of Baghdad whose population was overwhelmingly Sunni), and Kazimayn (near Baghdad) were located in Iraq. South of Baghdad, Najaf, a major Shi‘i academic center located at the shrine of Ali ibn Abi Talib, and whose cemetery was considered the holiest and most highly sought after burial site for Shi‘i believers, was mostly Arab and ruled and controlled by Arab tribal factions with connections to neighboring Arab tribes until World War I. The population of Karbala, where the shrine of Husayn, the son of Ali, was located and whose cemetery was considered to be next in holiness to that of Najaf was 75 percent Persian. In 1843, the city had been besieged and occupied as part of the Ottoman attempt to regain authority in outlying districts of the empire. As a result, more or less autonomous Najaf retained its enormous political influence in Iraq, Persia, and beyond. There was constant traffic of Shi‘i Muslims traveling back and forth from Persia and from India and the Gulf to the Holy Cities of Najaf and Karbala. By the mid-nineteenth century, Persian clerics predominated and the existence of a large Persian colony in the shrine cities led to claims by Persian shahs for rights of protection of the Shi‘i cities. In 1875 the Ottomans conferred economic and political benefits (capitulations) for Persians at the expense of Arab residents.15 Persians and the

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large influx of Indian Muslims from the Indian Shi‘i state of Awadh (Oudh) with their financial remittances and philanthropic support for Indian pilgrims16 contributed to the economic importance of the shrine cities which, by the mid-nineteenth century, were a pilgrimage center and final resting place for the devout whose remains were cared for and shipped to Iraq from all parts of the Shi‘i world. Their importance as market towns that served southern Iraq, Arabia, and Arabistan in Persia increased as more of the tribes became Shi‘i.17 Basra, the port that served the region, was home to sheikhs from the tribes in the neighborhood and a large merchant community consisting of local Muslims, Christians, and Jews. A considerable contingent of Persians resided there in addition to merchants from Najd in Central Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bombay, and representatives of British shipping firms. The population of the city grew during the religious pilgrimage season and when dates, the major cash crop, were shipped to India.18 For sheikhs and Arab businessmen in Kuwait and Oman looking north, Basra and its environs were seen both as extensions of Arabia and the overland link between the Gulf and the Mediterranean.19 Indian and Persian coinages were widely used, and as late as 1921 the British High Commissioner reported on several petitions and requests for autonomy for Basra.20 In the south and west, the settled land near the rivers only gradually gave way to desert inhabited by Arab nomadic tribes that did not respect fixed boundaries. The caravans that linked the desert entrepots of Baghdad and Aleppo, Baghdad and Damascus were protected, though often hijacked, by tribes that interfered with the overland trade. In this frontier zone, tribes protected their own market towns and often bypassed Baghdad on their way to points east.21 Large scale tribal movement from Arabia to areas in Syria, Iraq, and Persia was precipitated by severe drought during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Anaza, pushing the Shammar ahead of them, migrated to the Syria-Iraqi frontier; the Banu Ka‘b settled in the TigrisEuphrates estuary and raided Khuzistan in the Persian east and Basra, which was under Ottoman rule. Their “navy” dominated the creeks, rivers, and channels close to the city and the Banu Lam migrated from the lower Tigris into Persian territory.22

Introduction

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The tribal power struggle in Arabia between the al-Rashid and the al-Sa‘ud allied with the followers of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) only exacerbated tribal incursions into Iraq. At one point, Ibn Sa’ud and the Wahhabis attacked southern Iraq as far north as Najaf and Karbala pushing other tribes ahead of them. In 1871, Midhat Pasha, the governor of Baghdad, invaded eastern Arabia to intervene in a leadership dispute in eastern Arabia to control regional markets in Najd, southern Iraq, Kuwait, and Arabistan. With the assistance of the sheikh of Kuwait, who had considerable land holdings in the date palm area near Basra, the Turks annexed al-Hasa and brought the shortest route from the sea to Wahhabi country under Ottoman control and in 1884 incorporated al-Hasa and parts of the Najd in a newly reconstituted Basra province, which was excluded from the state created after World War I.23 The Turks intervened in Arabian politics and tribal raids into southern Iraq and back into Arabia again led by the Muntafiq of the southern Euphrates continued through the nineteenth century and after the creation of the modern state. Because of the chaos in the area, the southern border was, for a long time, de facto with a designated “neutral zone” allowing for seasonal migration.24 In the mid-nineteenth century, Iraq had long been neglected as a backwater area of an empire that looked toward Europe. Instituting new policies to link the periphery with the center, the Ottomans imposed imperial governance on the provincial capitals and concentrated even more attention on Iraq after major European territorial losses due to the Balkan Wars and the Treaty of Berlin (1878). By that time many tribes in the south that had once been Sunni had converted to Shi‘i Islam. They may have been attracted by Shi‘i missionaries from the shrine cities or enlisted in defense of Najaf and Karbala against the Wahhabis. Some, as the government settled them in irrigation-cultivated areas and gave title to the land to sheikhs, looked to Shi‘i sayyids—descendents of the family of Muhammad, most of whom were Shi‘i—as intermediaries in dealings with the government. The government sent Sunni missionaries to re-convert the tribes, imposed state education, stationed the Ottoman VIth Army Corps in Baghdad, and suppressed Shi‘i rebellions. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Turks had made a major effort to draw the cities of Baghdad,

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Mosul, and Basra more closely under Ottoman authority by railroad construction and the installation of telegraph lines. As late as 1905, the Ottoman authorities were still occupied with sabotage, Shi‘i revolts, tribal incursions from the south, and political intrigue by such local notables as Sayyid Talib of Basra, whose goal was leadership of an autonomous Basra.25 But Iraq remained a frontier, not only an area contested by the Ottomans and the Persians, but now also the object of imperial competition for economic and political hegemony between the Ottomans and the British—who ruled India, controlled Aden, and looked northward to the Persian Gulf. Drawn into the diplomatic and commercial struggle with Britain for control in the Persian Gulf, which they called the “Basra Gulf,” the Ottomans made alliances with Arab sheikhs down the coast closest to shipping channels, at one point reaching south as far as Qatar, only to lose territory to the Saudis just before the war. In 1899, with the signing of an Anglo-Ottoman accord, the British succeeded in establishing a quasi-protectorate over Kuwait, which had been linked to Basra for the previous twenty-five years.26 For the British, whose strategic thinking throughout the nineteenth century was dominated by the need to protect the land and sea routes to imperial India, the territory they called “Mesopotamia” was the land bridge or frontier to control either directly or by proxy. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the British had already established their presence in the region either through naval stopovers, mail links, missionary stations, and finally commercial entrepots, and diplomatic residencies from the Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and Persian Gulf. By the 1830s, British companies had investigated the possibilities of steamship travel up the Euphrates and with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the pull of trade was to the Indian Ocean. Iraq was part of the Persian Gulf, the British Resident in Baghdad, J. G. Lorimer, would write in his multivolume Gazeteer of the Persian Gulf.27 But British oversight of “Mesopotamia” and the Gulf was chaotic. There was a British Consul in Basra answerable to the Resident in Baghdad who reported to the British Ambassador in Constantinople who was responsible to London. The Resident in Baghdad, however, was also an officer in the Indian Political Service with loyalties to the

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Indian government. Sir Percy Cox, who served as High Commissioner for Mesopotamia, had also served as Foreign Secretary of India. Even as British interests in Mesopotamia broadened, the men who were sent to Basra and to Baghdad saw the region from an Indian perspective.28 Lord Curzon, who had served as viceroy of India and would chair the Mesopotamian Administration Committee during the war, worked to continue British imperial policy.29 Until war broke out, however, the British were committed to maintaining the political integrity of the Ottoman Empire even though it had a tenuous hold on “Iraq.” The British were unhappy with Ottoman indifference to such issues as piracy, slavery, and gunrunning, which required Britain to police the Persian Gulf, but considered that it was better to have the Ottomans rule than to allow the Russians, the French, or the Germans chip away at the territory. The German threat became even more menacing with the policies of Kaiser Wilhelm II, which looked to the Ottoman Empire for imperial spoils. The construction of the Berlin to Baghdad railway, along with the sudden appearance of German military advisors in Istanbul, and archaeologists, spies, salesmen, and arms dealers in Arabia, Iraq, and the Gulf 30 led to British reassessments of the situation especially after 1913, when the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, directed his staff to locate a reliable source of oil for the navy, which had just switched from coal to oil. In 1914, then, the Ottoman province of Basra looked to the south, toward the Gulf, where the British held considerable hegemony, while the province of Mosul looked north toward Anatolia, and the shrine cities of Najaf and Karbala looked toward Persia.31 As World War I began, Mesopotamia was at the intersection of three declining empires— the Ottoman, the Persian, and the Russian—and was the object of desire of three European empires just reaching their zenith—the British, the French, and the German. During the war several possible scenarios for the future were presented, but by its end, three of the players had been at least temporarily eliminated. Germany had been defeated, and its Eastern policy, which Britain had feared threatened India, lay in ruins. The Ottoman Empire, which had cast its lot with the Germans, shared their defeat and was to be dismembered by the Allied victors. And Russia had withdrawn from the field of battle in 1917 following its

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own revolution, though it would eventually return in another guise, as the Soviet Union. By 1925, Turkey would also have reconstituted itself under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk as a modern nation state rather than an empire. When on November 5, 1914, the Ottomans entered the war as an ally of Germany, a decision that was motivated primarily by their fear of Russian goals both in the Black Sea and in the east, the “Eastern Question,” as the maintenance of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was known, no longer held. Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire the following day, and from then until the end of the war, politicians began to discuss how to deal with the dismemberment of the empire. On November 6, a British force was sent from India to protect Persian oil installations. The Turkish fort at Fao was taken and within two weeks the troops occupied Basra.32 Meanwhile, by the end of 1914 the war on the western front had bogged down in the trenches, and action moved eastward. In December 1914 the Turks under Enver Pasha marched eastward to engage the Russians. In spite of initial superiority in numbers, they were defeated by the Russians at Sarikamish in early January, losing all but 15,000 men from a force of 90,000.33 At the same time Djemal Pasha embarked on a campaign with the Ottoman Army in Syria to defeat the British forces in Egypt. On February 3, 1915, he attacked the British at the Suez Canal, but was resoundingly defeated and fled back to Syria with the remnants of his army. And in January 1915 a British fleet began to move up the Dardanelles toward Istanbul. By March, the British attempt to take the Dardanelles and Istanbul with naval power alone had proved unsuccessful, and on April 25 the British and Allied armies landed on the Gallipoli peninsula for what was to be one of the most disastrous battles of the war. By the time the British and Allied forces withdrew in January 1916, they, and the Ottomans, had each suffered a quarter of a million casualties.34 At the same time, the British and Indian army began its progress up the Tigris toward Baghdad. All summer the army slogged its way through the mosquito-infested swamps of southern Iraq, and by November it arrived at Ctesiphon, only twenty-five miles south of Baghdad. There, although they defeated the Turkish forces, the British lost half of their

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own. Having reached the end of their supply lines, the British decided not to try to take Baghdad, where the Turks were receiving reinforcements and were commanded by the German Field Marshall Colmar von der Goltz, and they fell back to Kut. There they remained, under siege by a relatively small Ottoman force, while the rest of the Ottoman army continued south to prevent British forces from reaching Kut. On April 26 the British in Kut surrendered, after the longest siege in British military history (146 days). The British forces sustained 10,000 casualties between the time they advanced on Baghdad and their surrender, as well as an additional 23,000 casualties sustained by forces trying to break through the Ottoman lines to the south to relieve them. So, in the fifteen months between January 1915 and April 1916 the British and the Turks had each suffered two devastating defeats on the borders of the Ottoman Empire—the Turks at Sarikamish and Suez, and the British at Gallipoli and Kut. While these were taking place, the French, British, and German armies were bogged down in a war of attrition in the trenches of Europe. There was more to come: 1916 also saw the German attack on Verdun, which resulted in 700,000 dead on both sides, as well as the battle of the Somme where, on July 1, the British suffered 60,000 casualties in a single day and eventually a total of 420,000.35 The Ottoman Empire did not have to disintegrate. There were forces in Europe that favored preserving its territorial integrity. But by the beginning of 1916, it was clear that those who favored a reorganization of the Middle East to reflect the imperial needs of the Allies had gained the upper hand. In January 1916, as the British finally withdrew from Gallipoli and three months before they surrendered at Kut, the British and French cabinets approved the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the first of many agreements for the postwar division of the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, which gave the province of Mosul to the French and the provinces of Baghdad and Basra to the British, under the control of the India Office. 1915 had gone disastrously for the Allies in the war, and by early 1916, the British were desperately searching for some way to bring new pressures to bear on the Germans and the Turks. British policymaking was divided between the Foreign Office and Cairo, where the Arab

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Bureau was established in 1916, and the India Office and Delhi. India had its debacle in Mesopotamia; Cairo had its disaster at Gallipoli. Even before the war had begun, there had been contacts between the British authorities in Cairo and the family of Sharif Husayn of Mecca hinting that the Arabs might be considering revolt, and seeking British assistance.36 As the war began to go badly for the British and Husayn, himself, learned that the Ottomans were considering replacing him as Sharif of Mecca, these contacts were renewed in 1915–1916. The result was the famed Husayn-McMahon correspondence (Sir Henry McMahon was the British High Commissioner in Egypt), the purpose of which was to pull the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire out of the war and, if possible, give them reason to revolt. Although the meaning of the Husayn-McMahon correspondence has been debated ever since, especially in the context of the Arab-Israel conflict, its impact on the creation of Iraq was equally profound. Essentially, the British expressed their willingness to support Arab independence in the Arabicspeaking portions of the Ottoman Empire, in areas that now include the modern states of Syria, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and part of Saudi Arabia. Husayn negotiated with McMahon on the details of this but never reached firm agreement. However, since he feared the Turks would depose him in any case, he had little choice but to support the British, even without firm commitments from them about his future status and of the limits of the promised Arab independence.37 As the British were making promises to the Arabs while seeking their support against the Ottomans, they were also negotiating with the French regarding the shape of the Ottoman Empire after the war. In January 1916 Mark Sykes, who had urged the establishment of the Arab Bureau in Cairo and contended that the Arabs were more important to the war effort than the French,38 took over negotiations that had begun two months earlier in London with Franc¸ois Georges Picot. The agreement known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement was signed on January 3 and approved by the two governments a month later. It laid out the postwar spheres of influence for the allies in the Ottoman Empire. As the map indicates, the Ottoman province of Mosul fell mostly in the French zone, whereas much of the provinces of Baghdad and Basra fell within the Arabian zone, to be administered by the Sharif of Mecca.39

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As the diplomats in Cairo, London, and Moscow were reaching agreements for the postwar organization of the region, the war continued in Mesopotamia. At the end of 1916, the Anglo-Indian Army of the Tigris under Major-General Sir Stanley Maude marched north through Mesopotamia and took Baghdad on March 11, 1917. But it remained unclear what was to happen to Mesopotamia. The War Cabinet in London established a Mesopotamian Administration Committee, but Maude assured the inhabitants of Baghdad that the British planned to withdraw as soon as possible. The armistice that ended the war in November 1918 and the Peace Conference at Versailles that followed only confused matters further. By then the Russian Revolution had made concessions by the allies to the Russians moot. In his Fourteen Points, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson advocated self-determination for peoples of the region and the end to all secret agreements. Nevertheless, the Allies reached their own agreement on the disposition of the Ottoman Empire at San Remo in April 1920 when Britain was awarded the territory of Iraq. How did this actually come about? What were the reactions of the peoples living in that contested territory? This volume is an attempt to provide an explanation and analysis of how the country of Iraq was actually created out of the conflict and confusion that was World War I. As such it will look at the questions from the vantage point of the peoples who lived in the three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire—Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, assess the impact of the creation of the new state on its neighbors, and examine the role of the major powers and the significance of oil in the international arena. The chapters in this volume originated as presentations at a conference entitled “The Making of Modern Iraq,” held on April 2, 2003, at the School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, and sponsored by the Middle East Institute and the Center for Energy, Marine Transportation and Public Policy of Columbia University. The editors want to express their gratitude to Dean Lisa Anderson of the School of International and Public Affairs, Hurst Groves, Director of the Center for Energy, Marine Transportation and Public Policy, and Gary Sick, Acting Director of the Middle East Institute, for their en-

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couragement and support. We would also like to thank Peter Dimock, Anne Routon, and Leslie Bialler of Columbia University Press.

A Note on Spelling and Transliteration We edited the book with the American reader in mind. For commonplace names and those of people often in the news, we have generally used standard American usage, according to to Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. For Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, we used the transliteration system of the International Journal of Middle East Studies without initial ‘ayn and diacritical marks.

Endnotes 1. Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 416. 2. Kamal S. Salibi, “Middle Eastern Parallels: Syria—Iraq—Arabia in Ottoman Times,” Middle Eastern Studies 15 (1979), 70–78. 3. Great Britain, Naval Intelligence Division, Iraq and the Persian Gulf (Oxford, 1944). 4–5; M. Miquel, “Irak,” Encyclopedia of Islam, new edition (Leiden: Brill, 1954– ), I2: 1250; G. Le Strange, Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia and Central Asia from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (London: Frank Cass, 1966; reprint of the 1905 edition), 22. 4. Frederick F. Anscombe, The Arabian Gulf: The Creation of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 20. 5. This is the view of the Arab geographers (M. Miquel, “Irak,—Geography,” Encyclopedia of Islam 3: 1251–1252) in contrast with Persian geographers (Xavier de Planhol, “Geography of Persia and Afghanistan,” Encyclopedia Iranica [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982– ], 10: 426–427.) 6. Halah Fattah, The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf, 1745–1900 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 19–20 referring to the work of William H. McNeill, Europe’s Steppe Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964); see also Hastings Donnan and Thomas A. Wilson, Anthropological Perspectives on Frontiers (Lanham: University Press of America, 1994).

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7. Fattah; Sarah Shields, Mosul before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000). 8. Ralph W. Mathisen and Hagith S. Sivan, Shifting Frontiers in Late Antiquity (Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1996); Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 1: The Classical Age of Islam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 153. 9. J. B. Segal, “Mesopotamian Communities from Julian to the Rise of Islam,” Proceedings from the British Academy (Oxford) 42 (1955): 109–139; Chase F. Robinson, Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia (Cambridge University Press, 2000). 10. Shields, 47–52; Nelide Fuccaro, “Communalism and the State in Iraq: The Yazidi Kurds, c. 1869–1940,” Middle Eastern Studies 35 (1999), 1– 26; Selim Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and the Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empire 1876–1909 (London: I. B. Tauris, 1998), 71–75. 11. Abdul-Karim Rafeq, “Damascus and the Pilgrim Caravan,” in Leila Tarazi Fawaz and C. A. Bayley, eds., Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 130–143. 12. de Planhol, “Geography,” 10: 426–27. 13. Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 71. 14. Rudi Matthee, “The Safavid-Ottoman Frontier: Iraq-i Arab as Seen by the Safavids,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, Washington, D.C., November 24, 2002. 15. Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi‘is of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 14–16. 16. Juan R. I. Cole, “ ‘Indian Money’ and the Shii Shrine Cities of Iraq, 1786– 1850,” Middle Eastern Studies 22 (1986), 461–480. 17. Nakash, 13–17; Juan Cole, Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics and Culture, and History of Shi‘ite Islam (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002). 18. Fattah, 69–71. 19. See also Robert G. Landen, “The Changing Pattern of Political Relations between the Arab Gulf and the Arab Provinces of the Ottoman Empire,” in B. R. Pridham, ed., The Arab Gulf and the Arab World (London: Croom Helm, 1988), 47–49; Gad G. Gilbar, “The Changing Patterns of Economic Ties: The Syrian and Iraqi Provinces in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” in Thomas Philipp, ed., The Syrian Land in the 18th and 19th

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20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

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Century: The Common and Specific in the Historical Experience (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1992), 55–67; for Omani-Basra political and military relationships during the late 18th and early 19th centuries; C. Edmund Bosworth, “The Nomenclature of the Persian Gulf,” in Alvin J. Cottrell, ed., The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), xvii–xxxiv. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 17; 189. Faruk Tabak, “Local Merchants in Peripheral Areas of the Empire: The Fertile Crescent during the Long Nineteenth Century,” Review 11 (1966), 194–195; Rafeq, 130–143. Cottrell, 37. Fattah, 118–121. Ibid., 138; Nakash, 25. Nakash, 28–43; Soli Shahvar, “Tribes and Telegraph Lines in Lower Iraq: The Muntafiq and the Baghdad-Basrah Telegraph Line of 1863–1865,” Middle Eastern Studies 39 (2003), 89–116. Anscombe, 3; Fattah, 118–119. Kuwait was not included in postwar Iraq. J. G. Lorimer, Gazeteer of the Persian Gulf (Bombay, 1913); Briton Cooper Busch, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1894–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). Busch, 7–9. John Fisher, Curzon and British Imperialism in the Middle East 1916–19 (London: Frank Cass, 1999). Reeva Spector Simon, Iraq Between the Two World Wars: The Militarist Origins of Tyranny (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 7–43. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 397. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989), 200. On the Mesopotamian campaign specifically, see Paul K. Davis, Ends and Means: The British Mesopotamian Campaign and Commission (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1994); A. J. Barket, The Neglected War (London: Cassell and Company, 1967); Brigadier F. J. Moberly, History of the Great War based on Official Documents: The Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914–1918 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1923–1927). Peter Hopkirk, Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire (New York: Kodansha International, 1994), 73–76.

Introduction 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

Fromkin, 166. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 99. Ibid., 185. Ibid., 188. See map, Frontispiece.

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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

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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 de-

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feat 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

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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

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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.

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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 AngloIndian 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

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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

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town and tribe and solidified these cleavages by consolidating and officially recognizing tribal customs. From 1918 to 1958 Iraq was legally under two laws: one for towns and another for tribes. It was the presence of the British military, however, especially the Royal Air Force (RAF) that kept town and tribe together.

Occupation and Revolt British authority encountered increasing resistance after the end of the war. In Najaf and Karbala a group of Arab Sunni military officers and officials who had served under the Ottomans joined notables, clerics, and tribal sheikhs to defend Islam against the British as well as to oppose tighter British administrative control. The murder of a British officer in Najaf in 1919 led to swift retaliation in the form of arrests, executions, and a blockade of the city. Prominent Shi‘i clerics and civilians began forming groups seeking independence and opposing British occupation, similar to Sunni Arab nationalist factions that had resurfaced. Sunni and Shi‘i Arab communities formed links. While they may have disagreed over the desirable form of government and leadership—Islamic state or secular monarchy, Sultan or Faysal—many new members of these organizations had lost jobs and status and been marginalized by the imposition of direct British rule. Beginning in 1919 the British Civil Administrator, Sir Arnold Wilson, introduced a series of measures aimed at sustaining British control over Iraq. He ordered a survey, or plebiscite, which asked prominent Iraqi notables what shape of government and constitution they preferred. The responses seemed to indicate support for a state comprised of three provinces under Arab rule, but with no consensus on the form of government or ruler. Wilson, who visited Basra and other southern towns, reported they preferred “Englishmen speaking Arabic” to French or American officers and that British political officers should continue their work. In Basra in particular, where most of the people interviewed were either landowners or others who had benefited from personally from British occupation, the majority favored direct British rule.7 Tribal leaders in the rich agricultural regions on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers

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asked for continuation of British rule. Wilson reported that 271 tribal sheikhs and notables signed a petition calling for the continuation of British rule and rejecting appointment of an Arab amir. Wilson quoted a sheikh as saying that “Ignorance is prevalent among us. . . . We do not want an Emir, because we are people of Irak, who are known as the most faithless and hypocritical nation.”8 Wilson, the imperialist, exaggerated the degree of popular acquiescence to British control by submitting only those pledges supporting continued British control. Others in the Foreign Office, for example Gertrude Bell, concluded that Arab nationalism in Iraq was developing an unstoppable momentum. She wrote a secret report describing opposition to the plebiscite in the Shi‘i shrine cities of Najaf, Karbala, Kazimayn, and the Middle Euphrates. Bell concluded that the British should work with the largely urban and Sunni nationalists to modernize the country and end what she viewed as the reactionary and obscurantist influence of the Shi‘i clerics and their tribal followers. She advocated Arab self-rule under British tutelage. The divisions among the British confused Iraqis. They rejected the Paris Peace Conference’s recommendation for a League of Nations mandate for Iraq. The idea that Iraq would only gradually become an independent, self-governing nation-state under tutelage of a foreign power met with contempt; it was seen as ominous and patronizing. In Karbala a leading Shi‘i cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi, issued a legal opinion (fatwa) declaring that “one who is a Muslim has no right to elect and choose a non-Muslim to rule over Muslims” and said service in the British Administration was unlawful.9 Religious leaders in the shrine cities threatened excommunication and exclusion from the mosque for anyone voting for continued British occupation. One Iraqi scholar wrote that participation in local municipal councils—the only political body allowing Iraqis a role—was “a comedy.” These councils were headed and run by British officers; Iraqi council members had responsibility only for public health and sanitation, parks, trade, assistance to the poor, and road building. How, he asked, could supervising parks and roads train anyone for autonomy and political independence?10 Merchants and other prominent secular notables, however, wrote declarations of support for continued British rule.

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Beginning in the spring of 1919, Shi‘i clerics and tribal sheikhs from the Middle Euphrates joined with Sunni nationalists who were unemployed civil servants, ex-soldiers for the Sharif, teachers, scholars, and lawyers. The movement was centered in Najaf and Baghdad. By May 1920, Sunni and Shi‘i clerics and nationalists were holding mass meetings in Baghdad at Sunni and Shi‘i mosques. They opposed British occupation and called for cooperation in the nationalist cause for Iraqi independence. They sent representatives to the Sharif in Mecca stating their support for one of his sons as king of an independent constitutional government. Ramadan in Iraq is traditionally a month of pilgrimage to the shrine cities in addition to the prescribed fasting and prayer. Sunnis celebrate the birth of the Prophet Muhammad in a ceremony called the mawlud. Shi‘is commemorate as well the birth and martyrdom of the Imam Husayn, the Prophet’s grandson, on the 10th of Muharram in a service of ritual mourning called the ta‘ziyya, a passion play reenacting the murder of Husayn at Karbala. Sunnis are unwelcome in Shi‘i mosques and prayer houses since they are held responsible for the murder. When Ramadan began on May 17, 1920, huge demonstrations took place in the mosques of Baghdad. Mawlud celebrations and ta‘ziyya commemorations were held in combined services that took place alternatively in Sunni and Shi‘i mosques with members of each sect participating. Besides the intense religious ceremonies, patriotic speeches were made and poems recited appealing to Arab nationalism, honor, and Islam. Even Muslims who opposed the nationalist cause and Shi‘i participation in government attended and helped defray expenses lest they be branded infidels and traitors.11 The spark for rebellion came one week later in Baghdad, when the British arrested and deported a young employee of the department of Muslim endowments (waqf ) for reciting a fiery anti-British poem. Representatives of the Baghdad notables sought a meeting with Arnold Wilson, the Acting Civil Commissioner for Iraq. Wilson refused to meet with them unless a larger number of his own preselected Baghdadi notables were present. They met, with the notables appealing for creation of an elected national assembly to determine the shape of the nation state of Iraq. Wilson could not imagine Shi‘i Arabs of southern Iraq

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making common cause with the Sunni notables of Baghdad and Mosul. In this, he was wrong. He opposed any compromise that would enhance the power and prestige of Shi‘i clerics and extend their authority to areas from which they had traditionally been excluded, e.g. government and military service. Moreover, Wilson opposed the innovative idea that numbers should now count in politics. In this, he underestimated the strength of the nationalist movement, the capabilities of the Iraqis for self-rule, and their ability to see in the new mandate a disguised imperialism. In June 1920 the British Civil Administration announced that the League of Nations had granted Britain the mandate for Iraq “until such time as it can stand by itself,” that a provisional committee drawn from former representatives in the Turkish parliament would be established, and that elections would be held for a constituent assembly. The provisional committee chose a newly returned exile and supporter of the returning Ottoman-trained military officers, Sayyid Talib, the Naqib of Basra, to be its president—the naqib is the leader of the descendants of the prophet Muhamad (sing. sharif; pl. ashraf ) The British viewed this as a step toward creating the kind of national institutions called for in the mandate. They viewed the politicians from the old regime as the obvious people to consult.12 Fearing the consequences of prolonged British rule for their personal well-being and dreams of national self-rule, oppositionists in Najaf and Karbala began an armed revolt in June 1920. The clerics were dismayed by the British refusal to establish an independent Islamic government and manipulation of popular opinion opposed to continued British rule. They were joined by tribesmen discontented with the stringent tax system and forced labor, ex-Turkish and Iraqi officials disappointed by their failure to find jobs and status in the British-run Civil Administration, and nationalists angered by British suppression of the independence movement. Senior Sunni and Shi‘i clerics issued a fatwa authorizing rebellion and began a brief period of unprecedented cooperation. The British responded with preemptive arrests of tribal sheikhs, and the revolt spread. By late July the rebels controlled the Middle Euphrates region and districts around Baghdad in a pattern to be replicated in 1991 following the end of the first Gulf War. Sensing weakness in the

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central authority in Baghdad and opportunity in the southern revolt, the Kurds rose in southern Kurdistan. As in 1991, Kurds and rebellious Arabs operated in isolation from and ignorance of the other. Opinion was divided among prominent Iraqis on the proper course of action to serve Iraq’s interests and their own. Some Sunni notables and Shi‘i tribal sheikhs looked to the British to secure existing privileges. They agreed to support Britain so long as Britain guaranteed them the same privileges they had held under the Turks. Others, fearing loss of autonomy, land tenure, and increased taxation, rejected any form of colonial tutelage. By June 1920 the revolt had spread from the mosques and streets of Baghdad to the tribes of the Middle Euphrates. Regional leaders raised money for the revolt and sent it to Baghdad and nationalist forces fighting the British in northwestern Iraq, but neither Baghdad nor the Sharifian Arabs had control over the actions of the sheikhs and clerics of the Middle Euphrates. They obtained reluctant support from Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi in Najaf, who feared that the tribes lacked the means to fight the British.13 Nevertheless, he gave the movement his support and urged leaders in Baghdad, Kazimayn, Najaf, Karbala, and the Middle Euphrates to demand the establishment of an Islamic government.14 Representatives from Najaf and Karbala were sent to the local British political officer to petition for Iraq’s independence free from all foreign intervention under an Arab king limited by a national legislative assembly.15 When the British refused to accept the petitions, demonstrations broke out in Karbala, the British sent in troops and armored cars to suppress them, and revolt erupted in the cities of southern Iraq. With the arrest of his son and deportation of a number of notables, Ayatollah Shirazi now issued a fatwa that “the time has come to take your rights.”16 In a meeting with the district’s political officer, one prominent sheikh said, “You have offered us independence; we never asked for it, nor dreamed of such a thing till you put the idea into our heads. For hundreds of years, we have lived in a state as far removed from independence as it is possible to conceive: now we have asked for it, you imprison us.”17 Provisional governments controlled by nationalists were established in the Middle Euphrates. They had the power to tax, supply the forces

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fighting the British, supervise their districts, and interact with other districts. Trains were derailed, Arabs supporting the British were denied burial in the shrine cities, councils headed by radical clerics controlled Najaf and Karbala while tribes and notables controlled other cities and towns in the region. In October Sir Percy Cox, now High Commissioner for Iraq, ended military rule, formulated a constitution in consultation with local elites, and established a provisional government with an Arab president and council of state. He selected as president an aging leader of Baghdad’s Sunni community, Abd al-Rahman al- Kaylani, the Naqib of Baghdad, whose sole qualifications were his religious position, family background, and lack of political experience. This left Cox to exercise real authority. Council members came from traditional upper classes and were religious leaders, landowners, and tribal sheikhs who could be expected to support the British. The revolt was quelled by November. The nationalists had run out of arms, ammunition, and supplies; the British, however, were receiving fresh troops and supplies. Aerial bombings by the British Royal Air Force were effective in leveling whole villages, and damaging the Great Mosque in Kufa. Karbala, Najaf, and Kufa surrendered in mid-October. With most of the leaders under arrest or in exile, the tribes and towns of southern Iraq submitted to British authority. The tenuous ties that had bound the fractious Iraqi Arabs of town and tribe were easily broken. Religious sects and political groups resumed their traditional sniping at each other. Moderate political figures had been alienated by the violent tribal disturbances, declarations of revolt, and uncontrollable clerics and tribes; but they, too, had told the British they opposed the mandate system, which was only a disguised form of annexation. According to Wilson’s account, the nationalists told him that to accept anything less than independence would admit acceptance of similar schemes in Syria and Palestine.18 The rebellions failed, but the events of 1920 played an important role in the creation of an Iraqi national mythology and in shaping future British policy in Iraq. The insurgency itself lasted three months, affected one-third of the countryside, and cost Britain 400 lives and £40 million. For Iraqis, it became the symbol of nationalist pride and opposition to

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colonial domination. Gertrude Bell wrote in the autumn of 1920 that “No one, not even His Majesty’s Government, would have thought of giving the Arabs such a free hand as we shall now give them—as a result of the rebellion.”19 For the British, the nine months of continuous military operations were a financial as well as human burden at a time when postwar sentiment was growing against outside adventures and widespread defense economies were being implemented. London preferred to draw down its military force in Iraq as quickly as possible. To achieve political and military economies, Britain decided to use air power and local levies for internal security operations and create a pliable government that would accept and implement British “advice.”

The Aftermath of Occupation and Revolt In late 1920 Britain appointed a new government in Baghdad, headed by a passive Arab Sunni religious official, and a council of ministers, both under British supervision. The new cabinet included representatives from all three formerly Ottoman provinces. Most members were prominent representatives of the Sunni Arab community, with a few Christians, Shi‘i, and a Jew as ministers. Municipal councils were restored, with each unit, council, and ministry under a British adviser. Shi‘is were noticeably absent from most government offices, partly because of their lack of administrative experience, partly because of prevailing anti-Shi‘i attitudes among Sunni Arab notables in Baghdad, and mostly because of British wariness of Shi‘i clericalism. The old order was reestablished—Ottoman-educated Sunni Arabs and arabized Kurds under foreign (now British) patronage dominated Iraq once again. Finally, Iraq’s first army was formed, comprising 600 returning Ottomantrained Iraqi army officers, most from Sunni Arab families. Britain chose Faysal, the third son of the Sharif of Mecca as king. He was a known quantity to British and Arab observers, with no ties to any Iraqi political faction or region of the country—surely a plus in British eyes. Although he had been rejected by the French as king of “their” Syria, the British preferred him because of their history of co-

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operation and assumed that they could manipulate him. Many Iraqis, however, regarded him as an interloper, despite his virtually impeccable Arab nationalist and Muslim credentials as a leader of the Arab Revolt and a descendent of the family of the Prophet Muhammad. As an Arab, he lacked Kurdish support; as a Sunni he lacked Shi‘i favor; and as a Hashimite from Arabia he was rejected by many old Sunni noble families. Yet, he had the loyalty of Iraqis who had served in the Ottoman military and defected to the Arab Revolt. Faysal was “elected” by unanimous resolution on July 11, 1921 in the Council of State under Cox’s direction. His government pledged to be constitutional, representative, democratic, and limited by the rule of law. A plebiscite managed by the British gave the King 96 percent of the popular vote—Kurds and proTurkish elements opposing Arab rule did not vote, nor did Shi‘is in southern Iraq who wanted theocratic government.

