Return to the Marshes

by Gavin Young

  Basra, its Customs House ablaze, was easily occupied. So were Zubair and Shuaiba, five miles north. At Qurna there was quite a battle. Gata bin Shamkhi, the flag-bearer of Sheikh Falih of the Albu Mohammed, who sent men to fight for the Turks, breathlessly broke the news of it in Qalat Salih, and it spread like a Marsh-fire to the chattering tribesmen who eagerly thronged into the mudhifs throughout the region. Qurna, he reported, had fallen to the British troops. One thousand Turkish soldiers had been taken and with them the Turkish Wali of Basra, Subhi Bey. The Turkish gun-boats, Marmaris and Bulbul, had been beached and shelled and set on fire five miles north of Al Azair by the Royal Naval gun-boat, Clio. Seeing their ‘allies’ the Turks in disarray, the Arab tribal levies from further north prudently dispersed back to their black tents and flocks; Marsh Arabs dived back into the reeds. The Madan elders who went cautiously to Qurna to see who was in charge there, were well received by Arabic-speaking British officers but had difficulty in pronouncing the name of the newly installed British Political Officer who was called Crosthwaite.

  Not every tribal sheikh rushed to greet the British. Far from it. The Turks had handed out medals and cash to important sheikhs and these gifts in some cases paid off, particularly east of the Tigris and north of Suq-esh-Shiukh. General Barrett had quite a tricky time dealing with the Hawaiza Marsh tribes, the Beni Turuf and the Bawi. His Indian cavalrymen were bedevilled equally by Sheikh Falih, son of Sayhud el Munshid and Abd el Karim, son of Zubun al Faisal of the Beni Lam, and by Ghadhban bin Khalaf of the Al Isa. The cavalry were forced to use the narrow pig-tracks through the swamps. Quite a lot of ugly skirmishing took place between the British and the Arabs in that area, and a good many casualties were suffered by each side, particularly as Sheikh Ghadhban paid attractive rewards for any enemy heads brought to him. However, in Sheikh Khazal of the Muhaisin tribe on the Shatt al Arab the British found an ally – luckily, because they had a supply problem and he helped to solve it. Mashhufs loaded with dates, fish (which the Punjabi troops would not eat), ducks, chickens, eggs; bellams full of sheep, and even some decrepit old water-buffaloes, varied a mournful army diet of bully beef and biscuits.

  To the east, the British were opposed mainly by Muntafiq tribesmen and some of the Middle Euphrates. At the battle of Shuaiba 18,000 tribesmen joined the Turkish army and when it was routed by General Nixon’s force, the Muntafiq rapidly scurried back to their homes, leaving, it was said, 2000 dead and wounded on the field. Turkish hopes of a major jehad campaign with the universal, enthusiastic support of their coreligionists, the tribesmen, fizzled out there and then.

  The great Muntafiq confederation was not, in any case, what it once had been – almost a separate Arab nation on the Euphrates. True, the Sadun family was still the nominal overlord of the united tribes. But the Turks had handed out title deeds over vague estates in the Marsh and tribal areas, and the Saduns had become landlords rather than sheikhs. One of them, Nasir Pasha, became Mutasarrif (Turkish-appointed governor) of his own district and, in the 1870s, founded the town of Nasiriya. Some of his family objected to this collaboration with the Ottomans, so there were feuds and, bit by bit, the Muntafiq patchwork began to fall apart. But by the time the British came, the confederation was still formidable enough to rack the nerves of their generals.

  In fact, the tribes, aiding the Turks, gave General Gorringe, one of the best British commanders, a miserable time when he advanced to take Nasiriya in July, 1915. Gorringe marshalled his force at Qurna in the heat and sweat of high summer then, accompanied by two armed launches, Odin and Espiègle, moved up the Euphrates to Chubaish. Here, ‘Arabs in their graceful mashufs… scurried to and fro over the lake (the Hor al Hammar), obviously not wishing to do battle with us’. But after Suq-esh-Shiukh the idyll vanished – partly because of the Turkish resistance, partly because of heat and sickness, and partly because of the increasing hostility and resistance of local tribes. At Nasiriya, General Gorringe halted. He was obliged to; the Gharraf tribes resisted his men too fiercely to make a further advance worthwhile.

  In any case, the more important town of Amara, which dominated the essential waterway to the north – the Tigris – had already fallen to the British. Amara had been built in 1866 and by 1915 was a town of broad streets and 10,000 inhabitants. It fell to General Townshend with little resistance. The British force seized mahaila after mahaila (river barge) packed with Turkish troops, as Mohammed Pasha Daghistani’s army fell back. Already thrilled by the rush of events the Marsh Arabs had their first sight of British reconnaisance aeroplanes, two of which flew up from Basra and low over their heads. It was a bad time and a good time for the Madan. When not running for cover or taking pot-shots at the planes, they amassed unimagined loot. Years later, when I commented on the quantity of Turkish and British rifles I saw around me in Marsh villages, an old man said, ‘We filled our canoes with stolen rifles then as we fill them with rushes nowadays. The Turkish war! What a time that was!’