Conclusion As state builders, the British created an impressive array of institutions—a monarchy, a parliament, a Western-style constitution, a civil service, and an army. They established a government that would protect British interests at the least possible cost to the British taxpayer. To this end, historian Phebe Marr noted in her The Modern History of Iraq, they designed “a structure that was less a system of government than a means of control.” “The British,” she concluded, “created an imposing institutional fac¸ade, but put down few roots.”20 My favorite story, however, is one told by the Naqib al-Ashraf of Baghdad to Gertrude Bell about his visit with a sheikh of the Shammar. “Are you a Damakrati?” says the Naqib. “Wallahi, no!” says the Shammari, slightly offended. “I’m not a Magrati. What is it?” “Well,” says the Naqib enjoying himself thoroughly, “I’m Shaikh of the Damakratiyah.” “I take refuge in God!” replied the Shaikh, feeling he had gone wrong somewhere. “If you are the shaikh of the Magratiyah, then I must be one of them, for I’m altogether in your service. But what is it?” “Damakratiyah,” says the Naqib, “is equality. There is no big man and no little man, all are alike and equal.” With which the bewildered Shammari plumped

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onto solid ground. “God is my witness,” said he, seeing his tribal authority slipping away from him, “if that’s it I’m not a Magrati.”21

Acknowledgment This paper was prepared for a conference on The Making of Modern Iraq, 1915– 1925, sponsored by The Middle East Institute at Columbia University, April 2, 2003. The opinions expressed here are the author’s and do not represent policies of the University, the Department of Defense, or any other government agency.

Endnotes 1. Proponents of the Hashimite plan included Prime Minster Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary Lord Arthur Balfour, T. E. Lawrence, and Oriental Secretary to Percy Cox, Gertrude Bell. 2. India’s Muslims opposed the Arab Revolt led by forces loyal to the Sharif of Mecca; they viewed the revolt as a revolution against the authority of Islam and an attack on Muslim unity. Their perceptions shaped the views of the India Office towards the ambitions of Sharif Husayn and Arab nationalism. 3. Sir Arnold T. Wilson, Loyalties: Mesopotamia, 1914–1917, (London: Oxford University, 1930), 207. Wilson described the making of a civil administrator for Iraq as “a tale of great deeds by land and river, sea and air, of suffering and endurance and of faithfulness unto death . . . in pursuit of objects dimly seen, and of aims but darkly understood.” Ibid., p. xiii. 4. Cox as Chief Political Officer reported to the General Officer Commanding the British Forces, who was responsible for both civil and military government in the occupied territories. In 1917, the Civil Administration was reorganized and Cox named Civil Commissioner, reporting directly to the British Government rather than the military commander. In 1918 Cox was named High Commissioner for Persia and Wilson became Acting Civil Commissioner for Iraq. Wilson’s belief that the Arabs were incapable of self-rule, that a tutorial and imperial role was appropriate for Iraq, and his determination to incorporate Iraqis into government gradually would lay the groundwork for mistrust and rebellion. 5. The Tribal Civil and Criminal Disputes Regulation, which was based on the Government of India Act, was adopted in July 1918; it would later be encoded into the 1924 constitution.

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6. The number of British officers serving in the “temporary” Iraqi government grew at Arab expense. In 1917, 59 British officers served in the civil administration; by 1920 their number had grown to 1,022, with Arabs holding less than 4 percent of the senior grades. In 1923 there were 569 British advisers; by 1931 the number had shrunk to 260. 7. A. T. Wilson, Mesopotamia 1917–1920: A Clash of Loyalties (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), 112–113. 8. The Times (London), December 16, 1919, 13; Philip Ireland, Iraq: A Study in Political Development (London: Jonathan Cape, 1937), 167. 9. Shirazi’s son, described by the British as “a bigoted Muslim,” organized anti-British forces in Najaf in early 1920. Abd al-Razzaq al-Hasani, AlThawra al-iraqiyya al-kubra (Sidon, 1952), 34. 10. Ibid., 28. 11. Elizabeth Burgoyne, Gertrude Bell: From Her Personal Papers 1914–1926 (London: Ernest Benn, 1961), 2: 142–143; Hasani, 43; F.O. E8915, Memorandum of a conversation with Sulaiman Faidi by Gertrude Bell, June 13, 1920, enclosure in Telegram of the Secretary of State for India to the Foreign Office, July 26, 1920. 12. Hasani, 52–53; letter of July 11, 1920, in Burgoyne, 2: 146–147; editorial in the The Times (London), August 16, 1920, p. 9. 13. Ibid., 133–144. 14. Ibid., 57–58; Fariq al-Muzhir Fir‘awn, Al-Haqa’iq al-nasi‘a fi al-thawra aliraqiyya sanat 1920 wa-nata’ijuha (Baghdad, 1952), 108. 15. Ibid., 59; Fir‘awn, 109–110. 16. Hasani, 64; Fir‘awn, 195. 17. Wilson, Mesopotamia, 295–296. 18. Hasani, Tarikh al-Iraq al-siyasi al-hadith (Sidon, 1946), 2: 126–127; Wilson, Mesopotamia, 267–268. 19. Letter to Hugh Bell, September 19, 1920, in Burgoyne, 2:164. 20. Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 29. 21. Florence Bell, The Letters of Gertrude Bell (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), 2: 618.

2

The View from Baghdad Reeva Spector Simon

On November 5, 1914, Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The announcement was greeted in Baghdad with the beating of drums as the Turks prepared for a military buildup that was required to meet the advance of the British Indian army of the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force in southern Iraq to secure British interests in the Persian Gulf. The British landed near Basra and occupied the city at the end of November. Hoping for continued success, they pushed northward on to Baghdad, but were stopped by Ottoman forces fifty miles from the city at Kut. In Baghdad, the beating of drums signaled general military conscription and men of military age were signed up. By 1914, Baghdad, the city of Abbasid splendor laid waste by the Mongols in 1258, was reemerging from economic and political doldrums. It had been bypassed by the new trading routes established in the sixteenth century that favored sea over land; irrigation canals were in disrepair; and tribal nomads challenged the security of the city. Although the Ottoman Turks conquered Baghdad in 1534 and extended their rule from the Balkans to the Persian Gulf, they took little interest in the provincial town. For 300 years Ottomans and Persians fought over Baghdad, which changed overlords even while ruled by ex-slaves sent out from Istanbul to govern (mamluks). Once a center of trade, the region became a frontier between empires and a highway linking re-

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gional trade routes. By the nineteenth century the Ottoman governors, who originated in the Caucasus and passed the position from father to son, had become more or less autonomous but their rule scarcely reached beyond the city walls. When in 1831, the local governor, Da’ud Pasha, refused to evacuate his position on orders of the Sultan in Istanbul, an army was sent from Aleppo to take possession of the city for the Porte. From then on until World War I, Baghdad was ruled by a succession of governors sent directly from Istanbul whose orders were to implement the modernization policies advocated by the Ottoman government in its program of reform that began in 1839. Bringing the provinces on the periphery of the empire under the aegis of Istanbul was of prime concern. Authorities in Istanbul looked at Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul as separate provincial units and never “accorded any form of collective representation that set them apart from other regions of the empire.”1 For Baghdad, specifically, the reforms meant the centralization of authority through governors sent out from Istanbul instead of rule by local governors, warlords, and tribal sheikhs and through telegraph and rail links with the capital. It meant bringing the province back into international world markets by allowing foreign business concessions, at times at the expense of local interests. And, in the context of modernizing the army, the headquarters of the Ottoman Sixth Army was now to be located in Baghdad. This process was begun by Midhat Pasha (1869–1872), during whose short tenure Western-style schools were established, links between the provincial towns and the central government were created, and inducements for tribal settlement were offered. He instituted municipal councils of local notables to conform to the “reform” measures coming from Istanbul and to appease tribal sheikhs, merchants, and religious dignitaries.2 Irrigation canals were repaired, telegraph lines installed, and a regular mail service initiated between Syria and Iraq. By World War I, Baghdad could boast regional and international commercial connections, suburbs for wealthy merchants, a small European society with its clubs and sports, a law school, newspapers and magazines, and a native urban Sunni Ottoman elite that represented the region in the prewar Ottoman parliaments.3

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No longer a provincial backwater town, Baghdad emerged as a major regional capital. Some 140,000 people lived in Baghdad proper in 1904 out of some million and a quarter estimated in the entire province, and the number in the city increased to 200,000 by 1918.4 An equal number of Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims lived in the city as did smaller populations of Christians, Jews, Persians, and Armenians. Below the few dozen senior Ottoman officials, many in the Ottoman bureaucracy were Anatolian Turks as were one-fifth of the military forces and a tenth of the police force.5 There was a local religiously prominent Arab group of men who claimed descent from the Prophet (ashraf); they were mainly Sunni and led by the al-Kaylani family. Many of the Shi‘i who resided in Baghdad had family linkages with Shi‘i in Persia.6 Their numbers increased after 1879 when Kazimayn, three miles to the north, became a suburb of Baghdad when the two were linked by horse tramway. Kazimayn was a shrine city with an estimated population of 8,000 that included some 1,000 Persians.7 Some sent their sons to the primary school funded by Shi‘i merchants in Baghdad and Kazimayn and there were strong moves for Sunni-Shi‘i unity in opposition to European economic interests and encroachments on Muslim land8 and imperialist moves by Russia in Iran and Italy in Libya.9 The commercial class included both Sunni and Shi‘i Muslim landowning families and merchants who controlled regional trade and had close links with local industry.10 By far the most influential group, however, was the Jewish community that made up some 20 percent of Baghdad’s population. Jews served as financial advisers and legal counselors to the Ottoman governors and were counted among Baghdad’s wealthiest merchants and bankers. They were physicians, translators, and agents for the British firms which had begun to take root during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Many were partners with Muslim businessmen in the development of local banks, tramways, and boat service on the Euphrates.11 Despite their economic significance, Jews were of no consequence politically. Outside of Baghdad, the population was largely rural and not under the direct control of governors in Baghdad. Increasingly coming under the sway of tribal sheikhs under whose names lands were registered, the

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large well-armed tribes were made up of smaller confederations that ranged from Saudi Arabia to Karbala and Baghdad. The land registry office was located in the city and, as prominent tribal sheikhs were given economic and social privilege in exchange for maintaining order in the countryside, many of them moved to Baghdad. There they employed agents who supplied them with important political and economic information such as irrigation schemes, transport plans, or trade, enabling them to become key players in Baghdad politics.12 In order to provide officers for the Sixth Army, Midhat Pasha established schools that were designed to prepare career military officers for service. Among the first government secondary schools in Iraq, they provided a curriculum mandated from Istanbul, courses taught in Turkish by military officers, and a syllabus for the intermediate schools that included history, geography, science, religion, Turkish, Arabic, Persian, French, and English. The Porte’s desire to recruit local Iraqis began to succeed when it offered practical inducements such as free room and board both in Baghdad and later for successful candidates at the Military Academy in Istanbul. Some were sent back to Baghdad to teach in the military school. From 1872 through 1912, at least 500 and possibly upward of 1,200 Iraqis had gone through this educational process. Although small in numbers, the “Iraqi” Ottoman officers would play a key role in the creation of the new post–World War I state.13 Members of all of these groups reacted individually and in concert to the “reforms” implemented by the Ottoman authorities before the war. There were concerns about imperial encroachments on local commerce through trade concessions to the British instead of to local Baghdadi interests that sparked the formation of “secret societies.” These engendered flurries of press reports and protest letters to Istanbul but the Baghdadis did not consider secession from the empire.14 The coup d’e´tat that changed the government in Istanbul in 1908 had important ramifications in the provinces. Initial Arab support for the Young Turks (1908) declined as they adopted a process of Turkification in the empire and there was little evidence of Turkish nationalism in this Arabic-speaking area. Not everyone was pleased with the new regime whose constitution threatened the status of traditional elites by allocating less autonomy for the provinces and promoted Turks over

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Arabs.15 Some notables, like, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kaylani joined parties opposed to the Turkish Committee for Union and Progress party16 while others formed societies that emphasized their Arab identity that brought together prominent Sunnis and Shi‘is.17 There were Iraqi army officers in the Ottoman military who constituted a militant opposition to Turkish authority. In late 1912, a political society in Baghdad that included more than 100 officers discussed expelling the Turks from Iraq, but nothing came of it. These goals were reiterated by secret Arab nationalist al-Ahd (The Covenant) society founded late in 1913 in Constantinople with primarily Syrian and Iraqi military officers who first advocated Arab autonomy and equality with the Turks, but during the war switched to the goal of Arab independence. By 1914, the Iraqi majority in the group was already planning a revolt in Iraq. These few hundred men in an Arab-speaking area of five million18 established branches of the organization in Baghdad and Mosul. They planned to liberate the region from Basra to Mosul and seemed to have expected that once the revolt began that Britain would support them. But the British Ambassador in Istanbul discouraged Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey from such a venture and the Ottoman authorities began to move against the members who fled to other areas of the empire.19 As the war began in 1914, the Ottoman military reserve system, which had completely broken down during the Balkan Wars, was replaced with a new method. On August 3, a general mobilization was ordered with the younger classes of reservists, recruits aged 23–30 drafted into active units. Men aged 30–38 were sent to depot formations for training. After a few weeks of rudimentary training men aged 38– 45 were sent home with instructions to be ready to join units within 24 hours notice. Others were sent to garrisons to do road building or other nonmilitary duties. In November, 1914 the Turkish troops at Baghdad included 9,000 reservists of whom 4,000 were without rifles.20 Although Baghdad was a military headquarters and a major induction center both for officers and conscripts, when the war began there were no specified induction offices, no draft notices, no lists of specific names in age groups. Patrols of soldiers and bureaucrats working for the military took to the streets and went from house to house looking for

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able-bodied young men who seemed to be of draft age. Once sighted, whether or not they were of age, those deemed suitable candidates were drafted immediately.21 Many deserted, especially after the British occupied the south. Artisans and small businessmen, whose labor force often consisted of family members, found themselves without employees or were conscripted themselves, leaving their families without financial support. Shi‘is did not join the army for fear of Sunni indoctrination and Jewish and Christian minorities, if they could, preferred to contribute to the collective tax, bedel al-askari, of 30 Ottoman gold lira that exempted them from military service. For these people, the call to Holy War (jihad) against the British engendered little enthusiasm; their allegiance was local and they had little interest in the foreign policy of the government in Istanbul. Although punishable by hanging, desertion from the army became rife.22 By 1915, there were food shortages in the city that was also beset by floods and cholera epidemics. “The streets of the inner town,” an eyewitness recounts, “through which it was hard to move in 1912, gaped emptily, the shops were mostly closed, the coffee houses only halffilled.” Groups of soldiers appeared occasionally but there “was no longer any life in the town, formerly one of the busiest in the Orient.”23 Commercial groups were hit hardest by the war. With the British seizure of Basra, commerce in Turkish-controlled Baghdad came to a halt. As the Turks forced the use of worthless paper money and prohibited use of gold and silver, punishing those who tried to get around the ban, businessmen looked to the British to solve the problem. Especially vulnerable, the Jewish community was suspected of hoarding and price speculation. Their assets were seized by the government, and those who were conscripted and tried to escape were hanged for desertion or espionage. A number of Jews made it to Basra where they became interpreters for the British forces. By April 1915, it was reported that the business community in Baghdad was pro-British.24 As the British forces marched northward toward the city, they were stopped at Kut in October 1915 and surrendered to the Turks the following April. In Baghdad discussions continued about risings against the Turks, and once again nothing came of them. But the conversations

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reflected the differing views that would become more significant at the end of the war. Of immediate concern for those living in Baghdad were local issues and the immediate ridding of Baghdad from the British occupation—especially once the British reached the city. Those outside the city, especially the military officers of Iraqi origin in al-Ahd—known as the “Sharifians,” the men who were fighting with Faysal in the Arab Revolt—pressed for British support for an Arab nationalist Iraq after the war. Socially prominent personalities, among them the Sunni Naqib of Baghdad, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kaylani, noted that all his life he had been a loyal subject of the sultan and had no intention of violating this loyalty now. Another, Yusuf al-Suwaidi, had grievances against the Turkish regime (CUP) that had his son, the governor in Diarbakr, executed for refusing to participate in actions against the Armenians.25 They might be committed to Arab nationalist goals, but values and loyalties to tribe, clan, family, and religion remained strong despite the propaganda disseminated by al-Ahd members stationed in Iraq or on home visit. “The new generation of Iraqis, no matter how vociferously they might denounce the Young Turks,” notes historian Phebe Marr, “resembled nothing so much as an Arab version of the Young Turks themselves.”26 But the suppression of the Arab nationalists in Syria in 1916 by Turkish commander Djemal Pasha and the declaration of the Hijaz revolt by Sharif Husayn and the Hashimite family encouraged the Arab nationalists of Baghdad to offer their help to the British opposition to the Turkish regime. Encouraged by British promises of an Arab nation ruled by members of the Hashimite family, notably Faysal and his brother, Abdallah, a number of educated Baghdad nationalists defected to the British and said that they wished to participate in the revolt and fight alongside Faysal.27 Others joined after capture by the British on their advance from Basra to Baghdad. Given the choice of the Arab army or a British prisoner of war camp, some 130 officers opted for Faysal.28 The new British offensive of early 1917 was successful. British forces reached Baghdad in March 1917 and as they occupied the city, most of the Ottoman bureaucrats left and took with them registers and current documents. Of the 50 executive personnel in Baghdad, half were Turks and all left the city; of the 120 administrative personnel, only 48 re-

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mained.29 Schools ceased to function as most of the teachers were Anatolian Turks, and the army blew up the technical school and the machinery in the building. The primary schools were looted by the mob.30 Telegraph lines were damaged, malnutrition was rife, and conditions were deplorable in hospitals and jails. Economic life ceased.31 Upon entering Baghdad, General Maude issued a proclamation inviting the people of the Baghdad province, through their “nobles and elders and representatives to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the political representatives of great Britain who accompany the British Army, so that you may be united with your kinsmen in North, East, South, and West in realizing the aspirations of your race.”32 His words and the Anglo-French Declaration of November 1918, coming on the heels of the publication of Wilson’s Fourteen Points the month, before generated excitement in the city. All of these statements declared or implied that no government be imposed without the consent of the inhabitants. Discussions ensued over who should govern them—someone from the family of the Sultan of Egypt was suggested but others looked locally to Abd al-Rahman al-Kaylani, the Naqib of Baghdad.33 There was also support for one of the sons of Sharif Husayn expressed in a petition to the governor of Baghdad in January 1919 signed by some fifty Sunni and Shi‘i Baghdadis.34 The British, however, drew upon their experience in India and imposed direct rule for the three provinces centered in Baghdad under a civil administration headed first by Sir Percy Cox (until May 1918) and later, Sir Arnold Wilson. The British established order, and they repaired roads and buildings; but they also stationed political officers throughout the provinces. They cultivated notables and gave tribal sheikhs the authority to settle disputes, but staffed the civil service positions with minorities and personnel from India. It was this policy of direct rule that determined Baghdadi reactions to the politics of the future. For minorities, the British occupation meant protection and improvement of their status.35 For the Sunni and Shi‘i elites in Baghdad and the Baghdadi military officers now in Syria, the salient political issue that emerged during the short period when the future of Iraq was decided (May, 1918 until November, 1920 when the first government of Iraq was established), was whether or not to work

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with the British. For many in Baghdad, the center of British rule, the British were just another in the series of rulers they had had since the Ottomans took the city in 1517. Local elites worked in secret and presented a unified Sunni-Shi‘i front. For the members of al-Ahd, who had reached Damascus with Faysal’s forces, British promises during the war augured a place for them in a pan-Arab future. They worked openly and lobbied the British and the Allies during treaty negotiations in Versailles for an Arab nation under Hashimite rule. In Baghdad, British policy remained unclear until the very end. Wilson held a referendum in accordance with the Anglo-French Declaration, which, he determined, supported the British role in Iraq.36 During the process, a conference was held in a local mosque to choose delegates to go to Syria or to Europe to meet representatives attending the peace conference in order to “apprise them of the true desires of the Iraqi people.” The British arrested ten people and deported them to Istanbul. Local activists, primarily Shi‘i who included the businessman Ja‘far Abu al-Timman and Muhammad al-Sadr, a Shi‘i cleric from Kazimayn, formed the “Independence Guard” [Haras al-Istiqlal] whose primary objective was to lead an independent struggle against the British without being subordinated to the army officers of al-Ahd in Damascus. They advocated the absolute independence of Iraq under the rule of Abdallah, the son of Sharif Husayn and the integration of Iraq into an Arab union. In March 1920, the Shi‘i Imam Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi issued a fatwa against service in the British administration and members of the society agreed to work with other groups, especially the Euphrates tribes that were already preparing for revolt against the British. The publication of the decision at San Remo in May 1920 to grant the Iraq mandate to Britain crystallized reaction to the British. There were demonstrations in Baghdad against the mandate and for complete independence. In addition to speeches and nationalist poems, both Sunni and Shi‘i leaders decided to use religious ceremonies specific to both groups together in the Sunni and Shi‘i mosques of Baghdad during the upcoming Ramadan period in order to focus the people on the struggle against the British. From May through July, the ceremonies of mawlud (Sunni rite celebrating the birth of Muhammad) was to be celebrated together

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in the mosques of Baghdad with Shi‘i rite of ta‘ziyya [Shi‘i rite commemorating the death of Husayn], both to demonstrate the unity of both groups and to provide a united front against the British. The “Independence Guard” was not to become the link between the Sunnis, Shi‘is, and the Sharifians fighting for Faysal. The “Independence Guard” was able to call out 20,000 people for demonstrations at Baghdad mosques through the month of July, at a time when the full-scale rebellion against British rule was underway in the tribal areas of the Euphrates. The British were astounded. They planted spies in mosques and ordered the leadership either to work with them or be arrested. Concerned about Shi‘i power in the movement, Arnold Wilson agreed to meet with representatives of the group, but only in the company of Baghdad notables whom he selected. Most of the leadership left Baghdad and Kazimayn and fled to the Euphrates to join the revolt with the Shi‘i of Najaf and Karbala and the tribes, now joined by the Sharifians.37 The Baghdadi officers in Syria, the Sharifians, took a different tack. By the end of the war, rivalries between Iraqi and Syrian officers serving with Faysal in Damascus led to the formation of a separate Iraqi al-Ahd [al-ahd al-Iraqi] organization with a branch in Baghdad consisting of seventy members. The Sharifians, too, looked to an independent future as prescribed under the Anglo-French Declaration of 1918 and the prospects of their playing a key role in seeing it happen. When it became clear that the European powers had already decided to split Syria and Iraq into different spheres of interest and that the Syrian Arab officers wanted Syria for the Syrians, such pro-British Iraqi officers as Nuri alSa‘id and Ja‘far al-Askari worked with Faysal as their representative to lobby the British both in Syria and for a year at Versailles (November 1918–November 1919) for British economic and political support at first over both Iraq and Syria and then specifically over Iraq. He, and such other Sunni officers as Yasin al-Hashimi, a latecomer to the movement, worked to hold the British to promises that a son of Sharif Husayn, a Hashimite, would rule an emirate from the Persian Gulf in the south through the Euphrates and Tigris valley up to the bank of the Euphrates next to Dayr al-Zur in the northwest and the Tigris next to Diarbakr in the north.38

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Although at the outset, the military officers were willing to work with the British, Wilson either ignored them or saw them as “active enemies,” and despite Faysal’s requests for their repatriation, he was unwilling to allow the Iraqi officers to return home from Syria. For the Sharifians, the Anglo-French agreement39 in September 1919 was the catalyst for considering revolt against the British. They had been assembling at the town of Dayr al-Zur in the no-man’s land between Iraq and Syria; and with the Syrian declaration of independence, as more Iraqis were removed from their posts in the Syrian administration, they made their way to the town to await orders. The declaration by the Iraqis in Damascus in March 1920 of an independent Iraq under the kingship of Amir Abdallah, the brother of Faysal and one of the sons of Sharif Husayn, was the signal to move back to Iraqi territory. They joined the revolt against the British but their role in the Iraqi revolt of 1920 was brief. As Wilson sent troops west to ensure that the area would remain under British control and that the tribes of the region not be split between British and French rule, by autumn the rebellion was suppressed at high cost to the British. The French rout of Arab troops in Syria in June 1920 presented them with a new problem. At this point, British policy shifted. Gertrude Bell, Oriental Secretary to the British civil commissioner in Baghdad and an early advocate of direct rule, now saw Iraq’s future in support of Sunni Arab nationalists in their goal of self-rule. Chaos and casualties resulting from the revolt gave the British pause. Occupation had its costs in blood and treasure and policy reconsiderations were required. While London dithered over support for a Hashimite candidate as king of Iraq, Sir Percy Cox arrived in Baghdad to take up his position as the first high commissioner under the mandate. In October, he allowed former members of al-Ahd to return to Baghdad and persuaded the elderly Naqib of Baghdad, Abd al-Rahman al-Kaylani, to become the president of the provisional government under Sunni domination of the new country. Cox and Bell worked assiduously with their superiors in India and London through the winter to take local considerations into account. Instead of a mandate, Iraq and Britain would be linked by treaty. Instead of direct rule, a king acceptable to all Iraqis would be installed along with the trappings of parliamentary democracy suitably advised by British experts.40

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The kingdom of Iraq that was created at the Cairo Conference convened by Winston Churchill, newly appointed Colonial Secretary in March 1921, was largely the work of Gertrude Bell. Faysal, relieved of his Syrian throne by the French, was acceptable both to Sunnis and Shi‘is because of his Hashimite lineage and his Arab nationalist role in the Arab revolt; he was persuaded to take the Iraqi throne. After some deft diplomatic maneuvering and a British controlled election, he and his coterie of former al-Ahd, Sunni military officers returned to Iraq. The work had been exhilarating, but tiring, Gertrude Bell noted in her diary. A few months after the conference, she noted that the creation of the kingdom was a satisfying, but exhausting job. “You may rely on one thing,” she wrote to her father on July 8, 1921, “I’ll never engage in creating kings again;” “it’s too great a strain.” By August 1921 Faysal was crowned king and the process of governing the new state began.41

Endnotes 1. Charles Tripp, A History of Iraq (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 29. 2. Walid Khadduri, “Social Background of Modern Iraqi Politics” (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University), 1970, 78–82. 3. Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 26–28; Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, ‘Iraq 1900 to 1950: A Political, Social, and Economic History (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 20. 4. A. A. Duri, “Baghdad,” Encyclopedia of Islam, new ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1954– ) 1: 907; Longrigg, 7. 5. Longrigg, 11–12. 6. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 44. 7. Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi‘is of Iraq (Princeton University Press, 1994), 23. The tombs of Musa al-Kazim the 7th imam and his grandson the 9th imam, Muhammad al-Jawad, were located there. 8. Mahmoud Haddad, “Iraq Before World War I: A Case of Anti-European Arab Ottomanism,” in Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon, eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 120–150. 9. Ibid., 52–60.

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10. Batatu, 224–318 on the chalabi. 11. Reeva Spector Simon, “Iraq,” in The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 252–253. 12. Tripp, 19–20. 13. Reeva S. Simon, Iraq Between the Two World Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); see Ibrahim al-Rawi, Min al-thawra al-‘arabiyya al-kubra ila al-‘Iraq al-hadith: Dhikriyat (Beirut, 1969). 14. Batatu, 275; see Eliezer Tauber, The Emergence of the Arab Movements (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 172 on “The Secret Club” established in Kazimayn in 1902 to protect the rights of Arabs. 15. Tripp, 27. 16. Ibid., 26–27; Tauber, 172. 17. For example, the Literary Club and later the National Scientific Club, founded in Baghdad in 1912, led by Muzahim al-Pachachi from Baghdad Law School. It was supported by the al-Suwaidi family of the ashraf in Baghdad and of Sayyid Talib of Basra to oppose Turkish centralization. See Abdul Wahhab Abbas al-Qaysi, “The Impact of Modernization on Iraqi Society During the Ottoman Era: A Study of Intellectual Development in Iraq 1869–1917” (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, 1958), 100; Tripp, 27. 18. Eliezer Tauber, The Arab Movements in World War I (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 9. 19. Taha al-Hashimi, Mudhakkirat Taha al-Hashimi 1919–1943 (Beirut: Dar al-Tali‘a, 1967); Tauber, Arab Movements, 8–9. 20. F. J Moberly, A History of the Great War: The Campaign in Mesopotamia 1914–1918 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1923), 32. 21. Nir Shohat, Sipurah shel Golah ( Jerusalem, 1981), 121. 22. Ghassan R. Atiyyah, Iraq 1908–1921: A Political Study (Beirut, 1973), 95. 23. Quoted from Alois Musil, The Middle Euphrates: A Topographical Itinerary (New York, 1927), 128–129 in Atiyyah, 95–96. 24. Edmund Candler, The Long Road to Baghdad (London: Cassell, 1919), 120–121; Atiyah, 94–95; Salman Shina, Mi-Bavel le-Zion (Tel-Aviv, 1955), 12–25. 25. Tauber, The Arab Movements in World War I, 31. 26. Marr, 28. 27. These included among them Sayyid Muhi-Din al-Kaylani, a member of the Naqib family, who was a journalist; Rashid al-Hashimi, another journalist; and Haji Majid, a law student (Atiyyah, 96).

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28. Briton Busch, Britain, India, and the Arabs 1914–1921 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 175–176. 29. Atiyyah, 94. 30. Gertrude Bell, Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1920), 5, 12. 31. Longrigg, 93–94. 32. “Proclamation of Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude at Baghdad,” reproduced in John Fisher, Curzon and British Imperialism in the Middle East 1916–1919 (London: Frank Cass, 1999), 305–306. 33. Bell, 126–130. 34. Tauber, The Formation of Modern Syria and Iraq (London: Frank Cass, 1995), 279. 35. Bell, 126–130. 36. As the British became more entrenched, there were Baghdad notables who saw the establishment of a kingdom with a Hashimite ruler as personal Hashimite ambitions (Tauber, The Formation of Modern Syria and Iraq, 190). 37. This account was taken from Tauber, The Formation of Modern Syria and Iraq; Tripp, 41–42. 38. Ibid., 179–180. 39. In anticipation of the King-Crane Commission’s arrival in Iraq in July 1919, the Sharifians offered to work with Americans. The commission did not go to Iraq but did meet with Iraqis when it arrived in Aleppo mid July 1919. They wanted an independent Iraq to include Diyarbakr, Dayr alZur, Mosul, Baghdad, and Mohammareh; a constitutional monarchy— the king to be one of Husayn’s sons—either Abdallah or Zayd. They protested against article 22 of the League of Nations covenant and foreign intervention in the country, but agreed to technical assistance from the United States, not Britain (Tauber, The Formation of Modern Syria and Iraq, 221). 40. Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq 1914–1932 (London: Ithaca Press, 1976), 41–50. 41. Simon, Iraq Between the Two World Wars, 1.

3

Mosul Questions: Economy, Identity, and Annexation Sarah Shields

Today it seems completely appropriate to include the province of Mosul in a collection on Iraq. But that was hardly a valid assumption less than a century ago. Indeed, the “Mosul Question,” as it became known to the emerging international community at the turn of the last century, was about where Mosul fit into the new nation-state system. The “Mosul question” resulted from a changed set of assumptions about boundaries and belonging. During the last century of Ottoman rule, Mosul had been part of a broad region within which goods, people, ideas, and currencies were exchanged. That broad region included cities and towns now part of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. At the end of the First World War, it was not yet clear that Mosul would become part of Iraq. More than any of the other places discussed in this volume, the Mosul region illustrates the massive transformation that accompanied the creation of the new nation-state system. For Mosul, the biggest issues accompanying that transformation are first, the consequences of excising it from its former imperial context, and second, determining where it belonged in the new nation-state system. I will argue first that Mosul had benefited enormously from the regional trade that was made possible by the Ottoman Empire’s broad area. When that expansive empire disappeared, to be replaced by the new Middle Eastern state system, the province would be forced to change its economic base. Second, when the League of Nations was called in

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to decide to which state Mosul should belong, the Commission it formed anticipated that group identities would be the central factor in Wilsonian self-determination. In the end, it was forced to confront its own inaccurate assumptions and assigned the area to Iraq for a very different collection of reasons.

Mosul and its Region To briefly summarize the argument I made in Mosul before Iraq, Mosul’s economy was based on regional trade.1 This book began as a contribution to the argument over dependency and world systems theories, trying to figure out how long-distance international trade had influenced an inland area. What I found instead was that long-distance international trade had been only a very small part of Mosul’s economy. Most economic production utilized the materials of a large contiguous region around the city, with a radius of some 400 miles, and the most important markets were also within that region. Production and trade tied the people of Mosul to the populations of these surrounding areas in webs of both commerce and culture. Artisans in the city of Mosul crafted shoes, wove fabric, and tanned hides for neighboring areas. Merchants from the city exchanged those manufactures for the animals, cotton, wool, and building materials used in their industries. Traders also brought the specialities of the broader region into the city, the famous linen fabrics of Rize, dried fruits from Diyarbakr, distinctive silk/cotton cloth from Baghdad. The merchants’ task was facilitated by an extensive infrastructure that tied them to their counterparts throughout the region. Transport within this broad area relied not only on mules, donkeys, and camels, but also on the relationships between their owners, local guides, and security purveyors. Systems of credit predated formal banks, allowing merchants to buy goods on account and mitigating the need to carry large sums on their journeys. Ottoman legal institutions provided protection and confirmed contracts. Merchant houses often cooperated with those in large cities hundreds of kilometers distant, in Aleppo, Baghdad, Damascus, Anatolia, and Cairo.

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Thus, the exchange of goods was accompanied by relationships among merchants, and between merchants and producers, that did not recognize provincial boundaries. Those trade networks resulted from regional production, not from the long distance trade that historians have long emphasized. European trade was a minor element. From at least 1884 until the end of the century, even using European records, only one-fourth of the city’s trade by value was outside this region.2 Even then, much of the area’s imports seem to have enhanced regional production. Yarn and dye imports made up a large proportion of Mosul’s overseas trade, both used as inputs in the city’s own industries.3 At the same time, the most numerous exports across the sea consisted of pastoral products, wool, skins, and hides. Seen together with Mosul province’s massive export of live animals to the broad region, it becomes clear that the pastoral economy experienced the greatest boom during the last hundred years of Ottoman rule. This export of sheep and their products further tied the region together as city merchants invested in the production of the various nomadic groups in contiguous provinces.4 After World War I, the League of Nations’ new borders disrupted these old webs. Trading partners were suddenly in different countries, new borders brought new tariffs, the credit and transportation systems were dismantled, and the commercial justice system diversified in the various new neighboring nation-states. Although many have examined the political consequences of the postwar division of the Middle East, few have considered the economic consequences of this dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. That is partly, no doubt, because we have continued to focus on the consequences of long-distance international trade, which may have been encouraged by the new situation—in part because of the devastation of the established regional networks. This is, after all, a century after Germany began to experiment with customsfree zones, clearly recognizing the advantage of taking down economic borders, and half a century before Europeans would begin a massive experiment in reorganizing tariff boundaries. In Mosul, the older patterns had to end, and the new “national” borders transformed the region’s merchants into smugglers, her products into contraband, and her laborers into refugees.5

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Mosul Question During the Ottoman period, Mosul was variously a province and a district (sanjak), alternately a capital itself or connected to Baghdad, but connected by ties of family, friendship, and commerce with other Ottoman provinces. The new state system proposed by the mandates redefined her connection with her neighbors. Cut off from her larger region, where did Mosul belong? When the League of Nations assigned the mandate for Iraq to England, Mosul’s status remained unclear. The new Republic of Turkey, whose National Assembly relinquished claims to all non-Turkish areas, insisted that most of the Mosul province was an integral part of Turkey. Britain’s occupation of the Mosul province, having been accomplished after the armistice, did not prejudice the situation, and the League’s experts agreed Turkey still had an uncontested legal right to the area. Britain, which had not yet made peace with Turkey, insisted that Iraq needed Mosul, that Mosul belonged in Iraq, and that the new Iraqi state could not survive without Mosul’s mountainous boundary that would protect Iraq from its neighbors. Unable to reach a resolution, in June 1924 both agreed to submit the situation to the League of Nations.6 Their arguments mostly addressed three major concerns, the popular will, security, and historic affiliation. Both of the disputing countries referred primarily to the desires of the population, consistent with the emerging rhetoric of self-determination that assumed that peoples’ “identity” determined their political desires. The two governments thus made their arguments by proposing differing census figures to “prove” that either the Turks or the Arabs were predominant in the disputed area. The Turkish government insisted that Kurds and Turks were brothers, giving them a significant majority in the province. The British claimed that the Kurds were different, did not want Turkish rule, and called attention to Britain’s promises to the Assyrian community, which the British had resettled in Iraq under British protection following their flight from Persia at the end of World War I. Each government claimed that Mosulis participated in representative assemblies: the Turks listed those who represented the area in the National Assembly in Ankara,

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while the British enumerated Mosulis in attendance at the National Assembly in Baghdad. Historically, each side claimed an advantage. The Turks pointed to the area’s long connection with the Ottoman Empire, and claimed that the major postwar agreements (Se`vres, Sykes-Picot) and the Encyclopedia Britannica defined Iraq without including Mosul. The British argued that the Treaty of Lausanne and the League of Nations defined Mosul as part of Iraqi territory. Both claimed that geography was on their side, with Great Britain emphasizing that the mountainous northern province would be essential to securing the new Iraqi state from Turkey. Perhaps the most significant difference was the way they defined the problem. As far as the British were concerned, the only real question was where the northern border of Iraq should be located. For the Turks, the dispute was over the entire province of Mosul, which they claimed should be part of Turkey.7 Historians argue about whether Great Britain and Turkey were really most interested in oil, with some claiming that this was really the overriding issue.8 When the League of Nations agreed to investigate the question posed by Turkey and Great Britain, they assumed that self-determination would be a major component of their deliberations. For the League’s Commission, then, sorting out the competing claims of the two parties seemed crucial. Perhaps a poster child for multiculturalism, the area’s topography led it to an extremely diverse population. Like Lebanon, the mountains had provided homes to many groups escaping persecution. The Mosul province well before the Ottoman period was home to numerous religious groups unwelcome by the established churches. Jews and Yezidis shared the territory with Muslims and varied Christian churches. Kurdish, Turkish, Arabic, Syriac, and Armenian could be heard in the markets. The assumption underlying the Commission’s endeavor is quite remarkable. All parties agreed with the idea that self-determination should play a role—that the future of Mosul should be what its people wanted. The remarkable part was that all the players assumed that what the people wanted would necessarily be the result of the people’s ethnic identity. Despite the fact that this population had been mixed for cen-

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turies, that many spoke more than one language and had mixed parentage, and that other, non-national forms of self-identification had predominated over the centuries (religion, family, guild, town), neither Turkey, nor Britain, nor the League of Nations seemed to question the notion that Mosul’s Turks would want union with Turkey or that Mosul’s Arabs would want to be connected with Baghdad. This assumed identity of ethnicity and politics is ironic, since the League met in Geneva, which should have been connected to France while the rest of Switzerland clearly should have disappeared into the neighboring states if this logic had applied to Switzerland’s population . The three League of Nations Commissioners (from Hungary, Sweden, and Belgium) and their staff traveled first to Baghdad, then to the disputed province, arriving in Mosul on January 27, 1925. They mapped topography, economy, arable land, trade routes, ethnicities. More important, they interviewed hundreds of the local inhabitants. Both the British and the Turks submitted lists of people to interview, and the Commissioners interviewed others as well. The commission talked to tribal chiefs, Kurdish sheikhs, religious notables, merchants, landowners, craftsmen, in an effort to find out whether they were Turks or Iraqis. If the League expected to find consensus among the people, it was disappointed. If it expected to discover national proclivities, it was similarly unsuccessful. What it found, instead, was that the political destiny Mosulis requested was related to non-identity issues. In some villages and towns, there was a clear choice, while the people in others had very diverse ideas. Often, political, historical, or economic concerns predominated. Ethnicity was clearly not the determining factor. When the Commissioners arrived in Baghdad, they found an historical context that complicated their task. At least four concurrent issues were on the minds of the Commissioners, officials of both concerned governments, and much of the population during the investigation. First, the mandatory regime viewed escalating military conflict in the disputed region as a threat to stability and their control.9 At the same time, the heavy-handed means the British had used to restore order after the 1920 uprising led many to fear continued British control. Moreover, Turkish attacks on Assyrian Christians in the neighboring territories influenced some respondents and, apparently, many abroad. Finally,

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Mustafa Kemal’s destruction of the Caliphate alienated many Muslims in the region. Nonetheless, the Commissioners were disturbed by the British mandatory government’s approach. Sent to investigate and to interview, they insisted on a neutral environment. Instead, they heard repeated accusations that the British were paying, imprisoning, or otherwise intimidating the pro-Turkish contingent.10 Colonel Paulis, a member of the League Commission, showed his anger in his journal, referring repeatedly to the “security” provided by the British, and he insisted on the ending of police escorts. Paulis followed up numerous accusations of intimidation, many apparently accurate.11 When the Commissioners arrived together at Mosul, demonstrators and repression greeted them. They decided to return later, after first dividing their staff and beginning interviews throughout the countryside. According to the notes of interviews conducted by the Commissioners, ethnicity in this region did not determine politics. Offered the choice of union with Turkey or Iraq, many local people suggested a much more complex set of considerations. Economic well-being clearly mattered. Arabs who thought commerce was better before the war spoke in favor of Turkey. Turks who believed the countryside was more secure than previously were in favor of continued British control. Many Turks would have favored union with Turkey, but abhorred the new government under Mustafa Kemal. Some identified themselves as Arabs, and, as Arab nationalists would have predicted, favored union with Iraq, but only if it were independent of outside interference. But many laughed when they were asked about being attached to Iraq if Britain were out of the picture, claiming that Turkey had a long history of rule but that Iraq was much too inexperienced and would not survive without Great Britain.12 While they had begun with the assumption that a census would reflect the people’s goals, they found that identity did not correlate directly to politics. Two correctives seem necessary to the League’s assumptions. First, identity is not fixed. In many cases, people’s selfdefinition was quite fluid, as one old Turkoman explained to M. de Wirsen, “Before, we had been Turks, at present we are Arabs.”13 Second, identity did not determine politics. Mosul’s residents, aware of many other political issues, refused to reject important considerations of reli-

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gion, economy, power, and leadership in favor of simplistic identity politics. In the end, the Commission rejected the ethnic considerations they had thought so central. Economic well-being would be compromised by division along ethnic lines, they concluded, and in any case, the communities were too mixed to make such divisions workable. The economy and even survival of Baghdad and Basra were dependent in hard times on the grain of the north, which seemed much more important to the Commission than Mosul’s own longstanding connections with its hinterland. Even though legally, “The Commission is of opinion that from the legal point of view the disputed territory must be regarded as an integral part of Turkey until that Power renounces her rights,” they decided that the British-proposed frontier made the greatest sense strategically.14 The Commission was clear about the sentiments of the people. The relevant paragraph in their conclusion reads . . . The fact seems to be established that, taking the territory as a whole, the desires expressed by the population are more in favour of Iraq than of Turkey. It must, however, be realized that the attitude of most of the people was influenced by the desire for effective support under the mandate, and by economic considerations, rather than by any feeling of solidarity with the Arab kingdom; if these two factors had carried no weight with the persons consulted, it is probable that the majority of them would have preferred to return to Turkey rather than to be attached to Iraq.15 The Commission recommended, in the end, that Mosul be attached to Iraq, but under the conditions that the area continue under League of Nations mandate for twenty-five years, and that Kurds be appointed in the administration, education, and judicial offices in the region, with Kurdish as the language of these services.16 The Commission is convinced that if the League of Nations’ control were to terminate on the expiry of the four-years Treaty now in force between Great Britain and Iraq, and if certain guarantees

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of local administration were not to be given to the Kurds, the majority of the people would have preferred Turkish to Arab sovereignty.17 After months of investigation on the ground, and still more time consulting experts back home, the Commissioners concluded that Mosul should become part of a British-controlled Iraq. Historians of the region have emphasized the development of nationalism during this period, but the notes of these interviews illustrate a different phenomenon—a population dubious that this brand new state with no experience and no legitimacy could manage to benefit the country. While the British had emphasized national identity and self-determination in their arguments, the people—even under their watchful eyes—rejected their arguments, emphasizing that survival and prosperity were their first priorities. More interesting than their conclusions, however, is the dismantling of their simplistic and binary structures of thinking about this population. The League of Nations assumed that one’s ethnic identity would determine one’s politics. Confronted with such simplistic questions (are you a Turk or an Iraqi?), the population insisted on complicating the options. They refused to go along with the notion that who one was determined one’s politics, and introduced more complex concerns. Being a Turk was well and good, but if a Mosuli opposed secularism, they refused to consider connection with Ataturk’s new regime. Similarly, Arab nationalists often preferred Turkey to an Iraq controlled by a foreign army. There was a broad array of political ideas and social ideals in the Mosul region in the postwar period, notions not taken into account by the League of Nations’ Commission in the region. But the whole project of “assigning Mosul,” the issue that became the “Mosul question,” was only an issue as a result of the nation-states system created as a result of European assumptions about state structures and belonging. These new ideas insisted that the population of Mosul could have one and only one identity, that nations and state boundaries should coincide, and that states must be mutually independent. It is that set of assumptions that constituted Mosul as a problem. And, once the problem was “resolved,” it was that set of assumptions that destroyed

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Mosul’s economy and left it open to the new oil economy waiting in the wings.

Endnotes 1. Sarah Shields, Mosul before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 2. Ibid., 103. 3. Sarah Shields, “Regional Trade and Nineteenth-Century Mosul: Revising the Role of Europe in the Middle East Economy,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991): 19–37. 4. Sarah Shields, “Sheep, Nomads and Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Mosul: Creating Transformations in an Ottoman Society,” Journal of Social History 25 (1992): 773–89. One set of merchants complained to the government when they saw a threat to this pastoral trade, claiming that the economy of the tribes was the most important factor in the local marketplace. Threatening this trade would be devastating, like a flood or an earthquake. (Turkey, Bas¸bakanlık archivi, DH.) MU 95/44. 5. Sarah Shields, “Take-Off into Self-Sustained Peripheralization: Regional Trade, Regional Partition, and Middle East Historians,” Turkish Studies Association Bulletin 18 (1993): 1–23. 6. Mosul was to have been under French control under the Sykes-Picot agreement. The French government relinquished its claims to Mosul during the postwar negotiations in return for oil revenues. 7. Summaries and transcripts of the negotiations between Turkey and UK (Archives of the League of Nations), S17 Irak II, May 19–June 5, 1924, Istanbul. 8. For an impressive effort to weigh the impact of oil on England’s interest in the region, see Marian Kent, Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil 1900–1920 (London: Macmillan Press, 1976). 9. Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, ‘Iraq, 1900 to 1950: A Political, Social, and Economic History (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 144–48, 152– 58 describes events from a British point of view. 10. Archives of the League of Nations, S 15 File D 26. Note from G. J. Djevad, 18 Jan 25 Bagdad. 11. Archives of the League of Nations, S16. Colonel A. Paulis, Enquete en Irak: Journal Prive, 2, 16, 18.

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12. Archives of the League of Nations, S 15 File D 29. Moussul Personnes interoge´e M. de Wirsten. S16. Colonel A. Paulis, Enquete en Iraq, Journal Privee, passim. 13. Archives of the League of Nations, S 15 file D 28. Interrogatories de M. de Wirsen. 14. League of Nations, Question of the Frontier between Turkey and Iraq: Report submitted to the Council by the Commission instituted by the Council Resolution of September 30th, 1924, 88. 15. Ibid., 88. 16. Ibid., 88–89. 17. Ibid., 89.

4

The Evolution of the Iran-Iraq Boundary Lawrence G. Potter

The creation of the mandate for Iraq in 1920 introduced a new country into the Middle East that, on its eastern frontier, inherited a number of unresolved problems with Persia. For hundreds of years frictions, sometimes leading to war, had periodically erupted across the common boundary extending from the Caucasus to the Persian Gulf, and a long series of treaties between the Ottoman Empire and Persia had vaguely defined the border. The modern boundary was basically established in 1847, but it was not demarcated on the ground until 1914. Since that time there have been few adjustments.1 Iraq, therefore, was faced at the outset with a border with Persia that had already been determined. As nationalism rose in both countries in the 1920s and 1930s, each blamed the British for imposing boundaries that left them at a disadvantage. Persia regarded the new state of Iraq with disdain and adopted an attitude toward it of “official and calculated unfriendliness,” in the words of a British diplomat.2 It did not extend diplomatic recognition until 1929. Once governments in Tehran and Baghdad had consolidated their internal positions and British influence was reduced in the 1930s, both sought to revise their common boundary, and a key frontier treaty was finally reached in 1937. In the same year both countries, along with Afghanistan and Turkey, signed the Sa‘dabad pact, whose key provisions were to respect the inviolability of

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common frontiers and to refrain from any internal interference in each other’s affairs. However, despite these agreements, disputes persisted between Iran and Iraq over many familiar issues, especially the Shatt alArab. This chapter will first review the geography and history of the border area and the competing conceptions of a boundary. It then reviews the various treaty agreements between Persia and the Ottoman Empire to see how the border had come to be defined by the eve of war in 1914. Finally, it considers the issues that troubled relations between the states during the Iraqi mandate and early years of independence.

Geography The border between Persia and the Ottoman Empire stretched for some 1,180 miles from the Gulf to Mt. Ararat. The modern Iran-Iraq border extends for some 906 miles (about half of which is in Kurdistan), from Mt. Dalanper in the north to the mouth of the Shatt al-Arab in the south. It broadly divides the Tigris-Euphrates Valley from the high Iranian plateau. The northern part of the boundary follows the watershed east of the basin of the Tigris River, but in the center and south there are no obvious natural features to follow. In its central part the boundary divides many streams which empty into the Tigris, leading to disputes over access to water. In the south, the flat plains of Khuzistan offer no obvious line of division.3 The Iranian province of Khuzistan, indeed, has often been a bone of contention between neighboring states.4 Geographically part of Mesopotamia, Khuzistan (known in Safavid and Qajar times as Arabistan, due to the predominance of Arabic speakers) was an alluvial, marshy plain stretching from the foothills of the Zagros mountains to the Persian Gulf. Khuzistan was known for its hot climate, favorable for growing dates and sugar cane. It is bisected by the Karun River that contributes to the Shatt al-Arab, which empties into the Persian Gulf.5 In modern times the Shatt has often served as a political boundary, although not a linguistic one.6 Khuzistan was always reckoned to be part of Iranzamin or the land

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of Iran.7 However, it was often a frontier zone remote from imperial capitals, and at times the Arab tribes located in these marshlands achieved a considerable degreee of autonomy.8 It was the center of the Musha‘sha‘ movement of extremist Shi‘i in the fifteenth century,9 and the headquarters of the independent principality of Chaub (Banu Ka‘b) Arabs in the late eighteenth century.10 Thanks to the Safavids, however, the province remained under Persian control.11 Until Reza Shah reincorporated Arabistan back into Iran in December 1924 (and reverted to use of the earlier name, Khuzistan), it was ruled by an Arab sheikh under British protection. Had they so desired, the British might have treated it as an independent sheikhdom, as they did Kuwait. After the rise of Reza Shah, however, they preferred to deal with a strong central government in Tehran rather than local potentates. At the turn of the twentieth century, Arabistan was still a frontier zone that enjoyed considerable autonomy, and two prominent British observers of the time commented on its sense of separateness. In the words of journalist Valentine Chirol, “The Turk and the Persian are both aliens in the land, equally hated by the Arab population, and both have proved equally unworthy and incompetent stewards of a splendid estate . . .”12 British imperialist George Curzon remarks that “No love is lost between the two people, the Persian regarding the Arab as an interloper and a dullard, and the Arab regarding the Persian, with some justice in this region, as a plotter and a rogue.”13 Such stereotypes, needless to say, may persist.

Background For over a millennium there was no political boundary between Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, and Iran was often ruled by dynasties centered in what is now Iraq. These include the great pre-Islamic empires of the Achaemenids, with an important city at Babylon, the Sasanians, with a capital at Ctesiphon, and the (Islamic) Abbasid dynasty, centered nearby in Baghdad and Samarra. Part of the difficulty in defining a border in this region is that since the Mongol invasion in the thirteenth century the area that later became

M a p 4.1 Iran-Iraq Boundary Source: International Boundary Study No. 164, Office of the Geographer, U.S. Department of State, 1978. Used by permission.

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Iraq has been a contested frontier zone. From the early 1500s until the early 1800s the Ottomans clashed there repeatedly with the Safavids and succeeding Persian dynasties, including, in the nineteenth century, the Qajars. Ostensibly, the clash pitted Turk against Persian and Sunni against Shi‘i, helping to sharpen territorial consciousness between Ottomans and Persians. The frontier repeatedly shifted back and forth, and a number of peace treaties were concluded, all soon to be broken. At times when the Persians were strong, such as under Shah Abbas in the 1620s and 1630s, they controlled Baghdad,14 but at times of Persian weakness such as after the collapse of the Safavids in 1722, Ottoman control stretched far into Iran and included the major cities of Kirmanshah, Hamadan, and Tabriz.15 The last war between Persia and the Ottoman Empire broke out in October 1820 and led to the (First) Treaty of Erzerum in 1823. However, this agreement mainly served to reaffirm a string of earlier treaties that did not precisely define the frontier. It was not enough to prevent frequent border incidents, such as the Ottomans’ sacking Mohammareh in 1837. At this point, the British and Russians, fearing continued instability, stepped in to mediate and impose their own idea of a boundary.

Border Treaties The peace treaties drawn up between the Ottomans and Safavids in the pre-modern era illustrate well local conceptions of a boundary. The first treaty between these states was the Treaty of Amasya, concluded in 1555.16 Under it Persia recognized Ottoman sovereignty over the territory it presently held,17 and the Ottomans gave permission for Persian pilgrims to visit the Shi‘i holy cities as well as Mecca and Medina. “The frontier thus established ran across the mountains dividing eastern and western Georgia, through Armenia, and via the western slopes of the Zagros down to the Persian Gulf.”18 The earliest document that still survives is the 1639 Treaty of Zohab, which was the precedent for all later treaties and the basis (except in the north) for the modern boundary.19 Under it Persia recognized Ottoman sovereignty over Mesopotamia, and permanently relinquished Baghdad. This treaty did not estab-

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lish a frontier line, but “rather, it described that strip of land in which the authority of both sultan and shah was weak and disputed. Somewhere within that zone lay the boundary.”20 Such lack of precision was not considered a problem, and the frontier thus described was reaffirmed in further treaties concluded in 1746 (Kurdan), and 1823 and 1847 (Erzerum). Following the increasing intervention of imperial powers in the Middle East in the nineteenth century, the reluctance of regional states to define specific borders could not be allowed to stand. Conflict between Persia and the Ottoman Empire was unsettling to Russia and Britain, who offered to mediate and in 1843 set up a Boundary Commission (with representatives from Persia, Turkey, Britain, and Russia) to demarcate the border. Extensive and frustrating negotiations led to the (Second) Treaty of Erzerum in 1847, which was the first European-style treaty between the states.21 Under its provisions, the Ottomans retained the city of Sulaymaniya, which Persian troops had captured in 1840. The Ottomans recognized Persian sovereignty over Mohammareh and the island of Abadan (then known as Khizr), and the eastern bank of the Shatt was defined as Persian. Freedom of navigation was specified for Persian shipping in the Shatt. While sovereignty over the river was not addressed specifically, there was general acceptance on the part of the Great Powers that the whole of the Shatt al-Arab belonged to the Ottomans.22 This led to continuous Iranian efforts from the late 1920s on to redefine the border as the thalweg, or median line of the deepest channel. The work of this Boundary Commission in preparing a topographic map continued in a desultory manner for the rest of the century, with interruptions for the Crimean War (1854–56) and the Anglo-Persian War (1856–57). Finally, in 1869, a carte identique was completed, some sixty feet long and two feet wide. It indicated a frontier zone, averaging twenty-five miles wide, within which the boundary lay, and the Persians and Ottomans were told that they should determine the boundary themselves within these limits. This is where matters stood until, after continued border incidents, and with the importance of the region increasing with the development of a nascent oil industry, the Persian and Ottoman governments agreed

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under the Tehran Protocol in December 1911 to set up a commission to demarcate the border. This led to the 1913 Protocol of Constantinople, which described a boundary line. Ottoman sovereignty over the Shatt was confirmed, with the exception of certain islands and an anchorage off Mohammareh. The Turks agreed to regard as Persian the border city of Qotur, northwest of Tabriz, which had long been a bone of contention.23 Turkey also gave up its claim to Qasr-i Shirin, on the border west of Kirmanshah, in return for some territory farther north. Some of the Zohab region to the west of Kirmanshah, including Mandali and Khanaqin, which was suspected of holding rich oil fields, remained within Iraq.24 The border was then rapidly demarcated with pillars. The Delimitation Commission, whose decisions were supposed to be final, started work in Abadan in January 1914 and finished in October at Mt. Ararat, shortly after the outbreak of war.25 (The commissioners found that the Persians had in general encroached on the border in the south, and the Turks in the north.26) A British diplomat commented at the time that the whole story was “a phenomenon of procrastination unparalleled even in the chronicles of Oriental diplomacy.”27

Postwar Relations Between Iran and Iraq After the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, Persia (known internationally as Iran after 1935) was confronted with two new states on its western border: Turkey and Iraq. Many issues that had bedeviled relations between Persians and the Ottomans over the years flared up again between the new states.28 These included border disputes; the juridical position of Persians in Iraq; the treatment of Persian pilgrims visiting Shi‘i shrines in Iraq; tribal unrest along the frontier; and disputes over sharing water from streams flowing from Persia into Iraq. In hopes of receiving satisfaction from Iraq on several of these issues, Persia withheld recognition of the new state until 1929. During World War I, although declaring itself neutral, Persia was subject to military intervention by the armies of Russia, Turkey, and Britain, with German agents active in the south. The postwar years in

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Iran were difficult ones, marked by the rise to power of Reza Khan. After seizing power in a coup in 1921, he became prime minister in 1923, and the shah (or king) of a new dynasty, the Pahlavis, in 1925. Reza Shah was preoccupied with strengthening the control of the central government, building up the army as the main instrument of state power, and imposing secularizing reforms. His initial task was to subdue tribal rebellions in the provinces, culminating in the reimposition of Tehran’s control over Khuzistan in December 1924. In foreign affairs, his prime aim was to free Iran from the interference of Britain and Russia, which had exercised an undue influence over the Qajar dynasty in the nineteenth century. As in the case of Turkey under Ataturk, Reza Shah sought to instill a strong sense of nationalism among Iranians. Persia felt contempt for the newly created regime in Iraq, which was dominated by Britain, and doubted that it would last.29 Persia also took the position that it was not bound by treaties negotiated by governments no longer in power, which included both the Ottomans in Iraq and the defunct Qajar dynasty.30 It believed that extending diplomatic recognition to Iraq was a valuable asset that should not be given up lightly without getting something in return.31 The border demarcation between the two states that had been arrived at in 1913–1914 had never been ratified by the Persian Parliament. This led to hopes that the border would be modified in its favor, and the Persian delegate to the Paris Peace Conference pressed in vain for extensive alterations.32 Persia was under the impression that the Iraqis would do whatever the British told them to.33 The key bone of contention was the boundary along the Shatt al-Arab, to be discussed below. The British, however, maintained that the frontier was settled,34 and blamed Iran for the strained relations in the postwar period.35

Persians in Iraq Another important issue was the status of Persian subjects living in Iraq, which was bound to change with the formation of a new Iraqi state.36 At the time of the creation of the Mandate, the influence of

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Persians there, especially in the Shi‘i shrine cities or atabat, was significant.37 Their number, according to a British census of 1919, was some 80,000,38 although a figure of 200,000 was cited in a British diplomatic memorandum of 1928.39 Persians had come to enjoy special privileges that the weak Ottoman government could not curtail. Iranian consuls had exclusive authority over Iranian subjects in civil and criminal matters, and Iranians were exempt from taxes paid by Ottoman subjects. Such privileges were confirmed in law in 1875.40 The British and Iraqi governments were now determined to see this influence reduced, especially in Karbala, where by the time of the war an estimated three quarters of the population were Persian.41 One grievance was the Iraqi Nationality Law of 1924, under which thousands of Persians were forced to become Iraqis.42 According to the law, Persians in Iraq were considered to be Iraqi nationals unless they renounced such citizenship by a final deadline of January 1928. One of the aims of this law was to exclude noncitizens (mainly Persians) from government positions and employment in the shrine cities. In 1924, Britain and Iraq signed a judicial agreement under which those who had enjoyed capitulatory privileges under the Ottomans would continue to do so. On this basis Iran claimed such privileges for its citizens there, who frequently complained to Tehran of ill-treatment. However, Britain and Iraq were opposed to this, on the grounds that it would be impractical to extend such privileges to such a large number of Persian residents and that the Persian courts were much worse than the Iraqi ones. Furthermore, such privileges were not reciprocal since Iran itself abolished its capitulatory regime in 1928. In March 1929 Britain and Iraq abolished their juridical agreement, which satisfied Persia and led directly to Iranian recognition of Iraq on April 25, 1929. The shrine cities were heavily dependent economically on pilgrims, 90 percent of whom by the time of the war were Persian.43 Starting in the 1920s, the Iranian government placed restrictions on Persians making pilgrimages there. Reza Shah sought to reduce the influence of the clerics (ulama) in Iran and the interference of the atabat in Iranian affairs. He reduced Iranian ties to the shrine cities by introducing visa requirements and restricting the length of visits. Thus, due to the poli-

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cies of both the Baghdad and Tehran governments, starting in the 1920s the number of Persian pilgrims to Iraq was much reduced, as was Persian influence in the shrine cities.

Tribal Troubles There was also the recurrent issue of tribal disturbances along the border. Lack of control over the tribes in frontier areas was the normal situation in the nineteenth century. The tribes along Iran’s western border, notably the Kurds in the central section and the Ka‘b Arabs in the south, could shift political allegiance back and forth and avoided paying tribute to governments unless absolutely necessary. Tribes were also accustomed to migrating with their flocks between their traditional summer and winter quarters, disregarding any political frontier. Iranians complained that tribal unrest had often served as a pretext for invasion on the part of the Ottomans.44 Reza Shah sought to disarm the tribes, particularly the Kurds and Lurs living in the Zagros Mountains adjacent to Iraq, and assert the control of the Tehran government over them. This was a sensitive issue in the case of Kurdish rebels, such as the notorious Simqu and the Vali of Pusht-i Kuh, who had been defeated by the shah and taken refuge in Iraq. Iraq placed such rebels under surveillance but was unwilling to extradite them. The Pizhdar tribes, who summered in the Sardasht area, were in conflict with the Iranian government throughout the 1920s.45 In 1931 and 1932, the migrations of the Jaf (the most important tribe in south Kurdistan) became a source of dispute, and led to agreement with the Iraqi government in 1932 to regulate their migrations.46

Water Another issue that had the potential to inflame relations was that of dividing water resources, although this matter is not well documented in the diplomatic record. Because of the way the border was drawn, many rivers and streams that flowed from the foothills of the Zagros mountains down onto the plain of Mesopotamia were divided between

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Iran and Iraq. Iraq thus depended upon its upstream neighbor for this crucial resource, which could lead to problems. (For example, in the summer of 1925 when the area was experiencing a severe drought, the Iraqi town of Mandali complained that Persia had cut off its water supply.) In only one case was the apportionment of the water of such a stream, the Gangir, referred to in a bilateral treaty. The Boundary Commission in 1914 decided to split its waters between Persia and Iraq, with the actual details left to local experts.47

Shatt al-Arab Issue48 In addition to the sources of tension mentioned above, the key Persian demand of Iraq was a revision of the boundary along the Shatt al‘Arab. As will be recalled, the 1913 settlement defined the frontier as the low-water mark on the Persian bank, thus leaving the entire waterway under Iraqi sovereignty. The only exception was around Mohammareh, where the median line defined the frontier. Although Iran retained rights of navigation on part of the Shatt, the situation had become untenable, as its jetties at Abadan were technically in Iraqi waters. Iran argued for change on the basis that, in accordance with international principles laid down at the Paris Peace Conference, in the case of a river the international frontier was deemed to run down the center. With Iran dependent upon the export of oil from Abadan for most of its income, it was unfair to let this strategically important artery be controlled by Iraq. In any case, Persia (like Turkey) denied the validity of the 1913 Protocol.49 Persia also had a grievance against the Basra Port Authority, set up by the British after the war to regulate trade and commerce on the river. Shipping that visited the Persian ports of Mohammareh and Abadan was obliged to pay dues to this authority, and by 1928 such revenue made up more than one-third of its income. However, Persia was not represented on this body and complained that it received few benefits in return.50 Iraq, for its part, insisted that the issue of sovereignty had been settled in its favor by previous treaties, including the Treaty of Erzerum in 1847

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and the Constantinople Protocol of 1913. Furthermore, the Boundary Delimitation Commission in 1914 had allocated the entire Shatt to Iraq and Iran had accepted this. Iraq argued that the Shatt was its only access to the sea, and Basra its only seaport, whereas Iran had a coastline of almost 2,000 kilometers and another major port, Bandar Shahpur, only 90 kilometers east of the Shatt.51 It was only fair and right, therefore, that Iraq should control the Shatt, her only lifeline to the sea.52 Once Iraq achieved independence, the Shatt issue flared anew. During a visit by King Faysal to Tehran in early 1932, he was asked to accept a thalweg definition for the boundary. Afterwards, the Basra Port Authority began objecting that Persia was disregarding its pilots and navigational aids.53 The situation was exacerbated when, in 1932, Persia took possession of six naval vessels for use in the Gulf and the Shatt.54 By 1934, friction had risen and Iraq complained to the League of Nations of a number of “flagrant acts of aggression” by Iran over the previous two years.55 Attempts to resolve the issue through the League went nowhere, due to what one of the participants characterized as the “mulish behaviour of the parties.”56 Finally, on July 4, 1937, the foreign ministers of Iran and Iraq signed a Frontier Treaty in which both states made important concessions. At a time when the international situation was deteriorating, Reza Shah decided not to let Persian demands over the river prevent an overall settlement. Each party confirmed the validity of the 1913 Protocol and the 1914 delimitation. This meant that sovereignty over the Shatt continued to lie with Iraq, with the exception of the Mohammareh area, to which was now added a four-mile strip opposite Abadan where the thalweg was recognized as the boundary—thus satisfying Iran’s major objection. The river was to remain open to the trading vessels of all countries but to vessels of war of only Iran and Iraq. It was agreed that all dues levied on shipping would be used only for purposes of conservancy and navigation, and that a convention would be concluded later to cover all issues related to this.57 This now cleared the way for the signing on July 8, 1937, of the Sa‘dabad Pact, one of the all-time high points of Iran-Iraq relations.58 Under this treaty, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Afghanistan agreed to abstain from interfering in each other’s affairs; to respect the inviolability of

M a p 4.2 Iran-Iraq Boundary in the Shatt al Arab Source: International Boundary Study No. 164, Office of the Geographer, U.S. Department of State, 1978. Used by permission.

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their common frontiers; to refrain from aggression against each other; and to bring any complaints of such aggression before the League of Nations. They also agreed not to harbor any opposition groups within their territory.59 Soon afterwards ( July 18, 1937) a Treaty of Friendship was signed between Iran and Iraq, extending most-favored-nation treatment to each other’s diplomats, and a further treaty ( July 24, 1937), established guidelines for the peaceful settlement of disputes, which were to be referred to the Permanent Court of International Justice.60 Unfortunately, these pledges were not honored, as would become clear in the course of the rest of the twentieth century.