  For the thirty or forty years before the British landings, the Beni Lam and Albu Mohammed – the two great confederations lying astride the Tigris north of Al Azair – had been mainly occupied fighting each other. In 1880, tribal unrest closed the Tigris for a time, and the regular steamer Khalifah, run by the British company Lynch Brothers, was attacked. As a result, the Turks built new military cantonments at Amara, the Albu Mohammed sheikh, Saihud, was given a drubbing by a Turkish force from Baghdad, and in general Turkish control became tighter, aided by the newly introduced telegraph and swifter communication by steamboat.

  A major reason why the Tigris tribes gave the British so little trouble was that the power and wealth of the sheikhs depended on the ruling power’s allotment of leases to their great estates. As the tide of war flowed northwards the sheikhs of the confederations found themselves at sixes and sevens, not knowing from month to month if the Turks were beaten for good or would rally and drive the British into the sea. Thus, Araibi Pasha al Munshid of the Albu Mohammed and his nephew, Majid al Khalifah, at first sided with the Turks. But with the fall of Amara to General Townshend they hastened to pay their respects to the newly-installed British Political Officer there. They and other sheikhs were rewarded by reduced rents and confirmed leases.

  In 1916 the Turks forced General Townshend to retreat from Ctesiphon and captured his entire army at Kut al Amara. British losses from the fighting, disease, heat and drowning in the Marshes, mounted horrifyingly, and in London the conduct of the war was condemned in retrospect as a national disgrace. On the Arab side, the back-and-forth nature of this terrible campaign hopelessly confused the opportunistic sheikhs. How were they to tell who would win? Shabib al Mizban of the Beni Lam, for example, was unalterably pro-British. Others, after vacillating this way and that, misjudged things and ended up pro-Turkish, forced to make the best of the final British victory.

  The British setback at Ctesiphon affected tribes elsewhere. General Gorringe, for instance, moving up the Gharraf towards Shatra, was forced to return to Butaniya, near Nasiriya, when he was attacked by 3000 tribesmen who had calculated that the British troops were on the run for good. At Butaniya, tribesmen of the Azairij and Khafaja under Sheikh Khayun al Ubaid engaged the British and Indian soldiers hand-to-hand and killed about 180 of them. No further British advance up the Gharraf was attempted for three years.

  On the other hand, at Chubaish, the British simply dismissed the unfriendly paramount sheikh of the Beni Assad, Salim al Khayun, and put his brother Majid in his place.

  Very powerful characters like Khayun al Ubaid of the Ubuda tribe in the Shatra area, and Badr al Rumaiyidh of the Albu Salih and paramount sheikh of the Beni Malik, which represented one third of the Muntafiq confederation, shrugged in the face of the inevitable and accepted the British – but only after an expensive and quite futile British effort to capture or kill them.

  Badr al Rumaiyidh was a ‘tall, heavy, prepossessing figure of a man of sixty-five years, with a rugged face, deep, penetrating eyes’. He was more tha
n just a shifty intriguer. He made an ‘unforgettable impression’ on Bertram Thomas, the Political Officer at Shatra (who in jocular respect called Badr ‘the Old Man of the Marshes’), and on Thomas’s boss, Major Harold Dickson, at Nasiriya (the administrative headquarters of the Muntafiq district), and not an easy man to impress. Four hundred infantrymen, 200 levies of the Muntafiq Horse, 100 of the Suq-esh Shiukh scouts, three aeroplanes and two gunboats were assembled to pursue Badr and his men into the Marshes, and they were supported by armed tribesmen of the Albu Said, Al Bazun and Al Isa. Even so, Badr escaped. Much later, when Dickson had been replaced by Major A. H. Ditchburn, Badr galloped up to capitulate in his own good time near the Hor al Hammar. ‘Approaching Ditchburn (Thomas wrote) he bent down and removed his head-dress. And in the manner of the country tied it slowly to the leg of the chair of those to whom he was making submission.’ Relations thereafter were cordial and – most important – based on mutual respect, for there was nothing petty about men like Badr or Ditchburn.

  There is a necessary word to be said here about the British Political Officers – an important addition to the Iraqi landscape of the time. These widely scattered and learn-as-you-go young men were remarkable by any standards. They spoke good Arabic; unlike their Turkish predecessors they got about their districts with zest despite heat, insects, water and mud. Surrounded by armed tribesmen, few, if any, of them had British soldiers at hand for their day-to-day protection; at most they were given a section of uncertain Iraqi levies. They may not have been infallible but they were probably not particularly unjust either. They were all deeply interested in the tribes and the landscape. They were often amateur anthropologists, ornithologists or archaeologists. Their success depended largely on their strength of character for, in the tribal chiefs, they confronted men of equal will and greater immediate power.

  Thomas, whom I have already mentioned, later became the first non-Arab to cross the great Empty Quarter of Arabia on foot and camel. Dickson became British Political Agent in Kuwait, settled there, and wrote a standard work on The Arab of the Desert. H. St John Philby, the second man to cross the Empty Quarter, later became the friend and adviser of King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the mighty welder of the Hejaz and Arabia Deserts into Saudi Arabia, mapped much of the kingdom, and wrote numerous books about his travels in the Arabian Peninsula. (He was also the father of Kim, the notorious British diplomat who defected to the Russians.)