Conclusion Relations between Iran and Iraq, and before that Persia and the Ottoman Empire, have often been tense and frictions have led to war repeatedly since the sixteenth century. However, the struggle between Iran and Iraq in the 1980s was no more a religious one between Sunni and Shi‘i than that hundreds of years earlier. Despite the difficulty in defining a border, for the past several hundred years the general course of the frontier, dividing the Mesopotamian lowlands from the high mountainous plateau of Iran, has been clear. The boundary between the two states must always be an arbitrary line, in light of the transnational nature of ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups. Such groups on either side of the border will always have more in common with each other than with distant governments they are supposedly subject to. Both sides have sought small adjustments in the border and will probably continue to do so when they feel they have the advantage, especially if such demands are endorsed by an outside power. In the wake of the U.S.-led war against Iraq in the spring of 2003, such a situation may again prevail. Although the Shatt al-Arab was defined as Iraqi as early as 1847, Iran has never accepted this, and only obtained Iraqi agreement on a thalweg border in 1975. This issue will probably continue to be a bone of contention regardless of the future form of government in Iran or Iraq. The dispute over the Shatt now has become a symbolic one, which has come to denote the divide between Arab and Persian, Sunni and Shi‘i.

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With the creation of the new state of Iraq, historic Iranian aspirations for influence or control over the atabat were checked, and a major modification of the border seemed out of reach. However, Iranian interest in the Shiite shrine cities, and the pilgrimage traffic, assured that Iran would continue to have a close interest in internal Iraqi developments. In the early mandatory period Iran regarded Iraq as a British creation, and Iran was in no hurry to reward it with diplomatic recognition. However, in the period leading up to World War II, a goodneighbor policy prevailed, and Iran and Iraq reconciled their differences, at least on paper. Unfortunately, the era of good feeling did not last long, and the perennial areas of tension resurfaced ultimately leading, decades later, to all-out war.

Endnotes 1. The essential reference work on this subject is an 11-volume compilation of British diplomatic documents and maps on all aspects of the border dispute, edited by British geographer Richard Schofield. I am grateful for his comments on an earlier version of this chapter. See The Iran-Iraq Border 1840–1958 (Farnham Common, England: Archive Editions, 1989). The “General Preface” in vol. 1 (pp. xv–xxii) provides a valuable overview of the subject, as do the introductions to the other volumes. Also useful are articles under the entry “Boundaries” in Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. 4 (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1990); see “i. With the Ottoman Empire” by Keith McLachlan, 401–3 and “iv. With Iraq,” by Joseph A. Kechichian, 415–17. Helpful reviews of the subject include: “The Iraqi-Persian Frontier: 1639–1938” by C.J. Edmonds, in Asian Affairs 62 ( June 1975): 147–54; “The Evolution of the Boundary between Iraq and Iran” by Vahe´ J. Sevian, in Essays in Political Geography, ed. Charles A. Fisher (London: Methuen, 1968), 211–23; and “Iran-Iraq Boundary,” International Boundary Study No. 164 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Office of the Geographer, July 13, 1978), 9 pp. with 2 maps. Also consult The boundaries of modern Iran, ed. Keith McLachlan, The SOAS/GRC Geopolitics Series 2 (London: UCL Press, 1994). 2. “Foreign Office Memorandum by Mr. C. W. Baxter on Relations between Persia and Iraq, June 1928” [L/P & S/18/C215], Section 6.29 in Schofield, Iran-Iraq Border, vol. 6, 841.

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3. See Sevian, “Evolution of the Boundary between Iraq and Iran,” 223; U.S. Department of State, International Boundary Study, 1; C. J. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks and Arabs (London: Oxford University Press, 1957), 125. 4. On Khuzistan, see “Physical Geography” by W. B. Fisher, in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. I, The Land of Iran, ed. W. B. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 33–38; W. Barthold, An Historical Geography of Iran, trans. Svat Soucek (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 180–94; Svat Soucek, “Arabistan or Khuzistan,” Iranian Studies 17 (1984): 195–213; G. Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905; repr. Lahore: Al-Biruni, 1977), 232–47. The main works in Persian is Sayyid Ahmad Kasravi, Ta’rikh-i pansad sala-yi Khuzistan (Tehran: Mihr, 1312/1934), and Ali Razmara, Farhang-i jughrafiya-yi Iran (Tehran, 1328–32/1949–53), vol. 6. 5. See here R.N. Schofield, Evolution of the Shatt al-Arab boundary dispute (Wisbech: Menas Press, 1986) and his chapter, “Interpreting a Vague River Boundary Delimitation: The 1847 Erzerum Treaty and the Shatt al-Arab before 1913” in McLachlan, Boundaries of Modern Iran, 72–92. 6. Bruce Ingham, “Ethno-linguistic Links between Southern Iraq and Khuzistan,” in McLachlan, Boundaries of Modern Iran, 95. He points out that rivers form the centers of linguistic regions rather than dividing them. 7. However, in the 10th century ad the inhabitants spoke their own language, Khuzi, in addition to Arabic and Persian. See Barthold, An Historical Geography of Iran, 183, fn. 19, citing the Arab geographers Istakhri and Yaqut. 8. The most thorough discussion of this province is found in J. G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, Oman and Central Arabia, vol. I, part II, chapter 10 (Calcutta, 1915; reprint Farnham Common, England: Archive Editions, 1986), in 4: 1625–1775. 9. Mazzaoui, Michel M., The Origins of the Safawids: Shi‘ism, Sufism, and the Gulat (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1972), 67–71. 10. John R. Perry, “The Banu Ka‘b: An Ambitious Brigand State in Khuzistan,” in Le Monde Iranien et l’Islam I (1971), 131–52. Also, M. R. Izady, “The Gulf ’s Ethnic Diversity: An Evolutionary History,” in Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus, ed. Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 63. 11. Soucek remarks, “It was thus the rise of a strong centralized state in Iran

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12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

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that prevented what could have become a perhaps definitive Arab (and at the time Ottoman-sponsored) reorientation of Khuzistan.” Soucek, “Arabistan or Khuzistan,” 203. Valentine Chirol, The Middle Eastern Question or Some Political Problems of Indian Defence (London: John Murray, 1903), 174. George N. Curzon, in Persia and the Persian Question (London: Frank Cass, 1892; reprint 1966), vol. 2: 327. Roger Savory, Iran Under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 88–89. Stanford Shaw, “Iranian Relations with the Ottoman Empire in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 7, From Nadir Shah to the Islamic Republic, eds. Peter Avery, Gavin Hambly and Charles Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 299. The political dimension of this struggle was more important than the religious one. See Adel Allouche, The Origins and Development of the Ottoman-Safavid Conflict (906–962/1500–1555), Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, Band 91 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1983), esp. pp. 146–51. See “Amasya, Peace of ” by M. Ko¨hbach, in Encyclopædia Iranica I (1985), 928. Shah, “Iranian Relations with the Ottoman Empire,” 297. Stanford J. Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 1, Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280–1808 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 109. “Treaty of Peace and Frontiers: The Ottoman Empire and Persia, 17 May 1639,” in The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, 2nd. Ed., Vol. 1, European Expansion, 1535–1914, ed. J. C. Hurewitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 25–28. See the detailed analysis of this treaty in Edmonds, Kurds, Turks and Arabs, 125– 29; also “The Safavid Period” by H. R. Roemer, in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 6, The Timurid and Safavid Periods, ed. Peter Jackson and Laurence Lockhart (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 285. R. Michael Burrell and Keith McLachlan, “The Political Geography of the Persian Gulf,” in The Persian Gulf States: A General Survey, ed. Alvin J. Cottrell et. al. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 122. Schofield, Iran-Iraq Border, volume 1, section 1.05, 675–77. Schofield, “Interpreting a vague river boundary,” p. 73.

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23. Qotur, which had been occupied by the Turks in 1849, had been defined as Persian in the Treaty of Berlin (1878), after which it was occupied by Persian troops. 24. Schofield, intro to V. 6, xix. 25. G. E. Hubbard, From the Gulf to Ararat: An Expedition through Mesopotamia and Kurdistan (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1917). 26. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks and Arabs, 138. 27. Hubbard, From the Gulf to Ararat, 2. 28. For a valuable review of the issues, see the Memorandum by Mr. C. W. Baxter (cited above). 29. Baxter, 841. 30. Sevian, “Evolution of the Boundary,” p. 219. 31. Baxter, 842. 32. Schofield, Iran-Iraq Border, vol. 6, section 6.10. 33. Baxter, 849. 34. Ibid., 845–47. 35. Ibid., 841. 36. Rouhollah K. Ramazani, The Foreign Policy of Iran: A Developing Nation in World Affairs, 1500–1941 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1966), 260–61; Baxter, 841, 843–44. 37. Yitzhak Nakash, The Shi‘is of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), esp. pp. 100–105 and 164–73. 38. Ibid., 100. 39. Baxter, 841. 40. Nakhash, The Shi‘is of Iraq, 17–18. 41. Ibid., 101. 42. Baxter, 844. 43. Nakhash, The Shi‘is of Iraq, 167–68. 44. Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 26–29; quote is on p. 28. 45. David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds, Revised Ed. (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), Chapter 10, “The Kurds under Reza Shah,” pp. 214– 28. 46. Ramazani, Foreign Policy of Iran, 259–60; Edmonds, Kurds, Turks, and Arabs, 50. 47. Sevian, “Evolution of the Boundary,” pp. 219–21; also Schofield, IranIraq Border, Intro. to vol. 6, xviii, and vol. 6, section 6.19.

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48. See Richard Schofield, “Position, Function, and Symbol: The Shatt alArab Dispute in Perspective,” in Lawrence G. Potter and Gary G. Sick, eds., Iran, Iraq and the Legacies of War (New York: Palgrave, 2004). 49. Schofield, intro to vol. 7, xv–xvii and Baxter, 847–48. 50. Baxter, 847–48. 51. Bandar Shahpur, located on the Khor Musa inlet, was built in the 1930s and 1940s, and became a terminal of the Trans-Iranian Railway. See A Brief Account of Ancient and Present Iranian Ports (Tehran: Ports and Shipping Organization, October 1971), 29–32. 52. Ramazani, Foreign Policy of Iran, 261–63. 53. Schofield, vol. 1 intro, xx. 54. R. M. Burrell, “Britain, Iran and the Persian Gulf: Some Aspects of the Situation in the 1920s and 1930s,” in The Arabian Peninsula: Society and Politics, ed. Derek Hopwood (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972), 161 and 185. 55. Edmonds, “Iraqi-Persian Frontier,” 151. In reality these were fairly minor. 56. Ibid., 151. 57. Ibid., 153; Sevian, “Evolution of the Boundary between Iraq and Iran,” p. 219; Ramazani, Foreign Policy of Iran, 263–65; Schofield, intro. to vol. 9, xvi–xix. 58. “Treaty of Nonaggression (Sa‘dabad Pact): Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey (8 July 1937),” Document 118, in The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, 2nd. ed., vol. 2, BritishFrench Supremacy, 1914–1945, ed. J. C. Hurewitz (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 509–10. For subsequent developments see Shaul Bakhash, “The Troubled Relationship: Iran and Iraq, 1930–1980,” in Potter and Sick, Iran, Iraq and the Legacy of War. 59. Ramazani, Foreign Policy of Iran, 272–73. 60. Ibid., 265–66.

5

A Kemalist Gambit A View of the Political Negotiations in the Determination of the Turkish-Iraqi Border David Cuthell

The situation on the ground was explosive. The British army was in Iraq advancing northward. The Turks were making threatening noises about crossing the border and advancing into the predominantly Kurdish region of Mosul and Kirkuk. The Americans were largely concerned with obtaining control over the regional oil production and the French were doing their best to thwart British designs. The Russians fumed, relegated to the sidelines, and the Kurds wondered what chances they might have to obtain some measure of selfdetermination. This was not, however, 2003 but 1923, and the negotiations to avoid war were taking place in Lausanne. At first blush, an examination of the historical circumstances surrounding the creation of the modern Turkish-Iraqi border might appear to offer an example of a missed opportunity on the part of the new Turkish Government to maintain control over a region of tremendous economic worth, not to mention strategic value. The British success in the post-World War I negotiations brings to mind earlier examples of Ottoman weakness at the negotiating table, as in the case of OttomanRussian negotiations leading to the Treaty of Ku¨c¸u¨k Kaynarca in 1774. There, the Ottoman government apparently was outmaneuvered by skillful Russian diplomats, allowing the Russians guardianship over Christians within the Ottoman Empire, the right to build an Orthodox church in Constantinople, as well as relinquishing control over the

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northern Black Sea, thereby leaving the door open for further Russian aggression. Roderic Davison in his essay “Russian Skill and Turkish Imbecility” discovered that, upon further review, the case for the Russian claims was far from compelling and that the interpretation of Russian “skill” in the negotiations depended on which copy of the Treaty one read.1 In a similar vein, this chapter proposes that the results of the Turkish-British negotiations, viewed from the Turkish perspective and in light of the internal Turkish economic and political calculations, produce a conclusion utterly different from one we might obtain from a Western European perspective. To that end, it is the position of this chapter that the ultimate Turkish acceptance of British demands for control over Mosul Province represented not only a realistic appraisal of Turkish economic and military abilities but also a gambit designed to obtain a vital quid pro quo, enabling the Turks to secure their southeastern flank and, at the same time, their most western one in Thrace, as well as enlisting a much needed counterweight to the Turks greatest threat, the Soviet Union. At this point it is useful to provide a brief historical review of the events leading up to the post–World War I period and the time of the negotiations under question. Beginning with the early Ottoman period and the reign of Selim I, we see a time of considerable expansion and change within the empire. Following his defeat of the Safavids in the period following the battle of Chaldiran in 1514, the newly acquired lands of Iraq were divided into three administrative districts. The first was Mosul, comprising the northernmost third of present-day Iraq, followed by Baghdad in the center and Basra in the south. The result of these conquests, as well as those of eastern Anatolia and Egypt, profoundly changed the ethnic and political center of the empire away from one equally European in land mass and Christian in population to one predominantly Asian and Muslim. Additionally, the Muslim population was no longer predominantly Turkic but now included a significant number of Arabs and Kurds. In order to further legitimate the role of the Ottoman Sultan, Selim engineered the assumption of the role of Caliph or God’s vice-regent on earth in 1517 as well as the right to appoint the Sharif of Mecca. The administration of the region took shape in large part during the

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reign of Sultan Suleyman I the Magnificent (known as Kanuni—“The Lawgiver”) when the regions of northern Iraq were divided between the provinces of Mosul and Shehrizor, both reporting to the governor of Diyarbakr, the traditional administrative center of Kurdistan.2 This system stayed largely in place through the provincial reforms of the 1870s when Mosul was established as its own province administered by its own governor. The city of Mosul served as the administrative center and was divided into three provincial sub-districts. These were Mosul, Kirkuk, and Sulaymaniya. According to the General Census of 1881–83 the total provincial population amounted to 176,111 souls. These were further broken down into Muslims (164,593), Catholics (7,082), and Jews (4,286). Also listed were 102 Protestants and 45 Armenians as well as 3 Greeks.3 During much of the nineteenth century, Mosul was a backwater district within the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman concerns were largely focused northward toward an expansionist and hostile Russia as well as on rising nationalist threats in the Balkans as well as European aided insurrections in Egypt. By the last decades of the nineteenth century the pace of economic activity in Mosul increased as a result of the discovery of oil and the advent of railroads within the region. German aid in the construction of the Baghdad Railway provided the most notable example. In addition, British interests in Mesopotamia picked up as a result of increased strategic concerns arising from Russian expansion into Central Asia and the consequent threat to India. Mosul, sitting astride the crossroads of the major overland routes to Basra, the Persian Gulf, and India took on added importance to the British because of the arrival of another competing power in Ottoman realms, Imperial Germany. During the period leading up to the First World War, Mosul Province records list the French, British, and Italians among its trading partners. It is interesting to note that late-nineteenth-century Ottoman records list only the British involved in the exportation of oil products.4 With the outbreak of war, Mosul took a back seat to the fighting elsewhere. However, the British and French were very much involved in the business of formulating what a postwar Mosul would look like. While the Sykes-Picot negotiations first placed the region under French control, this was later amended and the territory became part of the

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British mandate and the plans to install a postwar puppet monarchy.5 As British forces were the more active in the region so fell the spoils of war. At the time of the cessation of fighting, the Turks had withdrawn to a line that roughly corresponds to the border running from the border with Syria and Iraq today with the exception of the region on the Mediterranean today surrounding the Gulf of Iskenderun. Mosul itself was for the most part unoccupied by either the Turks or the British. It was only in the period following the cessation of hostilities that the British occupied the region up to the current borders. While contrary to the terms of the Armistice, the facts on the ground were to come to determine the future.6 For the Turks, the reaction was a combination of outrage and resignation. Ismet Ino¨nu¨, a Republican general who later became Prime Minister and the President was to somewhat laconically observe: At the time of the armistice the British had not entered Mosul. We informed our commanders of the terms but the British commanders behaved as if they had not been informed and, with a number of excuses, (the British) created a fait accompli.7 During the four years that followed the Armistice, Mosul would once again become a low priority for the Turks. The Allied failure to obtain ratification of the Treaty of Se`vres, followed by the Greek attacks and the War of Independence brought about a significantly changed landscape by the time of the Lausanne Conference in 1923. It was during this time that Turkish politics and actions transformed events and in turn took shape in the form we can see as far as today. Without going into great detail here on the subject of Turkish independence, a few key aspects to Republican policy need be noted. In a speech before the National Assembly on April 23, 1920, Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk) threw down the gauntlet regarding Mosul, declaring that the southern border of Turkey extended from Iskenderun (formerly Alexandretta) in the south due east, to include Mosul and Sulaymaniya.8 On March 16 of the following year, as the war with the Greeks was breaking out, the Ankara government concluded a Treaty of Friendship with the Soviet Union. In a move reminiscent of the

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nineteenth-century Ottoman Treaty of Unkiar Iskelesi, the Turks sought to neutralize the Russian, now Soviet, threat through formalization with the Soviets of the border in northeastern Anatolia, while at the same time gaining leverage to negotiate with Britain and France over a host of issues, including control over the Straits.9 In October, additional agreements were signed with the Soviet Republics of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Armenia, confirming the borders in the east.10 What followed was a period of reduced tensions with the Soviets, one that brought aid for the prosecution of the war against the Greeks while also serving as an effective means of isolating whatever opposition might come from the exiled Enver Pasha and his followers.11 The negotiation achieved its intended results, although not without some confusion. For their part the British certainly did take notice, alarmed at what they believed to be a combination of a “subservient attitude of the Russians” and the Kemalist “dream of an Islamic federation under Turkish domination.”12 Equally vital for Turkish political calculations were the victories over the Greeks in Sakariya River region in 1921. With the stalling and reversal of the Greek offensive came a changed attitude toward the Kemalist regime on the part of the French and the Italians. In particular the French saw this as an opportunity to hedge their bets with the new government as well as exacting revenge on the British over disagreements over postwar policies in the Rhine.13 With victory in 1922 came an even more abrupt policy shift by the French, who abandoned Cilicia, which they had occupied at the end of the First World War, as well as breaking with the British over measures to stop a Turkish advance on the Straits.14 This precipitated the Italian withdrawal from southern Anatolia as well as the refusal of the United States to undertake a League of Nations mandate for Armenia. Kemal and Ino¨nu¨ had achieved a stunning reversal of fortunes. The world was looking to the new regime while the English stood isolated, guarding the perimeter. With the British led Allied Powers’ invitation to an armistice meeting at Mudros in September came the crowning achievement for Kemal, the de facto and then the de jure recognition of the legitimacy of the Republican government. A condition of the armistice, signed on October 11, 1922, required the Greeks to withdraw behind the Maritza River in eastern Thrace.15 Perhaps the only British victory in this process was the exclu-

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sion of the Russians on any matters apart from the Straits in the peace talks scheduled to convene that November in Lausanne. At the conference, a wide array of topics, involving numerous parties, were discussed. In addition to the victorious Allied Powers, the Conference fielded delegations from Turkey, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, and Greece. Russia was given a restricted status and the United States opted for observer status. At the top of the Turkish agenda were a) the abolition of foreign capitulations, b) the delineation of the western border in Thrace, and c) an agreement for a population exchange involving the resettlement of Greeks and Turks to the appropriate sides of the new frontiers. Ironically, Mosul, still not at the top of the list, was to become the major sticking point. In fact, the Mosul question was to threaten the ratification of the Treaty and in the end had to be tabled in order to prevent a general collapse. This was the gambit that was to buy the Turks the strategic balance necessary to preserve their long term security. The deliberations regarding Mosul involved a direct series of meetings between British Foreign Secretary Lord George Nathaniel Curzon and Ismet Ino¨nu¨, who Kemal had specifically chosen to lead the negotiations. In the initial exchange between Curzon and Ino¨nu¨, both relied on arguments based on the premise that any border should best serve the aspirations of the majority of the local population. Both looked upon what they considered to be the “racial, political, strategic and historical” bases for their respective views. It should be noted that by “racial” the British meant ethnicity. As such, Curzon relied heavily on an argument calling for Mosul to be split from Turkey and attached to Iraq due to its heavily Kurdish nature. According to his estimates of the population of Mosul in 1921, the Kurdish “race” comprised 454,720 of the 785,648 members of the population. Arabs accounted for 185,763, and “Turks” accounted for 65,895 with Christians and Jews filling in the balance. To further reduce the Turkish claim to Mosul, Curzon asserted that the majority of Turks were quite distinct from their neighbors to the north as “the Turanian language they speak resembles Azerbaijani rather than the Turkish of Constantinople.”16 That such an argument might be used in support of the independence of Newcastle from London seemed not to bother Curzon. In addition to this, Curzon presented a series of historical, economic, and

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strategic arguments, as well as the results of an election among residents in Mosul in 1919, which indicated the desire to ally themselves with the two southern provinces. In the end, however, Curzon relied on a more blunt assertion. “In the first place it is both a novel and startling pretension that a Power that has been vanquished in war should dictate to the victors the manner in which they are to dispose of the territories which they have wrested from the former.”17 Ino¨nu¨’s response followed a pattern often adopted in his diplomatic debates incorporating equal parts of charm, reason, and studied disregard for the opposition’s assertions. For his part, Ino¨nu¨ presented a historical overview of the region, recalling the presence of Turkic rule for more than a millennium. Added to this was the widespread use of Turkic toponyms as well as the common language spoken by the Turkomans in Iraq and the Turks of Anatolia. To this end he diplomatically shot back at Curzon, “Par contre le dialecte employe´ pars les Turcs de Moussoul est meme celui qui se parle en Anatolie; la diffe´rence qui existe entre eux est moindre que celle qui existe entre le franc¸ais parle au nord et celui parle au sud de la France.”18 [On the contrary, the dialect used by the Turks of Mosul is the same as that spoken in Anatolia; the difference that exists between them is less than that between the French that is spoken in the north and that spoken in the south of France.] More to the point were Ino¨nu¨’s arguments arising from the National Pact adopted in Ankara in 1921. Drawing attention to the impossibility of a nation ignoring the future of its former subjects living in territories lost during wartime, Ino¨nu¨ advanced the Turkish claims: 1. to pursue an interest in the well-being in Turkish and Muslim peoples living in occupied territories in accordance with Wilsonian principles; 2. for restitution for territories seized and occupied by foreign powers that are comprised by a Turkish majority; 3. that occupied territories continue to appertain to Turkey until they be so renounced; and 4. that occupied territories seized after the armistice, such as Mosul, be returned19

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Curzon’s reply to this, apart from a series of secondary economic points, once again took the perspective from the facts on the ground: In any case, it may be worthwhile to state in clearest terms what the present claim of the Turkish delegation really means. It means that the Turkish Parliament of February 1920, or the Angora Assembly of December 1922, is to have the right to decide that the Mosul Vilayet (which is represented in neither body), with its little minority of Turkomans and its enormous majority of non-Turks, is to be taken away from the victors in the great war and returned to the vanquished.20 In essence an impasse had been reached. Neither side was willing to make sufficient concessions to keep the matter on the table. As they had on the question of Western Thrace, the British would not agree to allow for a plebiscite to be taken in Mosul in order to determine the outcome. At the same time neither party was willing to allow the Treaty negotiations to collapse over this single sticking point. Accordingly, the matter was left unresolved with an understanding that a bilateral, negotiated settlement would be arrived at within nine months or, in the event that no agreement could be reached, that the issue would be submitted to arbitration before the League of Nations.21 The clock however was not to start until the ratification of the Treaty, an occurrence that itself gave rise to the next stage of gamesmanship. In acceding to British desires for a Treaty of Peace, the Kemalists had brought British thinking around to one of a belief that the new regime represented one that could be bargained with. As Mango has noted, “A compromise on Mosul would satisfy Britain. It would then be easier to resist the economic demands of the French and the Italians.”22 Turkey had won several important victories at Lausanne. The hated regime of capitulations had been abolished. The western front in Thrace had been stabilized. Yet the British were still hostile. To add further leverage to the Turkish position, the Turkish National Assembly ratified an agreement with the American businessmen called the Chester Concession. Led by a retired U.S. admiral, Colby M. Chester, this group represented the interests of a number of American companies

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pursuing the American “open door” policy regarding global business. The concession was to give wide ranging investment and development rights to American companies to explore for oil as well as invest in railroads throughout the region. The British were, predictably, livid. Ambassador Sir Horace Rumbold fumed and Curzon labeled the idea as “meglomaniacal.”23 While the plan was to ultimately fail, the presence of American economic interests would remain. A consortium including the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey subsequently entered into negotiations with the British- and Dutch-controlled Turkish Petroleum Company, ultimately securing a 23.75 percent share of Iraqi production. The diplomatic offensive to win American support did bear fruit. Americans, ranging from business people to educators and religious officials, most notably from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,24 responded with testimonials of support for the Turkish regime, of which the separate Treaty of Lausanne signed between the two nations in August of 1923 is the best evidence. The problem of Britain and Mosul remained. In May of 1924, negotiations were reopened in Istanbul. This time the chief negotiators were not Curzon and Ino¨nu¨ but Sir Percy Cox, who was asked to serve as British plenipotentiary in the negotiations after his retirement as British high commissioner in Iraq (1923), and Fethy Bey (Okyar). To a great extent the arguments presented by both sides were a repeat of what had been put forth at Lausanne. The British did, however, find and raise a new issue, involving the persecution of “Chaldeans” or Assyrian Christians. To this were added charges of massacre conducted by Turkish forces in the region. The Turks for their part pointed out the impropriety of the British mandate in an area they had linked with French interests during the Sykes-Picot negotiations. The response given by Cox was as informative as it was candid: It is entirely true that during the first years of the war, Great Britain and France envisaged the cession of the vilayets of Basra and Baghdad to Great Britain. It is important, however, to recall that this proposition was mediated between the two Allied Powers at a time when they expected a third Allied Power, Russia would be their neighbor on the north. . . . In any case, there has never been any question of the surrender of the vilayet of Mosul to Turkey.25

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Again the negotiations went nowhere. Accordingly, the matter was sent to the League of Nations for adjudication. In October of 1924, a decision was made in Brussels to send an expedition to the region to determine the border between Turkey and the British mandate in Brussels.26 This “Brussels Line” was to become the border we have today. The final disposition of the matter did not occur at this time, however. Instead both parties bided their time pending a final report from the League. Never ones to waste an opportunity, Kemal and Ino¨nu¨ initiated and completed a series of additional treaties of friendship during the period, further cementing relationships with the Russians, French, and, somewhat later, the Italians.27 At the same time, the Turkish regime engaged in a process of preparing the public for the inevitable loss of Mosul. This “spin control” exercised through the Turkish press was closely monitored by the British.28 When the decision was handed down by the League on December 16, 1925, some level of agitation was in evidence and the Russians pledged themselves in support of the government.29 It was, however, a short-lived affair with Kemal reining in those who would take a more threatening stance. Instead, the situation calmed sufficiently that Kemal was able to conclude a settlement with Britain in early June of 1926. In exchange for a ten percent royalty on Iraqi oil revenues, the Turkish government recognized the British mandate. The fact that Turkey accepted a lump sum payment of 500,000 pounds sterling underscores the fiscal plight of the government at the time.30 By the week following the agreement on Mosul, the British survey of the Turkish press noted that the situation had obtained a remarkable level of calm acceptance. Beyond this, there appeared to be a remarkable change in the British view as well. In a dispatch to Sir Austen Chamberlain in London, the British Ambassador Lindsey observed, “It must be remembered that the present rulers of Turkey inherited from the old regime a number of fatal mistakes in policy which could only be cleared up by heavy sacrifices. The main task of the present Government was to obtain security.”31 The timing of this recognition represented a master stroke for Turkish foreign policy. For the ensuing years, an increasingly friendly relationship with Britain, France, and to a lesser extent the United States was to provide Turkey with a perfect counterbalance to an increasingly

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menacing and aggressive Soviet Union. By 1930 the Turkish government had signed a Treaty of Friendship with Britain, placing the young state on a theoretically friendly relationship status with all the major powers. With Britain’s aid and friendship came the reduction of threats from Greece in western Thrace. The southern frontiers were the preserve of and problem for the French and British mandates. To the east and the north were Iran and the Soviet Union, also states with friendship pacts. Bulgaria alone seems to have been lost in the shuffle. Another unnoticed but equally important event that influencing Nationalist calculations was the Sheikh Sait rebellion. This short but sharp insurrection broke out in the Diyarbakr region in April of 1925 and required several months and 25,000 Turkish troops to suppress.32 The implications of this revolt to the government were obvious. First, the region represented a security problem. This, of course, was well known to the Turks, as it had been so long before the period of Ottoman rule. Second, any attempt to exercise a greater level of control in the Mosul district would only extend military supply lines through already hostile territory. Pacifying the region would present a greater drain on the already extended Turkish resources. While a divided Kurdistan troubled many in the regime, most notably Ino¨nu¨,33 the loss of Mosul would create a new frontier far more suitable geographically for the Turks. In giving up the province, the Turks lost a major transportation hub as well as the oil fields of Kirkuk. At the same time they gave up a largely Kurdish population, an attractive option to the nationalists who were engaged in the program of Turkification during this post-Lausanne era of population exchanges. Indeed, if one looks at late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century history, it becomes clear that the process of drawing borders and exchanging populations to reify those borders was one aspect, if not the dominant aspect, of government policy. With the advent of the Young Turks and then the Republicans under Kemal, the process took on an ever more nationalist bent.

Summary and Conclusion The derivation of the modern Turkish-Iraqi border is representative of a number of processes in force in the Middle East in the period

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following World War I. First, there was the aggressive policy of the British to obtain control over the region in northern Iraq in an effort to secure the overland routes to India as well as the oil potential of Mosul Province. Second, the Turkish response to the blatantly illegal incursion into Mosul was dictated by a combination of local military weakness and the low priority the Turks assigned to the region. For the founding fathers of the new regime in Ankara, job one was to simply survive. Once the Greeks had been defeated in 1922, the immediate existence of the regime was no longer in question. At this point, however, territorial integrity was still very much in the forefront of their thinking. Mosul, with its largely Kurdish population, was an extremely low priority. Instead, Thrace, the northeast frontier with the Soviet Union, and the occupied areas of Anatolia demanded Atatu¨rk and his group’s full attention. It was there that a Turkish majority, or near majority, was to be found. To obtain their goals, the Turks embarked on a series of diplomatic negotiations. By splitting the opposition and arranging both treaties of peace and friendship, the new Turkish Republic produced an almost unparalleled string of victories. What the Ottomans had lost on the battlefield was in large part won back at the negotiating table. France, Italy, and Russia were defused as hostile opponents, leaving Britain as the only major power blocking Turkey. At the same time the Soviet Union was recovering from the chaos of the 1917 Revolution, raising the specter of the return of the once and future enemy. For the Turks and the British only Mosul remained in terms of unresolved issues. As the last real source of friction, the Turks were forced to evaluate the importance of the territory. In reality, the calculation was simple. Mosul would be given to the British in return for a resumption of Britain’s nineteenth-century role of friend and strategic ally to the Turks. In return for a province of great strategic importance to Britain, the Turks would acquire a counterweight to the Soviet threat as well as a restraining force to further Greek mischief along the western borders. For the Turks, the loss of Mosul Province was no great problem but more of a public relations issue. As a bargaining chip it had value. As an administrative region it was a potential headache. By 1925, relations with Ankara had dwindled to next to nothing. As Qassim al-Jumaily has noted, early Kemalist activities attracted the attention and admiration of Iraqi nationalists and supporters of an Ottoman successor state.

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By the mid-1920s however, this admiration had all but evaporated largely as a consequence of Kemal’s abolition of the Sultanate and Caliphate, and pursuit of Turkification.34 In reality, the Iraqis should have known better. Atatu¨rk and his policies only represented a clearer distillation of a process that had been in effect in Turkey for almost a century. Turkish nationalism was an inevitable byproduct of the nationalist forces spreading throughout Eastern Europe in the late nineteenth century. For the Turks, the Iraqi provinces in the postwar period truly were the other side of the mountain, a world they had turned their backs on in order to tend their own garden.

Endnotes 1. Roderic Davison, “Russian Skill and Turkish Imbecility” in Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History: 1724–1923: The Impact of the West (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). In this reexamination of the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Ku¨c¸u¨k Kaynarca, Davison demonstrates that despite the commonly held view that the Ottomans negotiated incompetently, the reality is that subsequent Russian claims ran counter to the Treaty and that Ottoman “imbecility” was found in their ill planned entry into war with Russia over Poland. 2. Sinan Marifog˘lu, Osmanlı Do¨neminde Kuzey Irak 1831–1914 (Istanbul: Eren Yayıncilik, 1998), 34–36. 3. Kemal Karpat, Ottoman Population 1830–1914: Demographic and Social Characteristics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 144–45. 4. Marifog˘lu, 219–24. 5. In the initial secret agreements, the British sought to place the French in Mosul in order for them to act as a buffer between a British Mesopotamia and a Russian controlled Armenia. This was amended in secret negotiations between Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau in February of 1919. See Harry N. Howard, The Partition of Turkey: A Diplomatic History 1913–1923 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1931). 6. Andrew Mango, Atatu¨rk: A Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2000). 7. Ismet Ino¨nu¨, Hatırlar (Istanbul, 1967), 2: 90 (my translation). 8. Mesut Aydin, Tu¨rkiye ve Irak Hududu Meselesi (Ankara: ASAM 2001), 21.

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9. Howard, 263. 10. Mango, 327. 11. Enver, one of the triumvirate of Ottoman Army officers who led the Empire into World War I, escaped to the Soviet Union after the war. There, he would spend the rest of his life in a series of uneasy relationships with both the Kemalist regime and the Soviet authorities. He was to die in Soviet Turkestan in August of that year leading a revolt against his former Soviet allies. 12. Rumbold to Curzon. 11/22/1921 in Robin Bidwell, ed., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Turkey, Iran and the Middle East 1918–1939 Part II Series B (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984–1992), vol. 3, docs. 5, 7, pp. 6–7. This series will be henceforth be cited as British Documents. 13. Howard, 262. 14. Ibid., 268. 15. Ibid., 273. 16. Curzon to Ismet, p. 215 in British Documents, vol. 3, doc. 151, pp. 214– 22. 17. Ibid., 219. 18. Ismet to Curzon, Ibid., doc. 53, p. 222. 19. Ibid., 225. 20. Ibid., Curzon to Ismet, doc. 155, p. 230. 21. Howard, 301. 22. Mango, 378. 23. Ibid., 380. The actual plan, which had first been broached in 1909, called for an enormous infrastructural investment in eastern Turkey, encompassing more than 2,800 miles of railroad as well as railroads leading to the Black Sea and Ankara. In return for this investment, the companies involved were to hold the rights for not only oil but metals and other mineral production as well. In the end, the Standard Oil consortium was to receive the stake in the Turkish Petroleum Company that had been held by German interests prior to the war. For more on this subject see, Howard, 339. 24. See General Committee of American Institutions and Associations in Favor of the Ratification of the Treaty with Turkey (New York, 1926). 25. Howard, 337. 26. See League of Nations Report to the Council of Nations by General F. Laidoner, Situation in the Locality of the Provisional Line of the Frontier between Turkey and Irak fixed at Brussels on October 29, 1924. Parliamentary Papers 1924–25, vol. xxxi Cmd. No. 2557.

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31. 32. 33.

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Howard, 338. British Documents, Series B, vol. 5, docs. 106–8, pp. 101–2. Howard, 338. This buyout of the Turkish oil revenues was independent of the debt assumed by the Turkish Republic that had been owed prior to World War I by the Ottoman government. This debt was dealt with at the time of the Lausanne Treaty through a process involving the assignation of a portion of that debt both to Turkey and to the other successor states to the Empire. For a more detailed discussion see Howard Ch. IX. British Documents, Part 2, Series B, vol. 5 doc. 114, pp. 107–8. Mango, 425. Ino¨nu¨ had earlier maintained that a divided Kurdish population would only serve the cause of rebellion in the divided territories. That Ino¨nu¨ was reportedly part Kurdish only serves to underscore the transformation in outlook from ethnicity to nationalism as the basis of identity in the Republic. Qassam Kh. Al-Jumaily, Irak ve Kemalizm Hareketi: 1919–1923 (Ankara: Ataturk Ara, stirma Merkezi, 1999).

6

Kurds and the Formation of the State of Iraq 1917–1932 M. R. Izady

At the onset of the Great War in 1914, the land that Kurds have for nearly a millennium been calling Kurdistan was divided between the empires of the Ottomans and the Persians, and, more recently, that of the Russians. By 1914, Kurds had been fighting the local empires for their independence or autonomy for nearly 65 consecutive years. By 1918 and the conclusion of the War, the prospect of Kurdish independence seemed likely—even taken for granted. The failure of the Kurds to achieve their goal for independence and the forced inclusion of their mountainous homeland within the newly created states of Iraq, Syria, and Turkey (Iranian Kurds remained where they were before: in Iran/Persia) was to prove disastrous in the subsequent decades not only for the Kurds, but also for all states that willingly or unwillingly came to include portions of the Kurdish homeland. The quashing of the Kurds’ aspiration for regaining their independence, which had ended only in 1848 with the absorption of independent Kurdish principalities by the Ottomans, was to emerge as a perennial stumbling block to the peace, stability, and in fact prosperity of the states which incorporate portions of the Kurds’ ancient homeland. There has not been a single decade in which the Kurds have not staged a bloody and destructive uprising against the local states. Iraq has been just one of many of such states with a perennial Kurdish problem which has led to such atrocities as mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and gassing of the

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civilian Kurds in their cities by various Iraqi governments, from the Mandate period to the present.

Kurds at the Formation of Iraq As late as 1923, the inclusion of a large Kurdish population and its homeland into the formative state of Iraq by the British was more an accident than a foregone conclusion. The defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the end of the Great War presented the Allied Powers with the opportunity to cut her old imperial dominions and paste new “nationstates” together in the western half of the Middle East—all to suit their own interests alone. The “secret” Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 between Britain and France (to ultimately involve Italy and Russia as well), intended a division of the Asiatic sectors of the Ottoman Empire into various forms of European control, ranging from direct rule to “spheres of influence” and “economic zones.” No attention whatsoever was given in this agreement to the ethnic, religious, or cultural facts on the ground. The division of the land by Sykes-Picot looked comical indeed. An interweaving mesh of borders was to run from the western boundaries of Persia to the Mediterranean Sea to allow for Britain and France to put together bits and pieces of land that they thought they might need for strategic and economic reasons into single units ready for their possession. (Map 1) For a time after 1917, it even seemed this bonanza might well extend into the former Russian imperial territories in the Caucasus and Central Asia after the implosion of that empire into the communist revolution and chaos. However, by 1921 the newborn Soviet Russia had reasserted her old imperial jurisdiction over those areas. Naturally, the question of who was going to get what piece was the top priority for the European victors. And this did not include just the big Entente Powers of the time: Britain, France and Italy (and ultimately, Russia). Small countries like Greece, the newly born (but soon to be vanquished) Armenia and Georgia also had grandiose designs on land now that an apparent free-for-all had been declared on Ottoman possession. The only consternation facing these all was one thrown in by Woodrow Wilson. Wilson had been hammering the European empires with his ideal of “self-determination.” The European powers had

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not won the war with 10 million dead and over 20 million wounded and maimed to let the vanquished and the stateless to determine their own fates. But the desires of the American president could not be ignored, particularly because the Entente’s “victory” in November 1918 had been solely made possible by American economic, industrial, and military power.1 Thus a compromise emerged which joined this American de-

M a p 6.1 Sykes-Picot Agreement

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mand to another one of the Fourteen Points bulldozed into the Paris Peace Conference in 1919: the idea of creating a League of Nations. The Entente Powers (shorn of Russia), therefore, would take the Ottoman lands. However, they would not have the deed to their pieces, but instead just a lease that would entail a League-sanctioned “mandate” over an area but for the period of their own choosing. Thus were created the modern boundaries of nearly all Middle East states west of Persia/ Iran. Prior to the direct involvement by the United States in the Great War, the European Entente Powers had other ideas about their booty when (and if ) they win over the Central Powers. By 1915, the French, the Italians, and the British were already drawing boundaries on the map of the Middle East. The first of these projected divisions was the famed Sykes-Picot agreement referred to above. The two diplomats representing Britain and France respectively, came up with a plan to completely annihilate the Ottoman Empire (the fate that was to befall the Habsburg Empire as well), extending even into the Turkish-inhabited territories of Anatolia. No attention was to be given to the ethnic facts on the ground, but only to their own strategic and economic needs. But, the Sykes-Picot agreement never had the chance of coming into reality. With the United States staying out of the war, it would have been the British, French, and Italian dominions that would have been apportioned by the victors—Germany, Austria and the Ottomans—not the other way around. And with the United States entering the war, its demands and priorities took on major importance in all aspects of the postwar settlements. This left the European Entente Powers with the necessity of adjusting the once pie-in-the-sky SykesPicot agreement to the demands of Wilson. Attention, therefore, was to be given to some degree to the ethnic facts on the ground. SykesPicot, nonetheless, emerged as the ground plan on which to build any future compromises.

Kurds at the Paris Peace Conference At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, a delegation of the Kurdish dignitaries appeared among all those stateless people aspiring to receive

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the largesse of the victors at the Conference. The Kurdish delegation presented the Conference with a map and a list of claims that, in view of what others were asking, were quite modest. In fact, they had not included all Kurdish-majority areas inside their proposed independent and unified Kurdistan. This was due not so much to their ignorance of the ethnic facts as to their political apprehension vis-a`-vis the neighboring states and ethnic groups.2 Their claims and those of their ethnic neighbors, however, would to some degree impact the subsequent awards of land to the Kurds, Armenians, and Georgians by the Peace Conference and the subsequent Treaty of Se`vres. This was due not to the largesse of the European powers, but the influence and demands of the president of the United States at the Paris Peace Conference, embodied in his Fourteen Points.

Treaty of Se`vres Following the conclusion of the Paris Peace Conference, various treaties were imposed upon the defeated empires of Germany, AustriaHungary, and the Ottomans. The one of concern here was the Treaty of Se´vres. Woodrow Wilson had vigorously promoted the idea of “selfdetermination” for all nationalities living within the boundaries of the defunct empires of the Germans, Austrians, Ottomans, and Russians. As such, he categorically and repeatedly demanded independent states for the “Arabs, Armenians, and the Kurds.” The Treaty of Se`vres (August 10, 1920), which dismantled the defeated Ottoman Empire, clearly recognized this. Section III, Articles 62–64, provided for the creation of a Kurdish state on the Kurdish territories. Article 64 reads as follows: If within one year from the coming into force of the present Treaty the Kurdish peoples within the areas defined in Article 62 [comprising western Kurdistan] shall address themselves to the Council of the League of Nations in such a manner as to show that a majority of the population of these areas desires independence from Turkey, and if the Council then considers that these peoples are capable of such independence and recommends that it should

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be granted to them, Turkey hereby agrees to execute such a recommendation, and to renounce all rights and title over these areas. The detailed provisions for such renunciation will form the subject of a separate agreement between the principal Allied Powers and Turkey. If and when such renunciation takes place, no objection will be raised by the principal Allied Powers to the voluntary adhesion to such an independent Kurdish State of the Kurds inhabiting that part of Kurdistan which has hitherto been included in the Mosul Vilayet [comprising largely Iraqi Kurdistan]. This treaty was signed by the moribund Ottoman Sultanate in Istanbul, but the successor to the Ottomans, the newly founded Turkish Republic under Mustafa Kemal Pasha (later named Atatu¨rk, i.e., “Father Turk”) did not consider itself bound to observe it. But he could observe other trends in the offing that were rendering Se`vres obsolete. The primary factor in the annulment of the Treaty of Se`vres was the conclusion of the term of presidency of Woodrow Wilson, in which he spent the last year in bed, comatose. The U.S. Senate, meanwhile, neither ratified the adhesion of the United States to the League of Nations, nor to any of these peace treaties, particularly Se`vres, which would have involved United States in the mandate systems in the Middle East. With the effective withdrawal of the United States from the political scene of the Old World in 1921, the European allied powers were left to do as they wished and take what they could. And they did. The terms of the Treaty of Se`vres, therefore, were never enacted. Having absorbed the richest non-Turkish parts of the Ottoman lands, the British and the French tried to bring in the United States, urging it to accept mandates over Constantinople, Armenia, and Kurdistan, the areas that originally were to go to Russia; but the United States eventually refused. By 1921, however, there were few if any Armenians left in Anatolian Armenia, following their massacre and massive exodus. Except for Soviet Armenia, historic Armenia had become almost exclusively populated by the surviving Kurds, and such an “Armenian” state would inevitably have had a vast Kurdish ethnic majority (Map 2).

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The U.S. Congress rejected the mandate because it would unnecessarily involve the now isolationist United States in the quagmire of world colonial infighting; both Armenia and Kurdistan were remote and hardly accessible by sea; and it would have been unprofitable, since Britain had decided to annex and keep central Kurdistan and its petroleum wealth.3 The refusal of the United States to sponsor an independent Kurdistan prompted Britain, the only credible power left on the scene, to proceed with annexing as much of Kurdistan as she found attractive. She took only the ex-Ottoman vilayet (province) of Mosul (central or Iraqi Kurdistan), and with it the petroleum-bearing Kurdish

M a p 6.2 Provisions of the Treaty of Se`vres

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district of Kirkuk.4 The region was attached to the Arab-dominated British mandate of Iraq, with the League of Nations provision that the national and ethnic aspirations of the Kurdish people be respected by Baghdad.

Grand Alliance and the Lausanne Treaty On June 24, 1923, a new treaty was signed in Lausanne, Switzerland, that ceded all of Anatolia, including northern and western Kurdistan, to the newly established Republic of Turkey. Iraq received all the Kurdish land to the crest of the Hakkari Heights. This was known at the time as the “Brussels Line,” a temporary border established by the League of Nations between the British Mandate of Iraq and the emerging power of the Republic of Turkey to the north (Map 3). An independent Kurdistan in Anatolia would almost certainly have destabilized the British hold on central Kurdistan and its vital oil deposits. Britain therefore willingly allowed the rest of ex-Ottoman Kurdistan to be occupied by the young Turkish Republic. As a face-saving measure, for the European powers to show that they had not completely abandoned Wilson’s idealist principle of self-determination for ethnic nationalities, certain guarantees of minority rights were included in Articles 37–44 of the Treaty. None of the ethnic minorities who were summarily handed over to Turkey were mentioned by name in the document. While Article 38 guaranteed freedom of religion and religious practices for all, and additionally freedom of movement and emigration for non-Muslims, Article 39 guaranteed language rights for all ethnic groups. It reads No restrictions shall be imposed on the free use by any Turkish national of any language in private intercourse, in commerce, religion, in the press, or in publications of any kind or at public meetings. Notwithstanding the existence of the official language, adequate facilities shall be given to Turkish nationals of nonTurkish speech for the oral use of their own language before the Courts.

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M a p 6.3 Treaty of Lausanne

To prevent any future state laws in Turkey to infringe upon these guarantees, Article 37 states that Turkey undertakes that the stipulations contained in Articles 38 to 44 shall be recognized as fundamental laws, and that no law, no regulations, nor official action shall conflict or interfere with these stipulations, nor shall any law, regulation, nor officials action prevail over them.

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As an international mechanism of checks and balances on the enforcement of these and other provisions of the Treaty, Article 44 added that Turkey agrees that any Member of the Council of the League of Nations shall have the right to bring to the attention of the Council any infraction or danger of infraction of any of these obligations, and that the Council may thereupon take such action and give such directions as it may deem proper and effective in the circumstances. However, realizing early the inclination of the Allied powers not to press for observation of Articles 38 and 39, a Turkish official decree on March 3, 1924, less than a year after the signing of the Treaty, banned all Kurdish schools, organizations, and publications, along with their religious fraternities and seminaries. A year later, in February 1925, the Anatolian Kurds staged the first of a series of bloody and calamitous general uprisings against the infant Turkish Republic.

Mosul Province and the Mandate of Iraq The young Iraq was not out of the woods yet. Its boundaries were still open to compromise, particularly if the forces demanding change could convince the British that holding onto such disputed territories was not worth the trouble. The Kurds did their best to do just that, while others, including Turkey and Persia (Iran), simply chose to force the issue with military encroachments and skirmishes on the Iraqi territories.5 The first to choose this course was a forerunner of the modern Barzani leadership, namely Sheikh Ahmed Barzani. He was soon to be joined in this endeavor by a far more energetic and charismatic leader, Sheikh Mahmoud Barzanji—the man who styled himself as the “King of Kurdistan.” By the end of 1922, the British seem to have decided to allow the emergence of a small Kurdish state from their mandate of Iraq, comprising the town of Sulaymaniya and its dependencies on the Persian/

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Iranian borders. This “Kurdistan” would have not included oil-rich Kirkuk, nor would it have had a common border with Turkey and its sizable Kurdish inhabited areas. It would have been fully dependent on Britain, and most importantly, it would have contained the unsinkable Sheikh Mahmoud and his troublesome ilk. A map by Colonel Lawrence Martin of the British Mandate forces in Iraq contains this idea, with the borders of this Kurdistan being designated as “International boundaries” with the qualifier, “undetermined” (Map 4). But this was no gesture of generosity on the part of the British. Instead, it has a desperate response to the Kurdish uprising in that area, as we shall see presently.

Kurds in the Mandate Period In Iraq, almost from the moment of its formation as a British mandate, the British had to deal with Kurdish unrest in the north. However, the Kurds there were never a match for the technologically and numerically superior British imperial troops and their extensive use of the war-hardened British Royal Air Force (RAF) which liberally and frequently bombed Kurdish villagers in northern Iraq. In northern Iraq a Kurdish kingdom was announced in 1922 by Sheikh Mahmoud. Although he had no connection with the old Kurdish princely houses, Mahmoud sprang from an illustrious Qadiri Sufi religious house, that of Barzanja. He thus enjoyed supreme religious status when he sought political station as well. His power base was in the Sorani-speaking, less tribal and more urbane, southern portion of Iraqi Kurdistan (where he was a precursor of Jalal Talabani and his political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan). Mahmoud was originally chosen by the British authorities to subdue and supervise the Kurds for them in their newly acquired mandate of Iraq. He did subdue and supervise the local Kurds, but not for the British authorities. He was quickly arrested and sent to exile in India, only to be brought back a year later by the British, who hoped to co-opt him. Instead, in 1922 Mahmoud, under the banner of the “Free Kurdistan Movement,” declared the independence of Kurdistan, with himself as its king.

M a p 6.4 Mandates in Arabia

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Throughout his twelve-year struggle (1920–December 1931), Mahmoud had to fight as much against Kurdish tribal chiefs as against the British forces, and could claim real authority only in his home district of Sulaymania. He was a representative of the old society, and aroused considerable animosity among the modernist Kurdish intellectuals, who blamed the Kurdish predicament on just those values that Mahmoud and traditionalists like him stood for and promoted. The local tribal chieftains did not see much difference between giving up their semi-independence to Mahmoud or to London, Baghdad, and Ankara. Mahmoud’s strong and specific religious background could not have helped his cause among those Kurds who were not Sunni Muslim of the Qadiri Sufi order. Yet despite all these handicaps, “in Southern Kurdistan,” reported Sir Arnold Wilson, the British Political Officer in Baghdad, “four out of five people support Sheikh Mahmoud’s plans for independent Kurdistan.”6 In 1926, the League of Nations Commission, citing the cruel treatment of both the Assyrian Christians and the Kurds in the contested territories at the hands of the Turks, awarded Mosul Province to Iraq and its British government. The League required Iraq to allow cultural and social autonomy in the Kurdish regions. Naively hoping to receive central Kurdistan as his independent kingdom from the League of Nations, Mahmoud moved his headquarters across the border into Iran to begin anew. There he staged a revolt in the town of Marivan in eastern Kurdistan. Beaten back by the Persian forces, he moved once again to Sulaymaniya, where he was put down one more time by the British in the spring of 1930. As early as 1927, the Kurmanji-speaking7 northern section of Iraqi Kurdistan was the scene of another, rather peculiar uprising led by the charismatic religious leader of the Barzani clan, Sheikh Ahmed, the elder brother of the well-known Kurdish political leader, General Mustafa Barzani, and a leader of the influential Naqshbandi Sufi order. Ahmed took on the British, Turks, and Arabs, as well as fellow Kurds (the rival Baradost clan). As if that were not enough, Ahmed also challenged traditional Islam by instituting a new religion, which was to bring together Christianity, Judaism, and Islam in one. Possibly hoping to

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unite the religiously fragmented Kurds, he also included elements of Yazdanism by declaring himself the new avatar of the Divine Spirit.8 Ahmed’s forces were put down by British and Iraqi troops after several years of fighting. The British and Iraqis were supported by the Royal Air Force bombers, whose appearance alone stunned the Kurdish villagers more than the destruction their bombs brought to their lives and property. Defeated, Sheikh Ahmed escaped to Turkey, but later was arrested and sent into exile in southern Iraq. His legacy within the Barzani clan was passed on to his brother Mustafa, who raised the specter of Kurdish home rule (as early as 1940, but mainly in the course of 1960s), which continues to this day. A harsh result of Mahmoud’s and Ahmed’s fierce and long struggle against the British in central Kurdistan, however inadvertent, was that it weakened British resolve to grant local Kurdish autonomy, as expressed in the League of Nations’ articles of incorporation of central Kurdistan into the state of Iraq. The new Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930, which provided for the independence of Iraq from the British by 1932, did not include any specific rights of autonomy, or in fact of any other kind, for the Kurds. Protesting the terms of the treaty of Iraqi independence, the seemingly unsinkable Mahmoud rose one last time in 1931. Having finally scaled down his expectations following a dozen years of fruitless struggle, Mahmoud this time asked for only an autonomous Kurdistan. The British refused, and it took them a full year to achieve the final downfall of the war-seasoned Mahmoud and his forces. By December 1931, Mahmoud had been broken for good. But in the end, after the final defeat of Mahmoud, British politicians included an eleventh-hour amendment to the Iraqi independence treaty of 1932, to provide for the teaching of Kurdish in the schools and for election of local Kurdish officials in Iraqi Kurdistan. Perhaps Mahmoud’s tenacity in the face of all odds finally gained admiration and sympathy from his European adversary.

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Endnotes 1. After the Communist revolution of November 5, 1917 and the withdrawal of Russia from the war, the British and the French informed Washington that unless United States entered into the war on their side, they would have no recourse but seek peace within a year on German and Austrian terms. 2. European ethnic maps of the northern Middle East and including Kurdistan had taken on an impressive accuracy by the turn of the twentieth century. A large, multicolor sheet map by the British Royal Geographic Society, published in 1906, showed Kurdish majority areas with such accuracy that even today—nearly a century later—it remains virtually peerless. This map became one of the main working maps at the Paris Peace Conference for that region and was used by the Kurdish delegation as well. 3. Theodore Nash, “The Effect of International Oil Interests upon the Fate of Autonomous Kurdish Territory: A Perspective on the Conference at Se`vres, August 10, 1920,” International Problems 15, 1–2 (1976). 4. William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 5. From 1921–1923, and after the League of Nations’ establishment of the “Brussels Line” to serve as borders between Iraq and Turkey, the Turkish forces would frequently cross the northern boundaries designated by Britain for Iraq and push as far south as the bend of the Greater Zab River. In fact, the Turkish maps and atlases of the period showed the area as a part of the Turkish territory up until the end of 1925. The Iranians, on the other hand, took over the Khusrawi, Sumar, and Dehloran regions of east-central sectors of Iraq: areas that were ultimately ceded to Iran. 6. Arnold Wilson, Mesopotamia, 1917–1920: A Clash of Loyalties (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), p. 137. 7. Kurmanji is one of the four main dialects of Kurdish; the others being Sorani, Gurani and Dimili/Zazaki. 8. Yazdanism was the pre-Islamic, native religion of most Kurds. It survives today mainly in its denominations of Alevism, Yezidism, and Yarisanism/ Ahl-i Haqq.

7

The Oil Resources of Iraq: Their Role in the Policies of the Great Powers George E. Gruen

With the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War on the side of Germany, the long-standing British policy of attempting to maintain the territorial integrity of the “Sick Man of Europe” was transformed into a struggle with its allies over the division of the spoils of war. A major part of this struggle centered on the region known in ancient times as Mesopotamia and today is called Iraq. Iraq is located in a strategically important part of the Middle East and the Persian/Arabian Gulf. For the British an added factor was Iraq’s proximity to the trade routes to India. There has been much debate over the extent to which the policies of Britain and the other Great Powers were influenced by visions of vast untapped oil resources in the territory that has become modern Iraq. Iraq’s proven oil reserves are now estimated at 112 billion barrels, making Iraq the second most petroleum rich country in the world, exceeded only by Saudi Arabia. Oil seepages visible on the ground and spontaneous fires in Mesopotamia were already known in Biblical times. Some have speculated that this naturally occurring combustion was the “burning fiery furnace” into which Nimrod cast Abraham. But significant commercial exploitation of petroleum did not take place in the United States until 1865 and the era of industrialization that quickened with the end of the Civil

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War. Although there were a variety of products refined from crude oil, the most important was kerosene for lighting oil lamps. Indeed, in the early years of the twentieth century, the Standard Oil Company was exporting American kerosene to the Middle East.1

Early Contenders for Ottoman Rail and Oil Concessions By the start of the twentieth century, however, the use of petroleum products—mainly gasoline and diesel fuel—for transportation was beginning to command worldwide attention. As for the Ottoman Empire, there were already rival foreign corporations seeking extensive railroad and mineral concessions. Notable among these was the German concession to build a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad. This was part of the recently unified Germany’s “Drang nach Osten,” a policy of expansion into the Middle East. British, Belgian, and Dutch interests were also vying for concessions from the Sublime Porte. American companies were also eager to obtain concessions from the Ottoman authorities. Bruce Glasgow represented the Anglo-American firm of J. G. White and Company, which first applied for a railway concession in July 1909. However, the Glasgow scheme was soon out of the running because better terms were offered to the Ottomans by Admiral Colby M. Chester, who first applied to Sultan Abdul Hamid in March 1908 for a concession to build a railway from Aleppo to Alexandretta. In August 1909 he renewed his application to the new Turkish Government, but this time for a far more extensive railway concession. It was to run eastward from Sivas, via Harput, Arghana, Diyarbakr, Mosul, and Kirkuk, to Sulaymaniya, with branch lines to the Black Sea port of Samsun, to Yumurtalik on the Mediterranean (via Aleppo), and to Lake Van (via Bitlis). What was most significant in the context of the subsequent vast oil discoveries around Kirkuk and Mosul was that besides permitting the construction of railway lines, “the concessions were to provide for the concessionary company to exploit all minerals, including oil, within a twenty-kilometer strip on each side of the line.”2

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The British Seek a Preeminent Position in Mesopotamia Until the summer of 1911, Winston Churchill, then British Home Secretary, had favored a policy of giving budgetary priority to domestic social programs rather than purchasing extra battleships to keep ahead in the emerging Anglo-German naval race. However, after Kaiser Wilhelm had sent a German naval vessel to Agadir, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, to check French influence in Africa and carve out a position for Germany, Churchill became convinced of Germany’s belligerent intentions. Although the immediate crisis was resolved by the end of July, when the German warship withdrew, Churchill now concluded that war with Germany was virtually inevitable.3 When Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty immediately after the Agadir crisis, he vowed to meet the German challenge on the high seas. He decided to convert the British Navy from coal to oil, citing the obvious strategic benefits of greater speed and more efficient use of manpower. The decision was controversial at the time, with some opponents calling it pure folly to give up reliance on “safe, secure Welsh coal,” and instead make the British navy dependent on distant and insecure supplies from Persia, as Iran was then known. However, Churchill was firmly convinced that Britain would have to base its “naval supremacy on oil,” and committed all his driving energy and enthusiasm to achieve that objective. History has certainly proven him right.4 The decision to base the navy on oil meant that the search for an adequate and reliable supply was no longer simply an interest of commercial entrepreneurs, but became a vital objective of the British government. A variety of groups were seeking oil concessions not only in Persia but in the neighboring Ottoman Empire as well, which included the area of Arabia that was to become modern Iraq. The German group was led by Deutsche Bank. The British championed a rival group sponsored by William Knox D’Arcy, which eventually merged into the AngloPersian Oil Company (APOC). In 1912 a new major player, the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC), entered the fray. Its shareholders were the Deutsche Bank (25 percent), Royal Dutch/Shell (25 percent) with a controlling 50 percent held by the Turkish National Bank. Despite its

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name, this was in fact not a Ottoman state-owned bank but a Britishbacked and controlled venture. The deal had been put together by Calouste Gulbenkian, who was to become famous as the very enterprising and persistent architect of Iraqi oil industry consolidation. He was the silent owner of 30 percent of the Turkish National Bank, and therefore 15 percent of TPC.5

Short-lived Anglo-German Cooperation in Oil Exploration In March 1914 the British and German Governments agreed on a concession unification strategy under which the British predominated: Anglo-Persian Oil Company held 50 percent, Deutsche Bank and Shell 25 percent each. APOC and Shell each gave a 2.5 percent beneficial interest to Gulbenkian. From this arrangement he was henceforth to be known as “Mr. 5 percent.” The parties in the TPC agreed on a “selfdenying clause” pledging not to engage in oil production in the Ottoman Empire except through the TPC. (Excluded from the terms of the agreement were to be the territories of Egypt, Kuwait, and the “transferred territories” on the Turco-Persian frontier.) On June 19, 1914, the ambassadors of Britain and Germany sent identical notes to the Turkish Grand Vizier, Said Halim, requesting the grant of a concession to the Turkish Petroleum Company for the exploitation of the oil fields in the provinces of Mosul and Baghdad. On June 28, 1914 the Turkish Grand Vizier replied: “The Ministry of Finance being substituted for the Civil List with respect to petroleum resources discovered, and to be discovered in the provinces of Mosul and Baghdad, consents to lease these to the Turkish Petroleum Company, and reserves to itself the right to determine hereafter its participation as well as the general conditions of the contract.”6 Unfortunately, on that same day, the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian nationalist. This led to a series of escalating diplomatic crises that culminated in the outbreak of World War I. This also brought to a halt the prospects for German-British cooperation in exploring for oil in Iraq.

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When the struggle among various applicants for a postwar oil concession was renewed, a key issue was whether or not the Grand Vizier’s note had constituted a valid concession by the Turkish Government to the TPC or whether it was merely an expression of interest subject to further negotiation. As Marian Kent has revealed in great detail, control of the prospective oil wealth of Mesopotamia was not only one of the key subjects of the Anglo-French secret negotiations (known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement) during the war, but it was also a prime objective of the Germans. Already in the spring of 1916 British diplomats had alerted the Foreign Office to German “articles on the importance of Persian and Turkish oil. These indicated the significance that Germany attached to securing possession of the Mesopotamian and Persian oilfields, which was an important objective of Turco-German military operations in the Middle East.”7 Even after conclusion of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Kent notes, Mesopotamian oil continued to be an important consideration for the British government, and remained so for the rest of the war. For example, in a meeting of the War Committee on July 6, 1916, Sykes himself “had stressed the great strategic importance of the Middle East for Britain” and also mentioned “the great value of the ‘immense oil areas’ to whoever should possess them.”8 Rear Admiral Sir Edmond J. W. Slade, who had headed an Admiralty committee of experts that had surveyed Persian oil prospects in 1913, expressed such views even more strongly. In a Cabinet memorandum in October 1916 he urged Britain to secure control of all the oil rights in Mesopotamia, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Arabia. He elaborated his views in a lengthy paper that he wrote for the Admiralty in July 1918, entitled “The Petroleum Situation in the British Empire.” He concluded “it is evident that the Power that controls the oil lands of Persia and Mesopotamia will control the source of supply of the majority of the liquid fuel of the future.” Britain must therefore “at all costs retain [her] hold on the Persian and Mesopotamian oilfields.”9 The severe wartime petroleum shortages in 1917 and 1918 made the British Government focus once again on the petroleum resources of Iraq and Iran in formulating Britain’s war aims. Sir Maurice Hankey,

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the influential secretary of the Imperial War Cabinet, strongly endorsed Slade’s views and circulated his paper to the Cabinet. Hankey wrote Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour that “oil in the next war will occupy the place of coal in the present war, . . . The only big potential supply that we can get under British control is the Persian and Mesopotamian supply.” Therefore, Hankey concluded, “control over these oil supplies becomes a first-class British war aim.”10 Balfour’s critical response was that Slade’s recommendations represented an entirely imperialistic war aim. The British faced a delicate diplomatic and public relations problem admitting this openly in the new more democratic—and some would say utopian—postwar vision that the Allies were projecting to the world. Explicitly proclaiming the conquest of Mesopotamia for its oil reserves as a war aim would seem too old-fashionably imperialist, especially after U.S. President Woodrow Wilson had issued his idealistic Fourteen Points that seemed to call for self-determination of nations and peoples after the end of the war. On August 11, 1918, the day before he was to make his statement on War Aims to the Imperial War Cabinet, Balfour received a further letter from Hankey. He conceded that as formulated by Slade, the War Aim was imperialistic and would doubtless shock President Wilson and others of Britain’s allies. Hankey now proposed a different formulation of the War Aim. London should argue that the reason British forces were pressing forward in Mesopotamia was “in order to secure a proper water supply.” He pointed out that this, incidentally, would also give Britain most of the oil-bearing regions.11 President Wilson’s intent actually was not an unqualified endorsement of self-determination but a maneuver to counter the appeal of the new Bolshevik government in Russia that had renounced the secret wartime agreements among the Allied powers. In fact, as William Stivers points out, Wilson had carefully hedged his promises and “the Wilson administration would not assist [Arab] nationalist politicians, however moderate and amenable to American influence, when such assistance threatened regional order.”12 In August 1918, three years before the League of Nations formally awarded the mandate over Iraq to Britain, Foreign Secretary Balfour had told the Prime Ministers of the Dominions that Britain must be the

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“guiding spirit” in Mesopotamia, as it would provide the one natural resource the British Empire lacked. “I do not care under what system we keep this oil,” he said, “but I am quite clear it is all-important for us that this oil should be available.” To make sure that this would happen, British forces already elsewhere in Mesopotamia captured Mosul after the armistice with Turkey was signed at Mudros on October 30, 1918.13

Clemenceau Revises his Views of Oil’s Importance In contrast to Churchill’s emphasis on petroleum, French Premier Georges Clemenceau had reportedly said before World War I, “When I want some oil, I’ll find it at my grocer’s.” But the war quickly showed the French the vital importance of oil, not only for ships, but also for tanks, trucks, planes, and even taxis. Indeed, it was in the very early days of the war, on September 6, 1914, that General Joseph Gallieni, the military governor of Paris, improvised an imaginative plan to bring desperately needed French reinforcements to fight the invading German forces. The Germans had already effectively disrupted the railway system; if the troops were to march on foot, they would never arrive on time to help their beleaguered comrades. Gallieni decided to commandeer and mobilize all the 3,000 taxis in Paris to move thousands of troops to the front. As Yergin notes, in setting up the “Taxi Armada” General Gallieni “was the first to grasp the possibilities of yoking motor transport and the internal combustion engine to the exigencies of warfare.”14 Now Frenchmen like Clemenceau also became vitally interested in petroleum. The crucial question was, where could France get a dependable long-term supply? At the time the “experts” in geology and mining predicted that the major known sources in the United States would soon run out. Their pessimistic predictions were based on projections that military as well as civilian and industrial uses for oil were rapidly increasing. One key factor was that in the period after the war ended in 1918, automobile ownership in the United States was skyrocketing. George Otis Smith, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, warned of a “gasoline famine” and predicted in November 1920 that the United States would run out of oil in 9 years and 3 months.15

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The proposed solution was to look for new oil sources abroad. The most promising areas were believed to be in the Middle East, most notably Persia (Iran) and Mesopotamia. A key question that emerged in the postwar negotiations was where to draw the border between Turkey and the new Arab country of Iraq. At issue was control of the northernmost province of Mosul.

The Valuable Resources of Mosul Other than its strategic location, the significance of Mosul Province for modern Iraq was twofold. It possessed fertile farmland that could once again be irrigated with the abundant waters flowing from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, natural advantages that had made the region part of the Fertile Crescent until the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century had destroyed the country’s extensive irrigation network. Ancient Iraq’s fertile fields and ample water resources had provided the economic and ecological advantages that permitted the first establishment of large cities, giving the region the popular designation as the “Cradle of Civilization.” In addition, the Mosul region possessed vast potential oil reserves in the north near the cities of Kirkuk and Mosul. Subsequently extensive oil resources were discovered in the southern districts of the country, primarily near Basra. The diplomatic question was who would control the region and its important natural resources following the First World War, since the Ottoman Empire, allied to Germany during the war, had been on the losing side. According to the Turkish National Pact of January 28, 1920, the Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal agreed to give up all claims to provinces of the former empire where Arabs constituted the majority of the population. However, they insisted on keeping all territories such as Mosul, which were “inhabited by an Ottoman Moslem majority.”16 The majority of the population of this northern province were in fact Kurds and there was also a significant Turkoman (Tu¨rkmen in Turkish) minority. Clearly, neither of these groups were Arabs ethnically or linguistically. The Turkish nationalists insisted, however, that the Kurds did not represent a distinct non-Turkish national or ethnic

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group. The Turkish nationalists at the time referred to the Kurds who lived in the mountainous areas along the southern regions of the Ottoman Empire and northern Iraq as “Mountain Turks.” The British insisted that Mosul be part of Iraq to enable modern Iraq to possess the means to pay for the cost of the British Mandate expenses and also to provide oil for transport and industry. I shall mention only one provision of the secret wartime agreements that bears directly on oil and the great powers. Under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, British initially offered the northeastern part of the Province of Mosul, including the city of Mosul, to France. Britain received Kirkuk and the area to the southwest. Since France had for centuries been Britain’s primary imperial rival the question naturally arises as to why. The answer is that Lord Kitchener, then the Secretary of War, always mindful of the paramount importance of safeguarding British interests in India, “the Jewel in the British Imperial Crown,” insisted on creating a buffer zone between the Russian and British Empires in southwest Asia. As a War Office memorandum at the time put it: “From a military point of view, the principle of inserting a wedge of French territory between any British zone and the Russian Caucasus would seem in every way desirable.”17 Others in the British Government at the time, especially those concerned with securing adequate oil resources not only during the war but also for the post-war period, were outraged by the “surrender” of Mosul.18 The strategic need for a French buffer zone vanished after the Russian Revolution in November 1917. The new Communist government revealed and denounced the secret wartime agreements that had been made among the Allied powers. It also formally renounced Tsarist imperial ambitions.

Britain and France Renegotiate Mosul Agreement. The four years of bloody fighting ended with the Armistice of November 11, 1918. Ten days later, on December 1, British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George welcomed French Premier Georges Clemenceau

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and together they rode in triumph through the cheering throngs in the streets of London. When they finally got to the French Embassy, LloydGeorge asked that France renegotiate the Sykes-Picot Agreement and agree to give the entire province of Mosul to Britain. Clemenceau reportedly agreed on condition that Britain would support the French desire to be awarded the League of Nations Mandate over Syria (and Lebanon) and that French interests would be given a significant share in any oil concession awarded for Mosul and any other part of Iraq or the former Ottoman Empire. The British Prime Minister reportedly also assured his French counterpart that London would back measures to prevent any danger of German rearmament. The problem is that they did not put their agreement in writing. Indeed, they even neglected to tell their foreign ministers about it. As Daniel Yergin recounts: “The exchange in London between the two Premiers settled nothing. Rather, it initiated a protracted series of stormy negotiations, filled with acrimony and mutual recriminations, between their respective governments.”19 Finally in April 1920 at San Remo, Britain and France reached an agreement on their respective spheres of influence in the Middle East. On April 24 they signed a specific agreement regarding their respective petroleum interests, including construction of pipelines, refineries, and other facilities, and agreed upon mutual exemptions from paying transit fees and export duties when crossing each other’s mandated territories. (This last provision was to arouse the opposition of Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians, who argued that these fees and dues should have been used to benefit their local economies.20) The agreement stipulated that France would get 25 percent of the reconstituted Turkish Petroleum Company. This was the share that in the prewar period had belonged to interests connected with the now defeated Germany. In exchange, France now formally gave up its territorial claim to Mosul.21 But there was not yet to be smooth sailing for Britain. At the Lausanne Peace Conference Turkish Representative Ismet Pasha (later Ino¨nu¨) and Lord Curzon of Britain clashed over where to draw the IraqTurkey border. The Turkish nationalist government maintained its claim to the province of Mosul, most of which British forces occupied

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after the cease-fire had been signed. After bilateral talks failed to resolve the matter, the issue was referred to the League of Nations, which appointed a Commission to investigate.22

Turkish Parliament Awards Chester Concession Meanwhile, in the hope of gaining U.S. political support for its claim to Mosul against the British, the Turkish Grand National Assembly on April 10, 1923 granted a far-reaching railway and mineral rights (including oil) concession to the Ottoman-American Development Corporation of Admiral Chester in the province. While the British and French were furious, U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes hailed the agreement as a victory for the “Open Door” policy that the United States had insisted upon for U.S. business interests in the Middle East. As noted above, Rear Admiral Colby M. Chester, a retired U.S. naval officer, had been seeking railway and mineral concessions in Turkey since he first visited Istanbul in 1908. His Ottoman-American Development Company (a New Jersey corporation) received a concession from the Turkish Minister of Public Works on March 10, 1910. It was sent to the Turkish Parliament in 1911, but because of the Turco-Italian and Balkan wars, it was never ratified by the Turkish Parliament before the World War. The German and French companies complained that the proposed Chester concession violated some of their prior rights. But he initially had some American backing, including the New York Chamber of Commerce and Board of Trade, as well as diplomatic support from President Theodore Roosevelt and Secretary of State Elihu Root. But after the war Admiral Chester admitted to the U.S. State Department that he had never actually been granted a valid concession.23 Admiral Chester’s triumph in 1923 was to be short-lived. His oil concession had a fatal flaw: it was worthless unless Turkey managed to regain the territory of Mosul now occupied by British forces. Chester was unable to get the necessary financial backing for his efforts, even

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for a rail line from Samsun to Sivas. On December 13, 1923, the Turkish government annulled the Chester concession. Another group of claimants to the oil wealth of the provinces of Mosul and Baghdad were the heirs of Sultan Abdul Hamid, who claimed that the territory was the personal property of the Sultan. Some American business interests initially backed their claim, and they were represented before the State Department by Louis Untermeyer. Nothing came of their efforts. The Commission of Inquiry appointed by the Council of League of Nations accepted British economic arguments that Mosul should be included in the new state of Iraq. However, in its final report, issued on February 4, 1925, it stipulated: “Regard must be paid to the desires expressed by the Kurds that officials of the Kurdish race should be appointed for the administration of their country, the disposition of justice, and teaching in the schools, and that Kurdish should be the official language of these services.”24

Britain, Iraq, and Turkey Reach Agreement The League Council awarded Mosul to Iraq, and the country was placed under British Mandate till it obtained its independence in 1932. The Turkish government reluctantly agreed to cede Mosul. Under the brilliant military leadership of Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the nationalists had managed to defeat the Greek and other European forces that had invaded Anatolia. In the Treaty of Lausanne the Turkish nationalists managed to reverse the humiliating concessions imposed in the Treaty of Se`vres and fully restored Turkish sovereignty over Anatolia and Istanbul. They had also beaten back Russian demands for control of the Straits. Buttressed by these accomplishments and exhausted by the decades of war, Mustafa Kemal decided that it would be imprudent to fight the British over Mosul. Moreover, following a wise policy of seeking friendship with all his neighbors, including the Greeks, Kemal realized that British friendship and support would be an important asset in the postwar period. Although he had concluded a treaty of friendship

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with Moscow, Kemal shared the abiding Turkish distrust of the expansionist ambitions of the Russians, be they Communist or Tsarist. In the treaty of June 5, 1926, that established the frontier, Britain and Iraq agreed to give the Turks 10 percent of the oil revenues of Mosul for the next 25 years. According to Hurewitz, this amounted to a total of 3,685,536 million Iraqi dinars between May 21, 1931, when the first royalty payment was made, and July 17, 1951, when the provision expired.25 The first oil in commercial quantities was found in October 1927, but it was not exported until the pipelines to the Mediterranean were completed. Today Iraq is considered no. 2 in global oil reserves after Saudi Arabia.

U.S. Oil Interests share in TPC and IPC In 1922 American oil companies were invited to take part in the Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC). They created the Near East Development Corporation (NEDC) to represent their interests. The American participants varied over time, starting with six (Atlantic Refining, Gulf Refining, Mexican Petroleum, Sinclair Consolidated Oil, Standard Oil of New York, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the Texas companies.) By the mid-1930s Standard Oil of New Jersey and New York (Socony Vacuum) had bought out the others. But as J.C. Hurewitz points out in his introduction to the “Red Line” Agreement of the Turkish/Iraqi Petroleum Company, the offer to the Americans “stirred up a hornet’s nest” since it required reallocation of the shares of the other participants. In the end, after years of negotiation, on July 31, 1928 the “Red Line” Agreement came into effect: Royal Dutch/Shell, Anglo-Persian, and the French each received 23.75 percent, as did the American consortium. The remaining 5 percent belonged to Mr. Gulbenkian, who quickly sold his annual share of the oil to the French for cash.26 What had finally gotten the squabbling parties to reach agreement? The answer is called “Baba Gargur Number 1.” How important was oil as a factor in British policy to Iraq? As I have outlined, the struggle for control of the Mosul province’s potentially vast oil resources was the

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focus of intense competition among governments and entrepreneurs. Yet the extent of Iraq’s petroleum reserves was still the subject of much speculation. It was only on October 15, 1927 that the first successful major well at Baba Gargur near Kirkuk gushed forth in a powerful 50foot-high stream. The oil initially flowed at a rate of 95,000 barrels a day. It took nearly nine days to cap the well and bring the flow under control.27 Endnotes 1. For the general reader, the most comprehensive and readable history of the oil industry is Daniel Yergin’s The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 2. Marian Kent, Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil, 1900–1920 (London: London School of Economics/ MacMillan, 1976), 26. The Chester syndicate was essentially a family affair. Colby Chester was represented by his two sons, Commander Arthur Chester, who became its agent in Constantinople (Istanbul), Colby M. Chester Jr., and their brother-in-law, C. Arthur Moore, Jr. For additional details see ibid., chapter 3: “Early Rivalries for the Mesopotamian Oil Concession, 1900– 12,” 15–30. 3. Yergin, 11–12. 4. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis (New York: Scribners, 1928), 1: 130–36. 5. On Gulbenkian’s role, see Yergin, 185–87, 196, 197, 200, 202–6. 6. Text in Benjamin Schwadran, The Middle East, Oil and the Great Powers. Third Edition (New York: John Wiley, 1973), 196–97. 7. Kent, 124–25. 8. Ibid., 124. 9. Ibid, 125. 10. Yergin, 188, and Kent, 125. 11. Kent, 126. 12. William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918–1930, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 59–62 et passim. 13. Yergin, 189. 14. Ibid., 168–69. 15. Ibid., 801, n. 10.

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16. J. C. Hurewitz, The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 2: 210. 17. Cited by Kent, 122. 18. Ibid., 122–24. 19. Yergin, 189. 20. See for example, Zuhayr Mikdashi, A Financial Analysis of Middle Eastern Oil Concessions: 1901–65 (New York: Praeger, 1966). Mikdashi was in the Department of Business Administration at the American University of Beirut. Schwadran notes that the Palestinians and Israelis made similar complaints about being cheated by the Mandatory agreement out of normal pipeline transit fees and other oil revenues that was their due. 21. Hurewitz, 2: 209–11. 22. For details see, Gruen, “The Struggle for Mosul, 1918–1926: A Case Study in Middle Eastern Power Politics,” (Columbia University, Faculty of Political Science, M.A. Thesis, Public Law & Government, and Certificate of the Near and Middle East Institute, 1959). See also Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918–1930, especially chapter 5, “Britain Pacifies the Turks,” 138–72. 23. Schwadran, 197–98. 24. Gruen, “The Struggle for Mosul, 1918–1926.” 25. Hurewitz, “Frontier Treaty: The United Kingdom and Iraq with Turkey” June 5, 1926, 2: 372–74. The treaty gave Turkey the option of an immediate lump sum of £500,000. 26. Hurewitz, 2: 399. 27. Yergin, 204, citing U.S. State Department documents. Other sources say that the flow was at the rate of 600,000 barrels a day. (Schwadran, 251, n. 23, citing Mohammed al Naqib, “How Iraq’s Oil Production Began and grew,” Al Aswaq al Tijariya, Feb. 6, 1954).

8

Russia from Empire to Revolution The Illusion of the Emerging Nation State in the South Caucasus and Beyond Peter Sinnott

Tsarist Russia entered World War I in a somewhat indirect manner following Austria’s declaration of war July 28, 1914 on Serbia in retaliation for the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand by a Bosnian terrorist with links to Belgrade. On July 31, 1914, it ordered the mobilization of its army and the next day Germany declared war. Russia joined the side of the Entente because allying with Britain, its traditional protagonist in efforts to increase its holdings against the Ottoman Empire and Persia, offered Russia the best opportunity to achieve its long-standing strategic goal of gaining control of the Turkish Straits and Constantinople, a city with special religious significance to Russia’s Romanov dynasty, which continued to project itself as the protector of Orthodox Christians since the fall of Byzantium. The possible consequences of Russia entering into a war on the side of Britain and France against Germany had been sharply outlined in February 1914 in a memorandum to Tsar Nicholas II by P. N. Durnovo, a former Minister of the Interior and State Council member. He accurately predicted the coming war’s alignment of Britain, France, and Russia against the empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey with the United States a late entrant on the side of Entente allies, Britain and France. He presented the motive for such a war as principally a contest for projecting sea power abroad between Britain and Germany, but questioned whether it was in the economic interest

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of Russia to be allied with Britain as “the vital interests of Germany and Russia do not conflict”.1 He further argued that “the main burden of the war will undoubtedly fall upon us” and that Russia would take on “the part of a battering ram, making a breach in the very thick of the German defense” while the French would be in a defensive mode throughout the war.2 In terms of Russia being possibly involved with a Caucasus border war with Ottoman Turkey and Persia he warned that the Anglo-Russian agreement of 1907—which created the Triple Entente where Russia agreed to the partition of Persia into a British, a Russian, and a neutral zone—had worked against Russia as it eliminated long-standing trust and had only achieved “an outburst of hatred for us in Persia, and a probable unrest among the Moslems of the Caucasus and Turkestan” that could be expected if Russia entered the war as Britain’s ally.3 Thereby Britain—“the obvious aim of our diplomacy [is] the rapprochement with England”—was a double-edged sword because the only advantage would be “to close the Black Sea to others” although that “would not give us an outlet to the open sea” because of Britain’s control of the Mediterranean Sea.4 The Ottoman Empire was a reluctant and late entrant into World War I. Basically tired from recent defeats in Balkan wars, it nevertheless was lured into alliance with Germany and Austria because it bordered an Entente power, Russia, which was now seen as a greater threat than Britain. The Ottomans launched a disastrous offensive in December 1914 against Russia’s mountainous southern flank, the South Caucasus, which the Russians called the Trans-Caucasus. In the opinion of Pavel Miliukov—a historian and later Foreign Minister in Russia’s provisional government: “This catastrophe to the best of Turkey’s troops saved the Caucasus from the threat of a new invasion for the rest of the war.”5 In 1916 a renewed Russian offensive brought Russian troops to occupy Erzurum in February, Bitlis and Tercan (Mamahatun) in March, and Trabzon in April. Flanking actions by the Russian army under the pretext of protecting them from armed roving bandits brought Russian forces far into Iran as well, reaching Kirmanshah in February, Bijar and even distant Isfahan in March.6 A February 1917 offensive increased their holdings as Erzerum fell. Kirmanshah and Qasr-i Shirin were taken in early April as well as Hamadan in Persia, which allowed a link with the British army forces at

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Kizil-Rabate. Van fell in early summer.7 This marked the greatest line of success the Russian army would know on what it termed the “Caucasus Front.” By May, however, the Turkish army had begun to go on the offensive and now began to concentrate its forces on single points of attack rather than across large fronts. The Russian army of over a half million continued to hold most of the mountainous terrain of the eastern Ottoman Empire, that is, the predominantly Kurdish areas, with the help of Armenian troops until late 1917 when the Bolsheviks rose to power and desertions became widespread. These gains had been thought to be sustainable and in fact represented much of the gains promised Russia by Britain and France in a series of secret agreements whose contents the Bolsheviks were quick to publish in December 1917. Throughout 1917 the Bolsheviks’ campaign to undermine the Russian Empire’s war effort had been built around the tantalizing slogan of “Bread and Peace.” Germany’s campaign on its “Eastern Front” had turned into a rout as the Russian Army simply disintegrated and walked away from the war. By the time of the Bolshevik seizure of power in November 1917, only one of Russia’s fronts had not yet turned into chaos and actually still held most of its gains as it stretched beyond the Russian Empire’s southern borders through the Caucasus mountains and neighboring ranges of the Ottoman Empire and Persia. At their deepest penetration Russian forces were just north of Mosul in the spring of 1916, where the British Army in Mesopotamia had hoped to link up with it and by a separate campaign through the Turkish Straits to decisively knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war. But now the Caucasus front was becoming a region with several nations attempting to build independent states, and this struggle would be played out against a background of civil war in Russia, German and British intervention in the Caucasus, as well as the emergence of a Turkish republic and the promise of mandates from Paris in 1919.

The Secret Agreements The question of Russia’s interests and compensation had not yet been determined when it entered the war in alliance with the Entente. “On

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November 13, 1914, the day following Turkey’s entrance into the war, Count Benckendorf, the Russian Ambassador to Great Britain, discussed the matter of the Straits with King George V of England, who said to him: ‘Constantinople must be yours.’ ”8 As British war aims approached the Turkish Straits with the disastrous Gallipoli campaign in early 1915, a more formal understanding of what Russia’s compensation from the Entente powers would entail led to the Constantinople Agreement, which not only awarded Russia “the city of Constantinople, the western bank of the Bosphorus, of the sea of Marmara and of the Dardenelles,” but parts of Thrace as well.9 The Straits were to be open to free passage for merchant ships, however. While Russia was promised Constantinople and the Straits, France and Great Britain essentially partitioned the rest of Ottoman territories with later allowances for Italy that became formalized following the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. In that agreement, following the reports of genocide perpetrated by the Turks against Armenians on a wide scale in 1915, regions where Armenians had been concentrated were now awarded to Russia: “the region of Erzerum, Trebizond, Van and Bitlis,” as well as substantial adjoining Kurdish mountainous areas of eastern Anatolia, including part of the province of Mosul. At the time most of these areas either were under Russian occupation or Russian forces were nearby. Russia had lobbied Britain and France for far more. It had requested the creation of an “autonomous” Armenia that would represent not only traditionally Armenian areas held by Russian forces, but would also include parts of Cilicia in southern Turkey with an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea, the port of Mersin.10 This bold request represented an attempt by Russia to assert a role beyond the protection of Armenians to include Nestorian Christians living near Bitlis as well as Assyrians and Greeks living in Cilicia. In short, it represented Russia’s continuing attempts to serve as the protector of Christians living in Ottoman Turkey. Mark Sykes’ solution (March 12, 1916) was to let Russia receive Erzerum, Bitlis and Van with a minimum Armenian population and Nestorian Christians and Kurds as one designated zone, while the French would receive more historical Armenian areas south, including Cilicia.11 The Russians had also already come very close to Mosul and remained just north of it in the mountainous Kurdish areas. The failure

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of Russia to occupy Mosul was political not military. Indeed, according to one Russian diplomatic historian, as the Russian army moved closer and closer to Mosul in the spring of 1916, and “therefore, to its significant oil resources.” “French and English politicians were apprehensive that the Caucasus Army would follow the Turks fleeing to Mosul, and then Russia would be most unlikely to free the territory once occupied, which was close to Baghdad and the area of the Persian Gulf.”12

1917 On the broader European front, however, Russian losses of personnel and terrain were vast. Russian soldiers began to be described as going into battle with one rifle for three or four men. Some units lacked boots. A visit to Warsaw by the president of the Duma, Russia’s legislative assembly, described conditions: “On the floor, without even a bedding of straw, in mud and slush, lay innumerable wounded, whose pitiful groans and cries filled the air.”13 Social disintegration was increasing at home as labor and political strikes combined with high inflation. The Duma began to question the competence of the leadership, first of the ministers, and then, gradually, by extension of the monarchy itself. When a government order to dissolve it was given on March 10, members of the Duma refused and two days later began to set up a provisional government. On the streets Councils or “Soviets” of workers, soldiers, and several socialist parties had already been formed; that same day they met in the Duma to form a Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. On March 15 an agreement that formed the Provisional Government was obtained between the two groups mainly by pledging not to form a final government until a national constituent assembly of all of Russia could be called. The Tsar abdicated his throne that night. The Russian army, so battered on the Western Front, still had a force of 600,000 entrenched deep in Ottoman territory. Now, despite Minister of Foreign Affairs Miliukov’s assertion that Russia would remain loyal to its allies, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies announced a policy of seeking “peace without annexation and indemnities on the basis of national self-determination.” This phrase, which the Bolsheviks also would

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attempt to use in negotiations with the Germans later, in many ways prefigured President Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Britain, France, and the United States now feared that Russia, despite official assurances, might leave the war. Throughout the summer the Russian Army continued to melt along Germany’s eastern front, while the British and French lines continued to reflect the battleground stalemate. The possibility of German divisions being shifted westward made a German victory suddenly less tenuous. The Bolshevik seizure of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in November 1917 put into power a force not only anathema to the British War Cabinet; but one that was poorly known. The chaos of Russia now fueled an atmosphere of uncertainty. By late December the British and French governments began to discuss “a delimitation of south Russia into British and French spheres of activity.”14 The question now, Lord Robert Cecil argued before the British War Cabinet, was that “we must decide definitely whether we are to support the Bolsheviks in their claim to be the supreme Government throughout Russia, or whether we are to recognize and assist the other de facto Governments in Russia. We must either support the Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, or the Bolsheviks.”15

Nationalities Unbound The March 1917 revolution greatly affected the situation in the southern Caucasus and eastern Anatolia, as it became an impetus for independence by several nations. The national question had arisen as a key issue “both in social democratic circles and in the general intellectual life of Transcaucasia in the years before World War I.”16 The most important of the Social Democratic parties was the Mensheviks whose Georgian leader, Noia Jordania, in contrast to fellow Georgian, Stalin, and the Bolsheviks, “had long supported an autonomy that would support, protect, and nourish the national culture.”17 His “proposal to create an autonomous local government, which would shield Transcaucasia from anarchy until the Constituent Assembly convened . . . on an all-Russian basis,” was the basis of Georgian independence.18 This was

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called the Transcaucasian Commissariat. Its representation included Georgian Mensheviks, Azeri Muslim Musavats, Armenian Dashnaks, and Socialist Revolutionaries.19 For Menshevik and newly independent Georgia it was crucial to keep Turkish troops out. The Russian army, so battered on the Western Front had maintained a force of 600,000 entrenched deep in Turkish territory. Now, they too began to melt away. Armenians began now to play an increasingly prominent position in the Russian lines as the Provisional Government directed Armenians “to take charge of the provinces of Van, Erzerum, Bitlis and Trabzon.”20 By January 1918, neither the Armenians nor the remnants of the Russian army could hold the mountains north of Mosul or, as months wore on, even the core areas of Armenian settlement in Ottoman Turkey as the Turkish army began to concentrate its forces on one objective at a time. As Kazemzadeh termed it, “for the Western Powers in the autumn of 1917, Transcaucasia was nothing more than a front in the war against Turkey,” while for the Bolsheviks and White forces its surviving army “was the only force that could very well decide the fate of the revolution in Transcaucasia.”21

Brest-Litovsk The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed on March 15, 1918. The terms for peace, which Germany demanded, resulted in serious territorial losses for Soviet Russia. Turkey, as an ally of Germany, also insisted on strong territorial concessions in the Caucasus. Brest-Litovsk superseded a truce that the Transcaucasian Commissariat had negotiated at Erzinjan in December 1917 in Turkish eyes. They refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the Transcaucasian Commissariat and the states it represented. Now, Turkish forces no longer had to negotiate to regain their 1914 borders; instead, “Russia, in its anxiety to extricate itself from war, agreed to cede Kars, Ardahan and Batum, all of which had been acquired in 1878.”22 The countries of the Caucasus, which had all briefly tasted independence, and the areas that the Russian Army had conquered under the guise of protector to Christians of the Ottoman Empire soon found

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themselves being incorporated into the budding Soviet Union or Turkey. The promises of mandates and the rights of nations so eloquently championed by President Woodrow Wilson were difficult to fit to the new economic situation of postwar Europe or the aspirations of the United States in a region where revolutionary forces had now achieved power. Peoples like the Kurds and other nationalities caught up in the Russian occupation saw little chance of independence either if they were to be under the umbrella of the Bolsheviks or the newly installed Turkish nationalist regime in Ankara. It was no coincidence that Soviet Russia was the first state to formally recognize the new government of Kemal Ataturk. Two pariah countries that didn’t quite fit into Europe’s plans for them were secure in their borders. Iraq, or at least parts of it, would now be relegated to what might have been part of imperial legacies.

Endnotes 1. P. N. Durnovo, “Durnovo’s Memorandum,” in Frank A. Golder, ed., Documents of Russian History, 1914–1917 (New York: The Century Company, 1927), 12. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 13. 5. Paul Miliukov, History of Russia: Reforms, Reactions, Revolutions (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969), 3: 308. 6. Evgenii Adamov, ed., Razdel Asiatskoi Turtsii po sekretnym dokumentam b. ministerstva inostrannikh del (Moscow: Litizdata NKID, 1924), 80. 7. David McDowall, A Modern History of the Kurds (London: I. B. Tauris, 1996), 106. 8. Anatole G. Mazour, Russia, Past and Present (New York: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1951), 397. 9. Jacob C. Hurewitz, ed., The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics: A Documentary Record (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 2: 17. 10. Adamov, 135–36. 11. Ibid., 158. 12. Ibid., 81.

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13. Mazour, 401. 14. Michael Kettle, The Road to Intervention, March–November 1918: Russia and the Allies 1917–1920 (London: Routledge, 1988), 1: 164. 15. Ibid., 1: 165. 16. Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 176. 17. Ibid. 18. Firuz Kazemzadeh, The Struggle for Transcaucasia (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951), 57. 19. Ibid., 58. 20. McDowall, 106. 21. Kazemzadeh, 79, 42. 22. McDowall, 107.

9

Britain, France, and the Diplomatic Agreements David Fromkin

In the century before the First World War, Great Britain pursued a policy aimed at preserving the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire. Though briefly abandoned by Prime Minister William Gladstone in his 1880–1885 government, it was a policy followed with remarkable consistency up until the outbreak of the 1914 war. Its purpose was to use the Turks as a buffer covering and protecting England’s vulnerable road to India against the drive southward by Tsarist Russia. In those antebellum years, Britain, ruler of 25 percent of the world, was the largest of the planet’s empires, followed closely by its rivals, Russia and France. India was the jewel in England’s crown—Victoria had insisted on becoming Empress of India as well as Queen of Britain and its other possessions—and the road east to India, by land and sea, was the artery of empire that London could never afford to see severed. Hence the importance of Ottoman Turkey, holding the land route and the coast up above the sea route, cushioning it against Russian expansion from the north toward the warm waters of the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. It was because the Turks protected Britain’s empire in this way that Britons, in turn, upheld the ramshackle Turkish Empire against long-prophesied collapse. But in 1914 things changed. As the result of a sort of coup d’e´tat within the ruling clique in the Ottoman Empire, the Turks—unnecessarily and, as it turned out, unwisely—chose to enter the world war,

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and to enter it on the German side. Ever since the summer of 1914, the British government, though ill-informed as to what was going on in Constantinople, had been aware of the possibility that Turkey might become an enemy. Some, in London, welcomed an opportunity to overthrow the Ottoman Empire because it had become such an anachronism in the modern world and because, from a European point of view, much better use could be made of the lands that the Ottoman Sultan then ruled—or misruled. Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty, saw advantages that could accrue if Turkey sided with Germany. It would mean that Britain could use the prospect of giving away Ottoman territories to Balkan states as a lure for joining the Allies, Britain, France, and Russia. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey were more cautious, but tended in the same direction. In order to persuade Turkey to remain neutral, the representatives of the British government eventually had been instructed to give assurances that, if she did so, Ottoman territorial integrity would be respected. From this there followed a converse proposition, that Grey had made explicit as early as August 15, “that, on the other hand, if Turkey sided with Germany and Austria, and they were defeated, of course we could not answer for what might be taken from Turkey in Asia Minor.”1 When the Ottoman Empire entered the war, the conclusion that British policymakers drew therefore seemed to be inescapable. In a speech delivered in London on November 9, 1914, the Prime Minister predicted that the war had “rung the death-knell of Ottoman dominion, not only in Europe, but in Asia.” Earlier in 1914, Sir Mark Sykes, the Tory M.P. who was his party’s leading expert on Turkish affairs, had warned the House of Commons that “the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire must be the first step towards the disappearance of our own.” Wellington, Canning, Palmerston, and Disraeli had all felt that preserving the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was of importance to Britain and to Europe. Yet in a little less than a hundred days the British government had completely reversed the policy of more than a hundred years, and now sought to destroy the great buffer empire that in times past British governments had risked and waged wars to safeguard.

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The Cabinet’s new policy was predicated on the theory that Turkey had forfeited any claim to enjoy the protection of Britain. In the turmoil of war the Asquith government had lost sight of one of the most important truths about traditional British foreign policy: that the integrity of the Ottoman Empire was now to be protected not in order to serve the best interests of Turkey but in order to serve the best interests of Britain. In turn, the British decision to dismantle the Ottoman Empire finally brought into play the assumption that Europeans had shared about the Middle East for centuries: that its post-Ottoman political destinies would be taken in hand by one or more of the European powers. Thus one thing which British leaders foresaw in 1914 was that Ottoman entry into the war marked the first step on the road to a remaking of the Middle East: to the creation, indeed, of the modern Middle East. Should Britain itself take part in the land grab that seemed likely to ensue? Prime Minister Asquith, speaking for himself and for Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, wrote at the time that “I believe that at the moment, Grey and I are the only two men who doubt and distrust any such settlement,” that is to say annexing parts of the Ottoman Empire. “We both think that in the real interest of our own future, the best thing would be if at the end of the war we could say that we have taken and gained nothing. And that not merely from a moral and sentimental point of view, but from purely material considerations. Taking on Mesopotamia [today’s Iraq] for instance, means spending millions in irrigation and development with no immediate or early return, keeping up quite a large army—white and colored—in an unfamiliar country, and a hornet’s nest of Arab tribes.” It has a certain ring today. In the winter of 1915, the French Foreign Minister, Theophile Delcasse´, came over to London for talks with Grey. For the Frenchman, a fact of overwhelming importance was that the lion’s share of Ottoman debt, sovereign and nonsovereign alike, had been subscribed by French investors. The disappearance of the Ottoman Empire would mean the

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disappearance of a significant percentage of the French public’s liquid wealth. Delcasse´ and Grey agreed that their top preference was to keep the Ottoman Empire intact. But they also agreed that if that could not be done, Britain would be sympathetic to French claims on Syria. In France, these claims were vigorously asserted by a colonialist bloc of very considerable strength in the parliament and in the government’s asserted continuity with French crusader kingdoms in the Levant won and established a thousand years earlier. Delcasse´ protected his own political position by obtaining a fallback agreement to respect these claims. But even as the foreign ministers confirmed their preference to keep Turkey intact, that option was foreclosed, leaving only the fallback in its place. A British-led Allied naval armada invaded the strategically vital waterway that runs between the Straits: the narrow link that separates Europe from Asia and that joins the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. In March 1914 it looked as though the armada was set to steam up to Constantinople and knock Turkey out of the war. In Russia this caused panic. If the British-French war fleet took Constantinople, would they ever give it back? Would Russia lose forever the prize it had sought for centuries? In all haste, the Russians pleaded with their allies to let the Tsarist Empire have the prize—and, with Russian blessings and support, to take anything at all that they wanted for themselves elsewhere in the Ottoman domains. France, with designs of its own on the Straits, was inclined to put off the Russians by the use of delaying tactics. Grey persuaded them instead to give Russia the pledge that it sought. Whether or not it was his real reason, Grey argued that Britain and France ought to agree to Russia’s requirements in order to keep the Tsar’s empire wholeheartedly on the Allied side of the war—for it would be a disaster if Russia defected to the other side. Once the pledge was given, it remained for Britain and France to negotiate between themselves their respective shares of the Ottoman domains. There seemed to be no hurry about this. The war was going all too slowly. The day of victory was no longer expected to come quickly.

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In retrospect, the negotiations between Britain and France resulted in the only Great Power agreement that survived the war. Russia had been a party to the Anglo-French accord, but both forfeited and renounced its position when the Bolsheviks seized power in late 1917. Two treaties with Italy failed by their own terms. The most discussed promises that Britain was asked to make in regard to postwar shares in the Ottoman Middle East were made to indigenous peoples—Arabs, Jews, Armenians, and others—that were not Great Powers. The secret treaty between Britain and France, then, was the only Great Power treaty concluded during the war that specified what each of the two parties would get in the postwar Middle East. The events leading up to the negotiation of the treaty were odd indeed. Britain’s bureaucrat in charge of the Middle East was Sir Mark Sykes. He was appointed by, and reported to, Lord Kitchener or to Kitchener’s spokesman, Oswald FitzGerald. Kitchener, Britain’s greatest general and a living legend, served as War Minister and was allowed by the government to exercise complete control over all policy in the Middle East, where he had spent much of his life. In 1915, Sykes had left London to tour British positions in the East, from Egypt to India, exchanging views with the men on the spot, and returning at the end of the year with an important report. Accepting what he had been told by British intelligence in Cairo, he repeated, in London, what they had said. And they had been hoaxed. A junior officer in the Ottoman army named al-Faruqi had deserted to the Allies. Purporting to be from the inner councils of a secret Arab nationalist society within the Ottoman army, he claimed that more than half the army was Arab and would come over to the Allied side if certain demands were met. It would bring about an Allied victory in one blow. The demands that had to be met were those that already had been presented to the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon. They had been presented by the Sharif Husayn, the Turkishappointed guardian of the holiest places in Islam, Mecca and Medina. Husayn proposed to lead a revolt against Turkey if his far-reaching demands for an independent Arab kingdom were met. His correspondence

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with McMahon along these lines proved inconclusive. Al-Faruqi claimed that Husayn was the leader that the Arab Ottoman army would follow. It later transpired that al-Faruqi made it all up, and that Husayn had no significant following. But British intelligence did not know that; and Sykes knew that, in order to be free to meet Husayn’s conditions, Britain would need to obtain permission from France, as Britain’s wartime partner. ✧•✧•✧•✧•✧•✧ In December 1915, Sykes reported to his government that in Cairo he had been told by al-Faruqi that if British Egypt were to launch an invasion of Palestine and Syria, it would trigger a revolt in which the Arabic-speaking troops and provinces of the Ottoman Empire would come over to the Allied side. The problem was that Britain needed France’s permission to divert the resources from the western front to launch such an offensive; and what Sykes told the Cabinet ministers was that they ought to seek such permission from the French immediately. (France was reluctant to allow any diversion of resources from Europe, and not without reason; early in 1916 Germany attacked Verdun in what by 1918 was to become the biggest battle in world history. Seven hundred thousand men on both sides were to be killed, wounded, gassed, or captured at Verdun in 1916, and 1.2 million at the Somme; it was not a year in which the Allies could easily afford to send manpower elsewhere.) At the same time, Sykes raised a related matter: the Sharif Husayn hesitated to come over to the Allied side (Sykes reported) for fear of French ambitions in the Arabic-speaking world. Negotiations with France aimed at allying such fears were the answer, he said. If these problems with France were not resolved soon, Sykes warned, the Sharif might be deposed and killed by the Turks, and events in the Holy Places might ignite a real Holy War. The radical new view that Sykes had brought back with him from the Middle East was that in terms of winning the war, the Arabs were more important than the French. France was a modern industrial power that had mobilized eight million men to fight the war, while Husayn,

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without industrial, financial, military, or manpower resources, brought with him only an uncertain prospect of subverting loyalty in the Ottoman camp; in retrospect, Sykes’s new view was unbalanced, but his government nonetheless attempted to persuade France to make the concessions Sykes believed to be necessary. In fact, the British government already had initiated talks with France. Britain could not make promises about Syria to the Sharif Husayn without France’s permission, for the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had recognized France’s special interest in that area. Moreover, al-Faruqi had persuaded Lord Kitchener and his followers that Husayn’s claims to Syria also had to be accommodated, at least to some extent. The Foreign Office, having authorized McMahon to make pledges to Husayn on October 20, 1915, therefore immediately requested the French government to send a delegate over to London to negotiate the future frontiers of Syria so as to define the extent to which Britain was free to deal with Husayn. The French representative, Franc¸ois Georges Picot, came over to London and commenced negotiations on November 23, 1915. The British negotiating team was at first headed by Sir Arthur Nicolson, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, and included senior representatives from the Foreign, India, and War Offices. The talks had deadlocked by the time Sykes returned to London in December; late that month the British government delegated Sykes—Kitchener’s man—to take the place of the Nicolson team in order to break the deadlock. In effect the Foreign Office turned the responsibility over to Lord Kitchener. Sykes possessed some qualifications necessary to carry out his assignment. He passionately wanted to succeed in reaching an agreement with the other side. He was pro-French. As a result of early schooling abroad, he spoke French—though it is not clear how well. As a Roman Catholic himself, he was not prejudiced against France’s goal of promoting Catholic interests in Lebanon. He had lived and traveled in the East, and had met with and knew the views of Britain’s soldiers and civil servants there. On the other hand, he had held government office for less than a year, and it was his first diplomatic assignment. He had no experience

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in negotiating with a foreign government, and was in a weak bargaining position because he wanted too much from the other side, too obviously. Until January 3, 1916 Sykes went to the French embassy on a daily basis to negotiate. He reported in detail at night to FitzGerald and through him continued to receive the ghostly guidance of Kitchener. It is impossible to know what Sykes said or was told: Kitchener and FitzGerald kept no proper files, and none of the three men left a record of what occurred. There may have been a misunderstanding between them as to what Sykes was instructed to demand and what he was told to concede. Later, in describing his dealings with Lord Kitchener, Mark Sykes remarked that “I could never make myself understood; I could never understand what he thought, and he could never understand what I thought.” There is more evidence from the French side of the negotiations than from the British side as to the secret hopes and plans that were involved. Documents exist that establish what Picot and his political associates hoped to gain from the negotiations and how they hoped to achieve their goals. Picot, the scion of a colonialist dynasty in France—his father was a founder of the Comite´ de l’Afrique Franc¸aise, and his brother was treasurer of the Comite´ de l’Asie Franc¸aise, of which his father was also a member—acted effectively as the advocate of the colonialist party within the Quai d’Orsay and was as dedicated a proponent of a French Syria as his government could have chosen to represent it. Earlier in 1915 Picot had inspired a parliamentary campaign in Paris against the ministers who were prepared to give way to Britain in the Middle East. The mixture of French commercial, clerical, and political interests in support of Picot’s position proved potent. The Lyons and Marseilles Chambers of Commerce sent resolutions to the Quai d’Orsay in support of a French Syria. Proponents of a French Syria took control of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Chamber of Deputies. Pierre-E´tienne Flandin, leader of the French Syria movement in the Senate, issued a report on Syria and Palestine in 1915 that became the manifesto of the “Syrian Party” in French politics—the party that Picot championed. Syria and Palestine form one country, he argued, that for centuries had been shaped by France, to such an extent that it formed

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the France of the Near East. (His argument harked back nearly a thousand years, to the Crusades and the establishment of Latin Crusader kingdoms in Syria and Palestine.) It was incumbent upon France to continue its “mission historique” there, he wrote. The potential wealth of the country was immense, he claimed, so that for commercial reasons, as well as historic and geographic ones, it was vital for the French Empire to possess it. Then, too, according to Flandin, it was vital for strategic reasons. Flandin claimed that Damascus was the third holiest city in Islam and was the potential center of an Arabic Islam; France dared not let another power direct it and perhaps use it against France. Flandin claimed that at heart Syria-Palestine was French already. Its inhabitants, according to him and his colleagues, were unanimous in desiring to be ruled by France. The French deluded themselves. Opposition to French rule was intense among the educated classes in Syria (other than the Maronites, the Eastern-rite Roman Catholic community sponsored by France). Sykes and his friends in Cairo believed that the French were blinding themselves when they ignored this opposition. (The British intelligence community in Cairo—Clayton and his colleagues—did not see, however, that they were deluding themselves in the same way by thinking that the peoples of those areas ardently desired to be governed by Britain.) Picot drafted his own negotiating instructions outlining a strategy to win the concessions that he wanted from the British. They show that he would have preferred to preserve the Ottoman Empire intact, for its “feeble condition” offered France “limitless scope” to expand her economic influence. Partition had become inevitable, however; it therefore was advisable to take control of Syria and Palestine, even though France would dismember the Ottoman Empire by doing so. The French Foreign Office recognized that policing inland Syria would strain French resources; what Picot and his government most desired was to assert direct French rule only over the Mediterranean coastline and an enlarged Lebanon, and to control the rest of Syria indirectly through Arab puppet rulers. Picot’s plan was to pretend to Sykes that France insisted on obtaining direct rule over all of Syria, so that when he moderated the claim he could obtain some concession in

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return. What he hoped to get was an extension of the French sphere of influence eastward from Syria to Mosul (in what is now Iraq). In secretly planning to take Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him. They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to provide Britain with a shield against Russia. France and Russia would be balanced one against the other, so that the French Middle East, like the Great Wall of China, would protect the British Middle East from attack by the Russian barbarians in the north. This concept had been suggested to Kitchener, perhaps by Storrs, and it became central to his strategic plan for the postwar East. Even Britain’s claim to Mosul, with the oil riches strongly suspected to exist there, was to be sacrificed in order to place the French in the front line, at a point where the Russians might be expected one day to attack. The War Office point of view was that “From a military point of view, the principle of inserting a wedge of French territory between any British zone and the Russian Caucasus would seem in every way desirable.” On the British side of the negotiations Sykes also wanted France’s agreement to an Egyptian offensive; Kitchener wanted Alexandretta, and an agreement that Britain could invade the Ottoman Empire at Alexandretta; Sykes held a brief from Cairo to reserve the towns in Syria that were being promised to the Sharif Husayn; and nobody in the British government wanted to see any other Great Power established in the postwar world astride the road to India. It was a challenging agenda, especially for Sykes, a neophyte in diplomacy. The British feared that Picot would not compromise on France’s claim to exercise direct rule over all of Syria, while the French feared that they would not be allowed to rule any of it, not even coastal Lebanon. Picot argued that Christian Lebanon would not tolerate even the nominal rule of the Emir of Mecca, while Paul Cambon, the French ambassador in London, warned that French rule would be necessary to avert the outbreak of a religious war: “It is enough to know the intensity of rivalries between the various rites and religions in the Orient to fore-

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see the violence of the internal strife in Lebanon as soon as no external authority is there to curb it.” In the end both Sykes and Picot obtained what they wanted from one another: France was to rule a Greater Lebanon and to exert an exclusive influence over the rest of Syria. Sykes succeeded in giving, and Picot succeeded in taking, a sphere of French influence that extended to Mosul. Basra and Baghdad, the two Mesopotamian provinces, were to go to Britain. Palestine proved to be a stumbling block. Sykes wanted it for Britain, even though Lord Kitchener did not, while Picot was determined to get it for France. In the end a compromise was reached: Britain was to have the ports of Acre and Haifa (rather than Alexandretta, north of Syria, the harbor that Kitchener preferred) and a territorial belt on which to construct a railroad from there to Mesopotamia, while the rest of the country was to fall under some sort of international administration. Except for Palestine and for the areas in which France or Britain exercised direct rule, the Middle East was to form an Arab state or confederation of states, nominally independent but in reality divided into French and British spheres of influence. The agreement reached by Sykes and Picot was to come into effect only after the Arab Revolt was proclaimed. Picot and the French ambassador, Cambon, were not persuaded that Husayn would contribute anything of value to the Allied cause; they told their Foreign Minister to ratify the preliminary Sykes-Picot Agreement (concluded on January 3, 1916) as soon as possible, before the British had a chance to become disillusioned about the Arabs, and therefore to regret the extensive concessions they had made to France in order to be free to deal with Husayn. ✧•✧•✧•✧•✧•✧ Husayn proclaimed his revolt, but it fell on deaf ears. It was intended to help the Allies, but instead the Allies had to divert scarce resources to protect Husayn. However British intelligence in Cairo, mounting a rogue campaign to withdraw the concessions made to France in the

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Sykes-Picot Agreement, found political uses for Husayn and his sons in doing so. That, however, is another story. Weeks after armistices brought hostilities to an end, the prime ministers of France and Britain met privately. Clemenceau, the Frenchman, wanted British support for France’s claims in Europe, and in return asked the Briton, Lloyd George, what he wanted. Mosul and Palestine, Lloyd George replied. Clemenceau agreed—and assumed that Britain would willingly honor its remaining promises made in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. When the Peace Conference convened, that turned out not to be so.

Endnote 1. Citations to quotations in the text will be found in David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace (New York: Holt, 1989).

10

The United States, the Ottoman Empire, and the Postwar Settlement Eleanor H. Tejirian

By the end of the twentieth century it had became a mantra among U.S. policy experts that American policy toward the Middle East was driven by two overriding interests: the safety of Israel and access to Middle East oil. But as David Fromkin pointed out in the conclusion of the last chapter, when asked what he wanted from the World War I peace settlement, British Prime Minister Lloyd George replied that he wanted Mosul—for access to Iraqi oil—and Palestine— for the establishment of a Jewish national home. U.S. oil companies did not become major players in the Middle East until the development of the Saudi oil fields in the 1930s and especially after World War II, and Palestine was exclusively the province of the British after World War I. It was only after World War II that these issues became the touchstones of American policy in the region. Thus the United States has been notably absent from the chapters of this book. While that may be appropriate for the period under consideration, as we look toward the future, it is important to assess the position of the United States in the region at the time of World War I and particularly its role in the peace negotiations that defined the borders of the successor states of the Ottoman Empire. However, it should be noted that this chapter will deal with U.S. policy toward the region and only tangentially with U.S. policy toward Iraq, because the United States did not have a separate policy toward Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia

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was part of the Ottoman Empire, and after 1918 was occupied by Britain, so U.S. policy was directed toward these empires rather than toward Mesopotamia (or Iraq) as a discrete entity. Before World War I, U.S. policy toward the Middle East was driven primarily by commercial and trade interests and by what might be called religious and humanitarian concerns, that is, the concerns of the Christian missionary organizations that had been working in the region since the early nineteenth century and held large assets there.1 There were other less important interests, including those of archaeology and tourism, as well as American Jews’ concern for Jews in Palestine and the concern of Syrian and Armenian immigrants for their families remaining in the Ottoman Empire.2 But before World War I, and even until World War II, it would be more accurate to describe the concerns of the U.S. government in the Middle East as reflecting interests rather than as constituting a policy. The United States came late to the Middle East, particularly in comparison with Britain and France, its allies in World War I. American missionaries arrived in the region in the 1820s, but for years they depended for protection not on U.S. diplomatic representation, but on the British. By the 1830s Americans had begun to have significant trade and commerce with the Ottoman Empire,3 but it would still be some years before U.S. consulates began to appear widely. The United States signed a most-favored-nation treaty with the Ottoman Empire in 1830, and a legation (not an embassy) was established in Constantinople. Over the next decades consulates were established in Alexandretta, Beirut, Erzerum, Harput, Jerusalem, Sivas, Smyrna, Baghdad, Cairo, Aden, and Muscat,4 locations that betray their particular concern with the protection of missionaries and with trade and commerce. Most of the American missionary enterprise in the Ottoman Empire was conducted by evangelical Protestants, particularly the Congregational Church represented by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), the Presbyterians, and the Reform Church. There was also some activity by the Episcopal Church, often in conjunction with the Church of England, and the Roman Catholics. Both of these worked in northern Mesopotamia and Baghdad, while the Reformed Church operated in the Gulf and in Basra. The ABCFM was

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particularly important in Anatolia, Syria, and Lebanon, where it was responsible for the establishment of the American University of Beirut, and the Presbyterians were especially active in Egypt, where they founded the American University in Cairo, and Persia, where their schools were important educators of the elite. The Near East was a large missionary field in terms of personnel and commitment of resources, rivaling efforts in China. Particularly important and influential were three large colleges—Robert College in Constantinople, the Syrian Protestant College (later to be called the American University of Beirut) in Beirut, and the American University in Cairo. It was also a field of particular theological and emotional importance as the land of the Bible. While the missionaries had initially gone to the area to convert Muslims to Christianity, they soon discovered that this was nearly impossible, and they turned their attention to “conversion” of the local “nominal” Christians to evangelical Protestantism. Thus their target populations were particularly the Armenians, Assyrians, Maronites, Greeks, Copts, and members of the smaller Christian churches of the Ottoman Empire. This shift was to have serious political consequences both for the local Christians and for U.S. policy. Like missionaries throughout the world, they also began to focus more on such activities as education and medical care rather than conversion. The second concern for the United States in the Ottoman Empire was freedom of trade and commerce, or what came to be known as the “Open Door” policy. That had been the subject of the first American treaty with the Ottoman Empire, though in fact the real purpose of the treaty was to pave the way for American assistance to the Ottoman navy, which had been nearly destroyed in the Battle of Navarino in 1827.5 In 1831 Commodore David Porter was appointed charge´ d’affaires in Constantinople, and by the following year Americans were in charge of shipyards rebuilding the Sultan’s navy. By the end of the nineteenth century, other commercial interests had come to dominate American commerce with the Ottoman Empire. The primary U.S. import was tobacco—by 1912 the American Tobacco Company was purchasing $10 million of Turkish tobacco each year and employed at least 3,800 people in Turkey.6 The petroleum industry was beginning to enter the picture, but the Near East was still seen not as a supplier, but as a market

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for Standard Oil’s sale of kerosene. Other American enterprises in the Ottoman Empire at the time of World War I included the importation of licorice root, and dates from Oman (hence the consulates at Muscat and Aden). Singer Sewing Machines were also active, with 200 stores and agencies in Turkey in 1918. In the meantime, the European powers had been active on a broader scale in the Ottoman Empire, because the Middle East had for them a political and security dimension that was not shared by the United States. We have seen in previous chapters the importance of Anatolia and Mesopotamia in controlling a land route to British India. British explorers had begun to investigate the possibility of such a route in the 1830s, but it was the Germans, attempting to enhance their position in the Near East vis-a`-vis the other European powers, who began the most serious attempt to establish such a route with the construction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, which was nearly complete by 1914. In 1909 an American syndicate entered the race for development of Ottoman resources in Mesopotamia with the first Chester Project.7 The U.S. Embassy in Constantinople had initially supported the Anglo-American firm of J. G. White and Company, represented by Dr. Bruce Glasgow, but White was eliminated from competition when Chester offered the Ottomans better terms. Furthermore, the new Young Turk government seemed to view American investment with more favor than European, feeling that it was less tainted by Great Power concerns. By 1910 the U.S. Embassy was willing to make a direct appeal to the Turks to grant the concession to the Chester syndicate, now chartered in New Jersey as the Ottoman-American Development Company, but at this point the Germans began to oppose the Chester effort, charging that it was a front for Standard Oil.8 At the same time, the Ottoman Minister of War expressed particular opposition to the mineral clauses of the proposed concession, which provided that if mineral and oil deposits were not found within sixteen months, the Chester-sponsored railroad would not be built. In 1911 the Turkish Parliament again postponed consideration of the concession, and the Italo-Turkish war led to Chester’s withdrawal. The syndicate tried to reconstitute itself, but it was unable to attract financial backing and in 1913 the Department of State declined to support it

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further.9 But this was not the last the Middle East would see of Admiral Chester. In 1914, “To the American State Department the Middle East was an extension of Europe, and the traditional isolation from European politics still seemed the best guide for American policy.”10 World War I, which began in Europe in August 1914, would change all that, if only temporarily. The Ottoman Empire was drawn into the war in late October on the side of the Germans, primarily because it feared Russian designs on the Bosporus and the Dardanelles to gain access to the Mediterranean, and declared war on Britain and Russia on October 31 and November 2 respectively. The United States did not enter the war against.Germany until April 1917, and never declared war on the Ottoman Empire. By 1915, the Christians of the Ottoman Empire, particularly the Armenians of Anatolia among whom the American missionaries worked, had come under attack from the Ottoman government. Of the 151 foreign staff of the ABCFM and 1,200 local staff in Turkey in 1914, by 1918 only 36 foreign missionaries remained and perhaps 200 local staff survived. The approximately 300 schools and colleges operating in 1914 had been closed and the hospitals taken over by the Ottoman authorities.11 From June 1915 on, U.S. Ambassador Henry Morgenthau in Constantinople sent appeals to Washington for assistance to the Armenians, and in mid-September, at the behest of his long-time friend, President Woodrow Wilson, Cleveland H. Dodge, a New York industrialist and financier who was also Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Robert College, called a meeting of friends and colleagues in New York to establish an organization that would provide relief to refugees, particularly Christians, in the Near East. The organization was first called the Armenian Relief Committee. The name was then changed to the American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief, and in 1919 it was chartered by the U.S. Congress as Near East Relief. As famine took hold in Syria and Lebanon in 1916, the relief efforts, particularly those conducted by AUB, were aimed at the entire population, not just the Christians. Woodrow Wilson, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, attended Davidson and Princeton University, both Presbyterian insti-

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tutions, and was a professor and then president of Princeton. He was elected president of the United States in 1912 and reelected, on a platform of keeping the nation out of war, in 1916. He and Cleveland Dodge, a Congregationalist whose family included presidents of the American University of Beirut, had been friends since their student days at Princeton, and Dodge had been a great supporter of Wilson as president of the University. With his wealth and his close family connections with the Middle East, he was a natural person for Wilson to turn to when the latter became concerned about the humanitarian situation in Anatolia. Near East Relief was a remarkable example of the interplay and linkages between the Protestant establishment in the United States, the government, the diplomatic service, and the military. Brought into being at the behest of an ambassador and the president, by an industrialist (Dodge’s family was an owner of the Phelps-Dodge mining company and he himself was a prominent figure on Wall Street) with close ties to the Near East and the Protestant missionary enterprise, the organization relied on the U.S. Navy to transport supplies to the region during a war in which the United States was eventually involved on the opposing side from the country in which the organization was working. Relief aid was distributed throughout Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Persia, and the Caucasus during and after the war by missionaries, diplomats, and military and consular officers, and to a great extent it can be regarded as an extension of the missionary effort in these areas. It was an enormous enterprise for its time, distributing aid totaling more than $10 billion over the next fifteen years, and, with the missionary movement, it became the primary point of contact between the American people at the grassroots level and the Middle East. When Near East Relief decided that the time for refugee relief was over, the organization continued its efforts to train and educate orphans, and after 1932 its operations were carried on as the Near East Foundation.12 The United States finally entered World War I against Germany and the Axis powers in Europe in April 1917, and on April 20, the Ottoman Empire broke diplomatic relations with Washington. The United States did not declare war on the Ottomans, however, in large part because of concern for American missions in the Empire, and fear that such action

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might result in new attacks on the Armenians and other Christians.13 The key to U.S. policy and influence in the Middle East during and after World War I was President Woodrow Wilson, and particularly Wilson’s Fourteen Points, presented to Congress in January 1918 as guiding principles for a peace settlement. The Points that were particularly important to the Middle East peace settlement and to the people of the region were numbers I and XII. Point I insisted that the peace agreements should be “Open covenants, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.” As we have seen elsewhere in this volume, by 1918, it was far too late for this to have any effect, for a variety of secret agreements already existed that would figure in the eventual settlements, most notably, for the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot agreement that provided for the sharing of parts of the Ottoman Empire among the Allied Powers. Point XII related specifically to the Ottoman Empire, even though the United States had not been directly involved in the fighting in the region, or declared war on the Ottomans. It read: The Turkish portions of the present Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure sovereignty, but the other nationalities which are now under Turkish rule should be assured an undoubted security of life and an absolutely unmolested opportunity of autonomous development, and the Dardanelles should be permanently opened as a free passage to the ships and commerce of all nations under international guarantees.14 These principles were to haunt the peace negotiations for the next five years, though they carried more weight with public opinion, both in the United States and in the Middle East, than with the negotiators themselves. They provided the basis for proposals that the United States undertake mandates for Constantinople (to protect navigation of the Straits) and for Armenia. Interestingly, the term “self-determination” for which the Fourteen Points are known does not appear in them. The war with the Ottoman Empire came to an end with the Armistice signed at Mudros on October 30, 1918, about two weeks before

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the European war ended on November 11. Less than a month later, on December 5, 1918, Woodrow Wilson sailed from New York for Paris to attend the peace conference at Versailles, which began on January 12, 1919. As Richard Holbrooke has said, “for the first time in history, an American stood at the center of a great world drama.”15 The American president brought with him great moral authority, but he would prove unwilling to use the growing power of the United States to become involved in what Americans regarded as European concerns. Wilson himself described the American delegation as “the only disinterested people at the Peace Conference,” because the United States “did not want territory, tribute or revenge.”16 At Versailles, discussions of Allied mandates over territory held by the defeated powers began at the end of January 1919 with talks about the fate of the German colonies. British Prime Minister David Lloyd George hoped and expected that the United States would accept mandates for Armenia and Constantinople, thus assuming responsibility for the areas that had been designated for Russia in the Sykes-Picot agreement. Indeed, the official American commentary on Wilson’s Fourteen Points had spoken of possible U.S. mandates for these areas.17 However, when the Versailles Peace Conference ended and the peace treaty with Germany signed on June 28, 1919, the disposition of territories of the Ottoman Empire, and the negotiation of a peace treaty with the Ottomans, were left unresolved. At this point, events began to overtake diplomacy. In May 1919 Italian troops landed on the coast of Asia Minor to take possession of the territories designated for Italy in the wartime agreements. President Wilson threatened to send a U.S. battleship to Fiume or to Smyrna, and he and Lloyd George supported the landing of Greek troops at Smyrna. At the same time, the British allowed Mustafa Kemal to leave Constantinople for Samsun, where he began to lead the Turkish nationalist reconquest of Turkey that was to make any question of mandates over Anatolian territory moot. Nevertheless, Wilson continued to express his hope that the United States would take a mandate over Armenia, a position that was, of course, strongly supported by the Protestant missionary establishment in the United States. Through Near East Relief, they continued to support Armenian refugees in the hope that they would soon be able to

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return to their homeland. Pursuing his concern, expressed in the Fourteen Points, that the wishes of the people of the Middle East concerning their government be respected, in the summer of 1919, Wilson sent two commissions, the King-Crane Commission and the Halbord Commission, to ascertain popular views and preferences for their future governors. The King-Crane Commission, headed by Henry King, president of Oberlin College, and Charles Crane, a friend of Wilson’s and a founder of Near East Relief, traveled to Syria. There it found substantial opposition to a French mandate and a preference for a U.S., or as second choice, a British mandate, if independence under Faysal were not possible. It also recommended a reduction in the Zionist plans for Palestine. The Halbord Commission went to the Armenian area of Anatolia and the Caucasus, and recommended that these areas be under the same mandate as Constantinople and Anatolia, that is, under a U.S. mandate. However, although the Commission reports were made in the late summer and fall of 1919, they were not made public until 1922. By that time, it was too late for them to have any effect on the disposition of territory.18 But these Commissions and their reports represented to the people of the region the commitment of Wilson and the United States to the principle of self-determination, and to the wishes of the population of the Middle East concerning their own government. Even though the European powers and the United States under Wilson’s successor, Warren G. Harding, paid little attention to local opinion, the principles enshrined in the Fourteen Points continued to resonate in the growth of nationalist movements throughout the region. In September 1919, while on a rail journey aimed at encouraging popular support for ratification of the Versailles Treaty and the Covenant of the League of Nations, President Wilson suffered a devastating stroke. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, had begun hearings on the Treaty at the end of July, and it became clear that Wilson would not compromise on any of Lodge’s reservations in order to win passage. The treaty, and with it U.S. membership in the League, finally failed to win the required two-thirds majority in the Senate on March 19, 1920. Nevertheless, Wilson took the Allies’ request that the United States ac-

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cept a mandate over Armenia to the Senate two months later. It was rejected, and by the end of the year, following military defeat by Mustafa Kemal’s forces, Armenia became a Soviet Republic. In April 1920 at San Remo in Italy, Britain and France agreed on the division of territory and mandates in Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Mesopotamia, though the mandates were not approved by the League of Nations until 1922. The United States declined to even participate in the San Remo meetings, which resulted in the abortive Treaty of Se`vres, signed by the Allies and the Ottoman authorities in August 1920. The treaty was totally unacceptable to the Turks, and over the next two years the nationalist forces under Mustafa Kemal gradually drove nonTurkish forces from their soil—Greeks, Armenians, and French—culminating in the burning of Smyrna and the signing of the Mudania armistice on October 11, 1922. The Treaty of Se`vres was dead, and Great Britain, France, and Italy invited the United States, Turkey, and others to a conference in Lausanne to negotiate a new treaty. Warren G. Harding succeeded Wilson as president in 1921, and as the Turks under Mustafa Kemal reasserted control over Anatolia, Harding came under increasing pressure from Armenian groups and from the Protestant missionary establishment, particularly the ABCFM, whose general secretary, James Barton, was also a leading figure in Near East Relief. In fact, the Greek refugee crisis following the battle of Smyrna would nearly bankrupt Near East Relief. Nevertheless, the United States declined to participate in the Lausanne Conference, but this time agreed to send official observers: Richard Washburn, U.S. Ambassador to Italy; Admiral Mark Bristol, who was U.S. high commissioner in Istanbul; and Joseph Grew, minister to Switzerland. The conference opened on November 20, 1922, and the first phase, which ended in an impasse, lasted until February 4, 1923. The Department of State had seven points of concern:

maintenance of capitulations to safeguard non-Moslem interests; protection with proper guarantees of philanthropic, educational, and religious institutions; equality of commercial opportunity; indemnities to Americans for arbitrary and illegal Turkish acts; pro-

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tection of minorities; freedom of the Straits; and reasonable opportunity for archaeological research and study.19 These interests reflect clearly Meade’s definition of the Hamiltonian strain in defining U.S. national interests in emphasizing freedom of the seas, including both travel and trade by Americans, and particularly the open door policy, which held that U.S. commerce and trade should have the same rights and privileges as any other country.20 But while the Turks were “willing to give guarantees for foreign educational, philanthropic, and religious institutions . . . Allied and American efforts in behalf of an Armenian national home ran up against a stone wall.”21 The Americans did have some success in persuading the Turks to allow the Greek Patriarchate to remain in Istanbul, provided it refrained from engaging in any political activity, and in exempting Greeks in Istanbul from the population exchange. The Lausanne Conference, which had collapsed in February over the concessions issue, resumed on April 23, 1923. The United States was particularly concerned to assure judicial safeguards for foreigners, a concern shared by the European Powers. On the issue of concessions clauses, however, the United States took the side of the Turks, for on April 10, the Turkish National Assembly had approved a new Chester Concession to construct railroads and ports and to exploit mineral (primarily oil) resources.22 The Europeans wanted the new Turkish government to confirm prewar concessions in Mesopotamia granted by the Ottoman government to the Turkish Petroleum Company. The Lausanne agreement signed on July 24, 1923, represented a diplomatic victory for the new Turkish government. On August 6 the United States signed a separate treaty with Turkey that “granted American philanthropic, educational, and religious institutions equal status with Turkish institutions of the same kind, accepting all American institutions recognized as of October 20, 1914, and pledging to give serious consideration to those operating as of July 24, 1923.”23 The treaty was presented to the Senate in May 1924, but although the Department of State felt that U.S. interests would be best served by immediate ratification, it was not reported out of committee until January 1926. Throughout 1926 there was energetic lobbying both for and against the

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treaty, but in the end, it failed to reach the necessary two-thirds majority when presented to the full Senate in January 1927. With this resolution, normal diplomatic relations with Turkey were resumed. Prior to 1918 American oil interests in the Middle East had been limited to the activities of Socony (Standard Oil of New York) and the attempts of Admiral Chester to win a concession to build railroads and develop mineral resources in Syria, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia. Socony had had a marketing operation in Egypt, Palestine, and Syria since the later nineteenth century, but in 1913 the company had begun to put together holdings in Palestine, Syria, and Anatolia with a view toward production, and had started to explore for oil in Palestine. World War I intervened, and by its conclusion in 1918 the British rather than the Ottomans were in control of the area. By this time the British government had concluded that control of oil would be necessary for the future, well before the U.S. government had become convinced of its strategic importance, and in 1918 Socony complained that the British had intimidated their Jerusalem agent and taken the company’s maps of their activities in the region.24 The Department of State challenged the British on this interference, and the British authorities finally admitted that they had operated oil wells in Mesopotamia, though they insisted that this had been temporary, for military purposes. Nevertheless, it was viewed as compromising the rights of others to postwar oil concessions. Pursuant to its general concern regarding an “open door” commercial policy, the United States sought equal opportunity for its companies under the League mandate for Iraq, and suggested arbitration of the claims to concessions. In November 1921, the State Department was told that seven U.S. oil companies—Standard of New Jersey, Socony, Sinclair, Texas, Gulf, Mexican, and Atlantic—were interested in exploring for oil in Mesopotamia,25 and in 1922, “encouraging hints came from leaders of the British petroleum industry suggesting their willingness to consider a deal granting American interests a minority interest in the Turkish Petroleum Company.”26 In the meantime, Admiral Chester had reappeared, attempting to reassert the concession that he claimed to have received from the Ottoman government in 1913. In May 1920 he approached the Department of State for support in asserting his “legal claims to oil rights in

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the Middle East,” particularly in the area of Sulaymaniya in northern Iraq.27 The U.S. Navy had by now become more aware of the future importance of oil, and gave Chester a more sympathetic hearing than did the State Department. But by November 1920 the State Department had become convinced that Chester had no legal rights—after all, the Turkish Parliament had never confirmed his concession—though it was still willing to support him on the same basis as other American companies, if only as a way to exercise leverage on the British.28 In July 1922 Chester put together a new company, which was chartered in Delaware as the Ottoman-American Development Corporation, to replace the prewar Ottoman-American Exploration Company, and on April 9, 1923, the Turkish National Assembly granted the Chester Concession. This occurred during the hiatus between Phases One and Two of the Lausanne Conference, and it is generally regarded as an attempt by the Turks to divide the Allies in negotiating with the Turks at Lausanne, rather than as a serious concession.29 As the British immediately pointed out, they and not the Turks were in control of Mesopotamia, and they insisted that the Turkish government had no right to grant concessions there. They need not have worried. Dissension developed within the company, and in December 1923, after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, the Turks cancelled the concession on the grounds that the company had not yet begun work.30 The San Remo Oil Agreement, negotiated at the San Remo Conference in 1920, gave France a share in potential Mesopotamian oil production and gave Britain the right to construct pipelines across Syria and build port facilities on the Mediterranean. At that time, the United States had been excluded from oil exploration in the Ottoman Empire. The British insisted on the validity of the Ottoman concessions to the Turkish Petroleum Company in Mesopotamia, while at the same time denying the validity of similar concessions to Socony in Palestine.31 In 1922, led by W. C. Teagle of Standard Oil, the American Group began negotiations with the Turkish Petroleum Company, and by December had reached an agreement that gave 24 percent interest each in TPC to the American Group, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Royal DutchShell, and the French, and 4 percent to Calouste Gulbenkian, who had established TPC before the war.32 A new agreement signed in 1924

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reduced the percentage held by the major partners to 23.75 and increased Gulbenkian’s share to 5 percent, and in 1928 the American Group incorporated itself as the Near East Development Corporation. In July 1928 the corporation signed an agreement with TPC that included the “Red-Line Agreement,” by which the companies involved promised not to operate independently anywhere within a red line drawn around what had been the Ottoman Empire as of 1914.33 The post–World War I treaties probably marked the end, at least for the time being, of significant evangelical Protestant influence in Washington. The large missionary enterprise in the former Ottoman Empire was broken up. American missionaries reestablished some operations in Greece, to which the Greeks of Anatolia had fled, and in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq, where they were protected by the British and French mandatory authorities. In Turkey and Iran the missionary organizations gradually negotiated new relationships with the nationalist authorities, adapting to the curricula of the new education systems and shifting their attention to serving the local Muslim populations rather than solely Christians. President Harding did not share his predecessor’s deep affection for the Protestant missionaries. U.S. foreign policy has been marked by periodic swings in domestic opinion between internationalism and isolationism. While both tendencies are always present and tension exists between them, one or the other may be in the ascendancy. In the period discussed here, the internationalism of the 1910s, which followed the first acquisitions of the “American empire” after the Spanish-American War and led to U.S. entry into World War I, was followed by the isolationism of the 1920s, emphasized most dramatically by U.S. refusal to join the League of Nations. Harding’s election marked a shift in U.S. policy away from the kind of involvement in the Middle East that Wilson had promoted with his support of the missionary enterprise, Near East Relief, and the protection of minorities, elements of foreign policy that Meade would describe as the Wilsonian strain.34 Harding’s concern was the protection of U.S. commercial interests, which meant primarily oil, and this policy toward the region, and particularly toward Iraq, would dominate U.S. thinking until World War II.

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Endnotes 1. In his recent book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), Walter Russell Meade has suggested four strands that can be traced through the history of U.S. foreign policy: Hamiltonian, Wilsonian, Jacksonian, and Jeffersonian. Within this paradigm, U.S. concerns in the Middle East from the beginning of the Republic through 1925 can be described as Hamiltonian—concerned with freedom of trade and commerce—and Wilsonian—moral principles, particularly as expressed in Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The Jacksonian strand—the exercise of power to further U.S. national interests—and the Jeffersonian strand—the promotion of democracy—have gained increased importance since World War II. 2. John A. DeNovo, American Interests and Policies in the Middle East, 1900– 1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), 8ff. 3. For further details on U.S. activity in the Ottoman Empire during this early period, see David Finnie, Pioneers East: The Early American Experience in the Middle East (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967). 4. DeNovo, 19. 5. Finnie, 57. 6. DeNovo, 39. 7. See chapter 7. 8. DeNovo, p. 68. 9. Ibid., 83. 10. Ibid., 57. 11. DeNovo, 96. 12. For more detail on the history of Near East Relief, see my “Faith of Our Fathers: Near East Relief and the Near East Foundation—From Mission to NGO,” in Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon, eds. Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East (New York: Middle East Institute, Columbia University, 2002), 295– 316. 13. DeNovo, 108. 14. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), 495. 15. Ibid., viii. 16. Quoted in MacMillan, 9. 17. Ibid., 376. 18. DeNovo, 122.

The Ottoman Empire 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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DeNovo, 130. Meade, pp. 105 ff. DeNovo, 141. Ibid., 147. Ibid., 153. Ibid., 169. Ibid., 186. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 210. Ibid., 215. Ibid., 225. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 198. See especially Meade’s chapter “The Connecticut Yankee in the Court of King Arthur,” pp. 132–73.

Postscript

Despite the Iraqi nationalist revolt of 1920, the British proceeded with plans to rule the mandate of Iraq awarded to them at the San Remo conference and confirmed by the League of Nations in 1922. The new state would consist of the three former Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul with their diverse religious and ethnic populations now welded into one country. But instead of direct colonial rule as advocated by the India Office, Winston Churchill, now the head of the newly formed Colonial Office decided that the British would rule Iraq on the cheap. Instead of occupying the country, an Iraqi government was to be linked to Britain by treaty. Instead of large numbers of troops, the British would use their air force, supported by the Assyrian Levies, a militia composed of refugee Christians, to suppress tribal and Kurdish revolts, and allow Iraq to develop its own military. British advisers would oversee the work of cabinet ministers who would head the departments of a new constitutional monarchy. The Creation of Iraq was finalized by Churchill and his colleagues at a conference in March 1921 at Cairo. Most of the attendees were British officials serving in Mesopotamia. Gertrude Bell was there, as was T. E. Lawrence. The only Iraqis who were invited were Ja‘far al-Askari and Sasson Hesqail, both of whom were to play major military and economic roles in the new state. While Churchill sat outside and sketched the pyramids, British officials met in a hotel where they drew

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borders and made decisions about a government and an administration that would last until 1958. The new country of Iraq was to be a constitutional monarchy headed by the Hashimite Emir Faysal, leader of the Arab Revolt against the Turks, who had been promised the throne of Syria but lost it when the French were awarded that mandate. Gertrude Bell was certain that Faysal would be acceptable to most Iraqis: as a member of Hashimite family and a direct descendent of the Prophet Muhammad, he would be respected by both Sunnis and Shi‘is. Faysal was not easily convinced, however. At first reluctant to take on the position, he was, nonetheless, realistic and understood that in the new international political climate, there would be few leadership opportunities. He agreed to become king of Iraq if the Iraqi military officers who served with him in Syria could become part of the new government. The British smoothed the way for the new administration. Alternative candidates were deported and a “referendum” was held. Declaring that 96 percent of Iraqis—some even voted twice—accepted the new king, the British invited Faysal to come to Iraq to rule. In August 1921, he was enthroned and the business of governing Iraq began. Under British “tutelage” there was progress under the mandate. While Faysal always doubted that the country would remain welded together, institutions began to take root. In 1932 when the League mandate was ended and Iraq became independent, the treaty with Britain was passed and the accoutrements of a modern secular state were implanted: political parties, schools, medical care, civil service, and a military establishment. But the British remained the ultimate arbiter of power, as the Royal Air Force (RAF) retained its bases in Iraq. In 1940, as a new World War was beginning, an attempted nationalist coup was put down by Britain on behalf of the king, and Britain retained de facto power in Iraq until the end of the war. Similarly, as they had during World War I, the British and the Allies effectively divided the neighboring states into spheres of influence. But by 1945 the world had changed. Britain had been weakened by the war, and in 1947 both India and Palestine left the British Empire. No longer was control of Mesopotamia and the Gulf necessary to preserve the route to India. Now the region was most valued not so much

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for its geopolitical situation as for its oil, and in the aftermath of the war, the United States gradually gained hegemony. The British left the Gulf in 1970, ceding influence to the United States. The parallels between the period of World War I and its aftermath and 2003 have been implicit, and sometimes explicit, throughout this volume. There have been many similarities between the British invasion of Mesopotamia in 1915 and the American invasion in 2003. But there are differences as well. In 1915 Britain controlled the greatest empire in the world, but it was engaged in a major war on its own doorstep, far from Mesopotamia. It suffered tremendous losses, especially human losses, during the war, and, as David Fromkin has pointed out, great political changes were occurring in Britain itself. Support for empire was eroding. This volume is an attempt, however brief, to recall a similar event in history, in the hope that memory will inform the future.

Appendix The Sykes-Picot Agreement: 1916 Or the secret understanding concluded between Great Britain and France, with the assent of Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire

1. Sir Edward Grey to Paul Cambon, 15 May 1916 I shall have the honour to reply fully in a further note to your Excellency’s note of the 9th instant, relative to the creation of an Arab State, but I should meanwhile be grateful if your Excellency could assure me that in those regions which, under the conditions recorded in that communication, become entirely French, or in which French interests are recognised as predominant, any existing British concessions, rights of navigation or development, and the rights and privileges of any British religious, scholastic, or medical institutions will be maintained. His Majesty’s Government are, of course, ready to give a reciprocal assurance in regard to the British area.

2. Sir Edward Grey to Paul Cambon, 16 May 1916 I have the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your Excellency’s note of the 9th instant, stating that the French Government accept the limits of a future Arab State, or Confederation of States, and of those parts of Syria where French interests predominate, together with certain conditions attached thereto, such as they result from recent discussions in London and Petrograd on the subject.

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I have the honour to inform your Excellency in reply that the acceptance of the whole project, as it now stands, will involve the abdication of considerable British interests, but, since His Majesty’s Government recognise the advantage to the general cause of the Allies entailed in producing a more favourable internal political situation in Turkey, they are ready to accept the arrangement now arrived at, provided that the co-operation of the Arabs is secured, and that the Arabs fulfill the conditions and obtain the towns of Homs, Hama, Damascus, and Aleppo. It is accordingly understood between the French and British Governments— 1. That France and Great Britain are prepared to recognize and protect an independent Arab State or a Confederation of Arab States in the areas (A) and (B) marked on the annexed map, under the suzerainty of an Arab chief. That in area (A) France, and in area (B) Great Britain, shall have priority of right of enterprise and local loans. That in area (A) France, and in area (B) Great Britain, shall alone supply advisers or foreign functionaries at the request of the Arab State or Confederation of Arab States. 2. That in the blue area France, and in the red area Great Britain, shall be allowed to establish such direct or indirect administration or control as they desire and as they may think fit to arrange with the Arab State or Confederation of Arab States. 3. That in the brown area there shall be established an international administration, the form of which is to be decided upon after consultation with Russia, and subsequently in consultation with the other Allies, and the representatives of the Shereef of Mecca. 4. That Great Britain be accorded (1) the ports of Haifa and Acre, (2) guarantee of a given supply of water from the Tigris and Euphrates in area (A) for area (B). His Majesty’s Government, on their part, undertake that they will at no time enter into negotiations for the cession of Cyprus to any third Power without the previous consent of the French Government. 5. That Alexandretta shall be a free port as regards the trade of the British Empire, and that there shall be no discrimination in port charges or facilities as regards British shipping and British goods; that there shall

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be freedom of transit for British goods through Alexandretta and by railway through the blue area, whether those goods are intended for or originate in the red area, or (B) area, or area (A); and there shall be no discrimination, direct or indirect against British goods on any railway or against British goods or ships at any port serving the areas mentioned. That Haifa shall be a free port as regards the trade of France, her dominions and protectorates, and there shall be no discrimination in port charges or facilities as regards French shipping and French goods. There shall be freedom of transit for French goods through Haifa and by the British railway through the brown area, whether those goods are intended for or originate in the blue area, area (A), or area (B), and there shall be no discrimination, direct or indirect, against French goods on any railway, or against French goods or ships at any port serving the areas mentioned. 6. That in area (A) the Baghdad Railway shall not be extended southwards beyond Mosul, and in area (B) northwards beyond Samarra, until a railway connecting Baghdad with Aleppo via the Euphrates Valley has been completed, and then only with the concurrence of the two Governments. 7. That Great Britain has the right to build, administer, and be sole owner of a railway connecting Haifa with area (B), and shall have a perpetual right to transport troops along such a line at all times. It is to be understood by both Governments that this railway is to facilitate the connexion of Baghdad with Haifa by rail, and it is further understood that, if the engineering difficulties and expense entailed by keeping this connecting line in the brown area only make the project unfeasible, that the French Government shall be prepared to consider that the line in question may also traverse the polygon Banias-Keis Marib-Salkhab Tell Otsda-Mesmie before reaching area (B). 8. For a period of twenty years the existing Turkish customs tariff shall remain in force throughout the whole of the blue and red areas, as well as in areas (A) and (B), and no increase in the rates of duty or conversion from ad valorem to specific rates shall be made except by agreement between the two Powers. There shall be no interior customs barriers between any of the abovementioned areas. The customs duties leviable on goods destined for the

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interior shall be collected at the port of entry and handed over to the administration of the area of destination. 9. It shall be agreed that the French Government will at no time enter into any negotiations for the cession of their rights and will not cede such rights in the blue area to any third Power, except the Arab State or Confederation of Arab States without the previous agreement of His Majesty’s Government, who, on their part, will give a similar undertaking to the French Government regarding the red area. 10. The British and French Governments, as the protectors of the Arab State, shall agree that they will not themselves acquire and will not consent to a third Power acquiring territorial possessions in the Arabian peninsula, nor consent to a third Power installing a naval base either on the east coast, or on the islands, of the Red Sea. This, however, shall not prevent such adjustment of the Aden frontier as may be necessary in consequence of recent Turkish aggression. 11. The negotiations with the Arabs as to the boundaries of the Arab State or Confederation of Arab States shall be continued through the same channel as heretofore on behalf of the two Powers. 12. It is agreed that measures to control the importation of arms into the Arab territories will be considered by the two Governments. I have further the honour to state that, in order to make the agreement complete, His Majesty’s Government are proposing to the Russian Government to exchange notes analogous to those exchanged by the latter and your Excellency’s Government on the 26th April last. Copies of these notes will be communicated to your Excellency as soon as exchanged. I would also venture to remind your Excellency that the conclusion of the present agreement raises, for practical consideration, the question of the claims of Italy to a share in any partition or rearrangement of Turkey in Asia, as formulated in article 9 of the agreement of the 26th April, 1915, between Italy and the Allies. His Majesty’s Government further consider that the Japanese Government should be informed of the arrangement now concluded.

Additional Readings

Bennett, G. H. British Foreign Policy during the Curzon Period, 1919–24. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Batatu, Hanna. The Old Social Classes and Revolutionary Movements of Iraq. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Busch, Briton. Britain, India and the Arabs, 1914–1921. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Davison, Roderic. Essays in Ottoman and Turkish History, 1724–1923. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Fattah, Hala. The Politics of Regional Trade in Iraq, Arabia, and the Gulf, 1745– 1900. Albany: SUNY Press, 1997. Finnie, David H. Shifting Lines in the Sand—Kuwait’s Elusive Frontier with Iraq. London: I. B. Tauris, 1992. Fisher, John. Curzon and British Imperialism in the Middle East 1916–1919. London: Frank Cass, 1999. Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. New York: Owl Books, 2001. Hopkirk, Peter. Like Hidden Fire: Plot to Bring Down the British Empire. New York: Kodansha International, 1994. Hurewitz, J. C. The Middle East and North Africa in World Politics, vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Kent, Marian. Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil, 1900– 1920. London: Macmillan, 1976. Khalidi, Rashid, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon, eds.

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The Origins of Arab Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Longrigg, Stephen Hemsley. Iraq, 1900–1950: A Political, Social and Economic History. London: Oxford University Press, 1953. MacDowall, David. A Modern History of the Kurds, rev. ed. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000. MacMillan, Margaret. Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2001. Mango, Andrew. Ataturk: A Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 2000. Marr, Phebe. The Modern History of Iraq. New Edition. Boulder: Westview Press, 2003. Meade, Walter Russell. Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. New York: Routledge, 2002. Nakash, Yitzhak. The Shi‘is of Iraq. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Potter, Lawrence G. and Gary G. Sick, eds., Security in the Persian Gulf: Origins, Obstacles, and the Search for Consensus. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Schwadran, Benjamin. The Middle East, Oil and the Great Powers, 3rd ed. New York: Wiley, 1973. Shields, Sarah. Mosul before Iraq: Like Bees Making Five-Sided Cells. Albany: SUNY Press, 2000. Simon, Reeva Spector. Iraq between the Two World Wars: The Militarist Origins of Tyranny. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Simon, Reeva Spector, Michael Menahem Laskier, and Sara Reguer (eds.), The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Sluglett, Peter. Britain in Iraq, 1914–1932. London: Ithaca Press, 1976. Stivers, William. Supremacy and Oil—Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918–1930. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Tauber, Eliezer. The Formation of Modern Syria and Iraq. London: Frank Cass, 1995. Tripp, Charles. A History of Iraq. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Wallach, Janet. Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. Winstone, H.V.F. Gertrude Bell. London: Jonathan Cape, 1978. Yergin, Daniel. The Prize—The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.

List of Contributors

David Cuthell is the Director of Turkish, Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology. David Fromkin, University Professor and Professor of History at Boston University, is the author of A Peace To End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East 1914– 1922. George E. Gruen is a Senior Fellow and Academic Advisor at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. He has served as an Adjunct Professor of International Affairs at the School of International and Public Affairs and currently is a member of Columbia University Seminars on the Middle East, on the History and Culture of the Turks, and on Israel and Jewish Studies. M. R. Izady is an expert on Middle Eastern affairs with a doctorate from Columbia University. He has taught at various American and European universities, including Harvard. He is presently an Ad. Master Professor of Middle Eastern Studies and History at the Joint Special Operations University, Florida. Izady has testified before two congressional Committees and has authored many books and articles on Middle East subjects.

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List of Contributors

Lawrence G. Potter is Deputy Director of Gulf/2000, a major research and documentation project on the Persian Gulf states, which is based at Columbia University. He served as Senior Editor at the Foreign Policy Association from 1984 to 1992. He holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia, where he is Adjunct Associate Professor of International Affairs. Sarah Shields is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Mosul before Iraq and numerous articles on northern Iraq during the late Ottoman period. She is currently working on a book on the Mosul Question and the Sanjak Question. Gary Sick served on the National Security Council staff under Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan. When this book was being written, he was director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. Reeva Spector Simon is the author of Iraq Between the Two World Wars: The Militarist Origins of Tyranny (2004) and co-editor of The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991); Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East (2002) and The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times (2003). Peter Sinnott has been teaching courses on the Caucasus and Central Asia at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs since 1997. He has a B.A. in Russian Area Studies from Fordham College and received a Ph.D. in Geography from Columbia University in 1996. Eleanor H. Tejirian is an Associate Research Scholar at the Middle East Institute, Columbia University. She holds a Ph.D. degree in political science from Columbia, and is co-editor with Reeva Spector Simon of Altruism and Imperialism: Western Cultural and Religious Missions in the Middle East (2002).

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Judith S. Yaphe is Distinguished Research Professor and Middle East Project Director in The Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University at Ft. McNair, Washington, D.C. She has published many articles on Iraq and U.S. Policy including The Middle East in 2015 (NDU, 2002) and Shaping the StrategicEnvironment in the Persian Gulf (NDU, 2001).

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Abadan (Khizr), 66, 71, 72 Abbas I (Safavid Dynasty), 65 Abbasid Dynasty, 2, 3, 63 Abdallah (later Emir of Transjordan), 42, 44, 46, 49 Achaemenid Dynasty, 3, 63 Aden, 8 Afghanistan, 61, 72 Al-Ahd. See Arab nationalists Aleppo, 5, 6, 37, 49, 51 Alexandretta. See Iskenderun Ali ibn Abi Talib, 5 Al Rashid, 7; see also tribes Amasya, Treaty of (1555), 65 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 88, 147, 150 American Committee for Armenian and Syrian Relief. See Near East Relief American Tobacco Company, 148 American University of Beirut, 148, 151

Anatolia, 4, 9, 51, 98, 148, 149, 151, 159 Anaza, 6; see also tribes Anglo-French Declaration (1918), 43, 44, 45, 46 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty (1930), 108 Anglo-Ottoman Accord (1899), 8 Anglo-Persian Oil Company, 112, 113, 122, 158 Anglo-Persian War (1856–1857), 66 Anglo-Russian Agreement (1907), 126 Arab Bureau, 11–12, 21 Arab nationalists, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 138 Arab Revolt, 12, 33, 42, 47, 138–139, 144 Arabia, 6, 7, 106, 114 Arabic, 3, 54 Arabistan. See Khuzistan Arabs, 3, 4, 19, 99, 117, 138, 139 Armenia/Armenians, 4, 38, 42, 54,

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176 65, 82, 84, 96, 99, 100, 127, 128, 130, 131, 138, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156 Armenian Relief Committee. See Near East Relief al-Askari, Ja‘far, 45 Asquith, Prime Minister Herbert, 135, 136 Assyrians, 19, 53, 88, 107, 128; see also Christians Atabat. See Shi‘ite shrine cities Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 10, 55, 56, 58, 68, 83, 84, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 100, 117, 121, 132, 153, 155 Atlantic Refining, 122, 157 Austria, 125, 126 Awadh (Oudh). See Indian Muslims Azerbaijan, 84 Baba Gargur, 122–123 Babylonia, 1, 2, 63 Baghdad, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 21, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 36–49, 51, 53, 55, 57, 63, 65, 81, 88, 113, 120, 129, 144, 147, 162 Bahrain, 114 Balfour, Sir Arthur, 34, 115 Bandar Shahpur, 72, 79 Banu Ka‘b, 6, 63, 70; see also tribes Banu Lam, 6; see also tribes Barzani, Sheikh Ahmed, 104, 107–108 Barzanji, Sheikh Mahmoud, 104–107 Barzani, General Mustafa, 107, 108 Basra, 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19–35, 37, 51, 53, 57, 71, 72, 81, 82, 88, 117, 144, 147, 162

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Index Beirut, 4, 147 Bell, Gertrude (Oriental Secretary to the British Civil Commissioner), 27, 32, 33, 46, 47, 162, 163 Berlin to Baghdad Railway, 9, 82, 111, 149 Berlin, Treaty of (1878), 7 Black Sea, 81, 126 borders: Iran, 61–79; Iraq, 1–17, 50, 54, 58; Syria, 45; Turkey, 80–94, 98, 102, 109, 117–119, 122 Boundary Commission (1843), 66 Boundary Delimitation Commission (1914), 71, 72 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918), 131 “Brussels Line,” 89, 102, 109 Byzantine Empire, 4 Cairo, 11, 51, 142, 147 Cairo Conference, 47, 162 Cambon, Ambassador Paul, 143, 144 capitulations, 87 Caucasus, 4, 61, 96, 118, 126, 127, 129, 130, 131, 143, 151, 154 Chaldiran, Battle of (1514), 81 Chaub. See Banu Ka‘b Chester, Admiral Colby M., 111, 120, 157, 158 Chester Concession, 87–88, 111, 120–121, 123, 149–150, 156, 158, 159 Chirol, Valentine, 63 Christians, 3, 4, 6, 19, 32, 38, 41, 54, 80, 81, 82, 85, 107, 125, 128, 131, 142, 147, 148, 150, 152, 159; Armenians, 4, 38, 42, 54, 65, 82, 84, 96, 99, 100, 101, 127, 128, 130, 131, 138, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155,

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177

156; Assyrians/Chaldeans, 19, 88, 107, 128; Catholics, 19, 82, 147; Nestorians, 128; Protestants, 82, 146–148, 159 Churchill, Sir Winston (First Lord of the Admiralty; Colonial Secretary), 9, 47, 112, 116, 135 Cilicia, 84, 128 Clemenceau, Premier Georges, 116, 118, 119, 145 Committee for Union and Progress, 40, 42 Constantinople, 125, 128, 137, 152, 153 Constantinople Protocol (1913), 72, 128 Cox, Sir Percy (Civil Administrator; High Commissioner for Mesopotamia), 9, 23, 31, 33, 34, 43, 46, 88 Crusades, 137, 142 Ctesiphon, 2, 10, 63 Curzon, Lord George Nethaniel (Foreign Secretary), 9, 63, 85, 86–88, 119

Durnovo, P.N. (Russian Minister of the Interior), 125–126

Dalanper, Mount, 62 Damascus, 4, 5, 6, 44, 45, 51 D’Arcy, William Knox, 112 Dardanelles, 10, 152 Da’ud Pasha, 37 Dayr al-Zur, 45, 46, 49 Delcasse, Theophile (French Foreign Minister), 136–137 Deutsche Bank, 112, 113 Diyarbakr, 3, 42, 45, 49, 51, 82, 90, 111 Djemal Pasha, 10, 42 Dodge, Cleveland H., 150, 151

Gallipoli, 10, 11, 12, 128 Georgia, 65, 84, 96, 98, 130, 131 Germany, 9, 11, 67, 82, 99, 111, 112, 113, 125, 126, 130 Ghassanids, 4 Great Britain, 1, 9, 125, 157; Foreign Office, 11, 21, 23, 27, 140; India Office, 12, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 34, 140; policy, 8, 9; Mosul, 53, 54, 83, 85–91, 92, 101, 116–117, 119, 157, 158; Persia/Iran, 61, 68, 69; Ottoman Empire/Turkey, 81, 84, 90, 100, 121–122; policy in

Eastern Question, 10 Egypt, 10, 81, 82, 139, 157 Enver Pasha, 10, 84, 93 Erzerum, 126, 128, 131, 147 Erzerum, Treaties of (1823; 1847), 65, 66, 71 Euphrates River, 3, 5, 8, 117 Fao, 20 al-Faruqi, 138–139 Faysal I, 20, 32, 33, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 72, 154, 163 Fertile Crescent, 3, 117 Flandin, Peirre-Etienne, 141–142 “Fourteen Points.” See Woodrow Wilson France, 1, 9, 12, 46, 55, 84, 87, 89, 90, 91, 92, 98, 100, 116, 118, 119, 122, 125, 128, 130, 134–145, 155, 158 frontier, 1–17, 63–67, 74 Frontier Treaty (1937), 72

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178 Iraq, 11, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 34, 42, 43, 44, 46, 55, 102, 112–124, 136; War Office, 21, 140; World War I, 10, 21, 42, 67, 96, 98, 127, 130, 134–145 Greece, 83, 84, 85, 90, 91, 96, 121; Greeks, 148, 155, 156, 159 Grey, Sir Edward (British Foreign Secretary), 40, 135, 136–137, 140 Gulbenkian, Calouste, 113, 122, 158–159 Gulf Oil, 122, 157 Halbord Commission, 154 Hankey, Sir Maurice, 114–115 Harding, Warren G. (President of the United States), 154–155, 159 Haras al-Istiqlal (Independence Guard), 44, 45 al-Hasa, 7 al-Hashimi, Yasin, 45 Hashimites, 22, 34, 42, 44, 45, 46, 47, 163 Hesqail, Sasson, 162 Hijaz, 3 Husayn-McMahon correspondence, 12, 138–139 Husayn ibn Ali, 5 Husayn, Sharif. See Sharif Husayn of Mecca Ibn Sa‘ud, Abd al-Aziz, 7, 22 India, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 82, 91, 110, 118, 134, 143, 149, 163 Indian Muslims, 6, 20, 34 Ino¨nu¨, Ismet, 83, 84, 85, 86, 88, 89, 90, 119 Iran. See Persia

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Index Iranzamin (land of Iran), 62 al-Iraq, 2 Iraqi Nationality Law (1924), 69 Iskenderun (Alexandretta), 83, 111, 143, 144, 147 Istanbul, 10; see also Constantinople Italy, 84, 87, 89, 91, 96, 98 al-Jazira, 1, 2 Jews, 3, 4, 6, 19, 32, 38, 41, 82, 85, 138, 146, 147 Karbala, 5, 7, 9, 21, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31, 39, 45, 69 Karun River, 62 al-Kaylani, Abd al-Rahman, the Naqib of Baghdad, 31, 33, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46–47 Kazimayn, 5, 27, 30, 38, 44, 45 Kemal, Mustafa. See Ataturk Khuzistan (Arabistan), 6, 7, 62, 63, 68 King-Crane Commission, 49, 154 Kirkuk, 21, 80, 82, 90, 102, 105, 111, 117, 118, 123 Kitchener, Horatio Herbert (British Army Officer), 118, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144 Ku¨c¸u¨k Kaynarca, Treaty of (1774), 80, 92 Kufa, 31 Kurdan, Treaty of (1746), 66 Kurdish Revolt, 105–108 Kurds/Kurdistan, 2, 3, 4, 19, 21, 30, 32, 33, 53, 54, 55, 57–58, 62, 70, 80, 82, 85, 90, 94, 95–109, 117, 118, 121, 127, 128 Kut, 11, 21, 41 Kuwait, 1, 6, 7, 8, 63, 113, 114

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Index Lakhmids, 4 Lausanne, Conference of (1923), 54, 80, 83, 85, 87, 88, 102–104, 119, 121, 155, 156, 158 Lawrence, T.E., 34, 162 League of Nations (including mandates), 27, 29, 50, 52, 53, 54–59, 61, 74, 84, 87, 89, 98, 102, 104, 107, 108, 119, 120, 121, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 159, 162, 163 Lebanon, 54, 119, 143, 144, 148, 150 Lloyd-George, Prime Minister David, 34, 118, 145, 146, 153 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 154 Lurs, 70 Mandates. See League of Nations Maude, Major-General Sir Stanley, 13, 23, 43 Mecca, 65, 138 Medina, 65, 138 Mediterranean Sea, 2, 6, 126, 128 Mesopotamia, 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 62, 63, 65, 70, 74, 82, 110, 114, 115, 116, 117, 136, 146, 149, 151, 156, 157, 163, 164 Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force, 19, 23, 36 Mexican Petroleum, 122, 157 Midhat Pasha, 7, 37, 39 Missionaries, 146–151, 153, 159 Mohammareh, 65, 66, 67, 71, 72, 159 Mongols, 2, 3, 63, 117 Morganthau, Ambassador Henry, 150 Mosul, 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 19, 21, 29, 37, 40, 50–60, 80–94, 100, 101, 104–105, 111, 113,

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179 116–118, 121, 122, 127, 128, 129, 131, 143, 144, 145, 146 “Mosul Question,” 50, 51–59, 80–94 Mudros, 84, 116, 152 Muntafiq, 7; see also tribes Musha‘sha‘ movement, 63 Muslims. See Sunnis; Shi‘ites al-Najaf, 5, 7, 9, 21, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 45 Najd, 6, 7 National Pact, Turkey (1920), 86, 117 Near East Development Corporation, 122, 159 Near East Foundation. See Near East Relief Near East Relief, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 159 Nicholas II (Tsar of Russia), 125 Nineveh, 2 oil, v, 9, 10, 13, 54, 59, 66, 71, 82, 88, 89, 90, 91, 93, 94, 101, 102, 110–124, 143, 146, 148, 149, 156–159, 164 Oman, 6, 149 “Open Door” policy, 148, 156, 157 Ottoman-American Development Corporation, 120, 149, 158 Ottoman Empire/Turkey, 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10–11, 12, 53, 24, 25, 32, 36–37, 39, 40, 50, 51–52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 61, 62, 65, 67, 72, 80–94, 95, 96, 99–100, 102–104, 110–123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132, 134–145, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 159

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180 Ottoman-Persian frontier, 4–5, 61, 62, 64, 65, 66 Oudh. See Indian Muslims Palestine, 119, 141, 142, 144, 145, 154, 157, 163 Paris Peace Conference. See Versailles Peace Conference Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), 105 Persia/Iran, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 36, 38, 61–79, 90, 95, 107, 112, 117, 125, 126, 127, 151, 159 Persian Gulf, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 61, 62, 65, 82, 129 Picot, Georges, 140–145 Qajar Dynasty, 5, 65, 68 Qatar, 8 “Red Line” Agreement, 122, 159 Revolt of 1920, 26–32, 45, 46, 55 Reza Shah Pahlavi, 63, 68, 72 Robert College, 148, 150 Roman-Parthian frontier, 4 Royal Air Force, 26, 31, 105 Royal Dutch/Shell, 112, 113, 122, 158 Russia/USSR, 1, 4, 9, 10, 66, 67, 68, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100, 115, 118, 121–122, 125–133, 134, 137, 143, 150, 153, 155 Russian Revolution (1917), 130–131 Sa‘dabad Pact (1937), 61, 72 al-Sadr, Muhammad, 44 Safavid Dynasty, 5, 63, 65, 66, 81 al-Sa‘id, Nuri, 45

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Index Samarra, 5, 63 San Remo (1920), 13, 44, 119, 155, 158 Sarikamish, 10, 11 Sassanid Dynasty, 63 Saudi Arabia, 1, 12, 39 al-Sawad, 2 Sayyid Talib of Basra, 8, 29, 48 Selim I, 81 Se`vres, Treaty of (1920), 54, 83, 99–102, 121, 155 Shammar, 6, 33; see also tribes sharif, pl. ashraf (descendants of the Prophet Muhammad), 29, 38 Sharifian military officers. See Sunni Arab military officers Sharif Husayn of Mecca, 12, 19, 21, 22, 28, 34, 42, 44, 45, 81, 138–144 Shatt al-Arab, 62, 66, 71–74 Sheikh Sait rebellion, 90 Shi‘ites, viii, 4, 5, 6, 7, 19–35, 38, 41, 43, 44, 45, 47, 63, 74; shrine cities (atabat), 5, 7, 9, 69, 75; alShirazi, Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi, 27, 30, 44 Sinclair Oil, 122, 157 Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, 88, 111, 122, 149, 157, 158 Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony), 122, 157 Suez Canal, 8, 10, 11 Sulaymaniya, 66, 104, 107, 158 Suleyman I, the Magnificent, 4, 82 Sunnis, viii, 4, 5, 7, 19, 20, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 38, 43, 44, 47, 74; Arab military officers, 20, 26, 28, 30, 32, 40, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47 al-Suwaidi, Yusuf, 42

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Index Sykes, Sir Mark, 128, 135, 138–145 Sykes-Picot Agreement, 11, 12, 21, 54, 82, 83, 88, 96, 97, 98, 114, 118, 119, 128, 138–145, 152, 153 Syria, 1, 3, 10, 45, 95, 137, 140–145, 148, 150, 151, 157, 159 Syrian Protestant College. See American University of Beirut Talabani, Jalal, 105 Ta‘ziyya (Passion play re-enacting the murder of Husayn at Karbala), 28, 45; see also Shi‘ites Taurus Mountains, 3 Tehran Protocol (1911), 67 Thalweg (median line of the deepest channel of a river border), 66 Thrace, 81, 84, 85, 87, 90, 91, 128 Tigris River, 3, 10, 45, 62, 117 al-Timman, Ja‘far Abu, 44 trade/trade routes, 2, 4, 6, 8, 20, 36, 37, 38, 39, 50, 51–52, 56, 59, 71, 82, 88, 110, 134, 148, 149, 156 Treaty of Friendship (Iran-Iraq 1937), 74 tribal sheikhs, 4, 6, 7, 8, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 37, 38, 43 tribes, 6, 7, 19–20, 22, 23, 27, 37, 39, 45, 63, 70 Turkey. See Ottoman Empire Turkish National Bank, 113 Turkish nationalism, 80–94 Turkish Petroleum Company, 88, 93, 112, 113–114, 119, 122, 156, 157, 158

Turkish Straits, 125, 128, 137, 152 Turkomans, 19, 56, 86, 67, 117 United States, 1, 13, 49, 84, 85, 88, 89, 97, 98, 100, 101, 109, 111, 122, 125, 130, 146–161 Unkiar Iskelesi, Treaty of (1833), 84 Versailles Peace Conference (Paris Peace Conference), 13, 27, 44, 45, 68, 71, 98, 99, 109, 145, 153, 154 von der Goltz, Colmar, 11 al-Wahhab, Muhammad Ibn Abd, 7 Wahhabi, 7, 22 water, 70, 115, 117 Wilhelm II (Emperor of Germany), 9, 112 Wilson, Sir Arnold (British Civil Administrator of Iraq), 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 34, 43, 44, 45, 46, 107 Wilson, President Woodrow, 13, 43, 46, 51, 86, 96–99, 100, 102, 115, 130, 132, 150–154, 159 World War I, 1, 9, 10, 11, 13, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24, 36, 40, 41, 42, 67, 82, 83, 95, 96, 98, 113, 116, 125–131, 134–145, 150–152 Yezidis, 54 Young Turks, 19, 39, 149 Zagros Mountains, 62, 65, 70 Zohab, Treaty of (1639), 65

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