  At the time of which I am writing Philby was the arabophile, though truculent, Political Officer of Amara. One who soon succeeded him there was S. E. Hedgcock who, with his young wife, wrote a wonderfully vivid book about the people he administered called Haji Rikkan: Marsh Arab, using (because officials are not supposed to write books when they are on the job) the pseudonym ‘Fulanain’. Other notable civilians were Stephen Longrigg (now Brigadier), the author of two scholarly – and indispensable – works on Iraq; and Captain Gerald Leachman, an experienced Arabian traveller and Arabic speaker, whose name – Lijman from Arab mouths – still cropped up in Marsh villages as late as 1952. The ‘top brass’ of the British administration in Baghdad was unusual: Gertrude Bell, the Oriental Secretary, Sir Percy Cox, the first High Commissioner, and Lt-Colonel (later Sir) Arnold Wilson, were scholars and Arabic speakers, and, in the case of two of them, Miss Bell and Wilson, archaeologists, writers and explorers as well. Whatever the pros and cons of their achievement in Iraq, such people were not second-rate.

  The Marsh Arabs left their mark upon the memories of these transient dwellers in Mesopotamia. ‘Oh I was very fond of them!’ Mrs Hedgcock exclaimed when I went to see her while preparing this book. ‘We both were, my husband and I,’ she said – and she brought out with reverence photographs she had taken in 1921 of the familiar mashhufs and reed houses along the Chahala. Her late husband’s affection for the Madan speaks for itself in their joint book Haji Rikkan, which is based on his experience with the eastern Marsh tribes. ‘Here dirt and disease should have given death an easy victory,’ he wrote. ‘Yet here was life triumphant.’

  Philby, on a trip to inspect the new railway line from Basra that had just reached Khamisiya, took a lift across the Hor al Hammar in ‘a vessel with a penthouse structure of reeds like a Noah’s Ark’. He found it was ‘pleasant and comfortable, travelling in the always gay company of the Marsh Arabs’. Delayed by a furious storm, he had to spend a night on a large flat island in the lake. There, the Marsh Arabs who lived on it made him welcome and killed a lamb and made ‘one of the most delicious meals I ever tasted’. Elsewhere, echoing his compatriots a hundred years earlier, Thomas commented ecstatically on the ‘laughing moon faces (of the Marsh girls) their hair plaited with coloured beads, their large flashing eyes and dazzling teeth’. Hedgcock noted that the men still wore their hair thick and long in two plaits and a single coarse-woven shirt. And when a friend took Philby up in a DH9 aeroplane he saw areas of water that ‘were more like inland seas than lakes’.

  Philby and the rest of them were open-air, down-to-earth men: they preferred to be out and about with Arabs than deskbound in Basra (where Philby spent some time as Revenue Commissioner). Philby had horrified Lady Cox there by dipping a cup into the Shatt al Arab and drinking from it, and he scoffed at Army Orders that forbade eating dates from the trees on health grounds. The genteel tennis, hockey and river picnics organized by the wives of the garrison at Amara bored him. He was much more interested in meeting Araibi Pasha of the Albu Mohammed – ‘a very old man, though still full of fire’. Proceeding further down the Chahala by launch, he found Gerald Leachman – ‘an erratic genius’, according to Philby – trying to buy sheep for the British forces from Sheikh Ghadhban of the Beni Lam. Leachman was not an easy man, but nor was Ghadhban who had driven his sheep into the hills of Persia and out of reach. Leachman and Philby had different ideas about how to lay their hands on those sheep which illuminate the characters of the two men. ‘Send for some troops and teach Ghadhban a lesson,’ fumed Leachman. ‘You always want to be so tough,’ Philby protested. Leaving Leachman, he borrowed a horse and rode off alone for a man-to-man talk with the sheikh. He seemed friendly. But the subsequent days of haggling were too much even for Philby. ‘Look here, Sheikh Ghadhban,’ he said at last, ‘it is quite unworthy of us – you a great Arab chief and me a British Political Officer, haggling over the price of sheep. We should be exchanging worthy gifts instead of bargaining like merchants.’ Within two days Ghadhban’s drovers had marshalled 10,000 sheep into the army’s compounds at Ali Gharbi. No blood had been shed. A decent price had been paid. No one’s pride was injured. The only sufferers were six sheep swept away in the Tigris.

  An era – a long one – was ending. By 1915, twenty-six generations of Arab tribesmen had lived under Turkish domination. The Marsh Arabs, whose spirit of independence had for so long driven Turkish officials to distraction, now cautiously eyed the European newcomers. Bertram Thomas gives a good idea of the life of a British Political Officer in the Marsh area. Shatra had a terrible summer climate of 110° to 120° in the shade; cholera hung about it; the bodies of three Turkish district officers lay in the cemetery as a silent warning. Thomas was the only Englishman in a district of 130,000 tribesmen. His nearest colleagues were at Nasiriya, twenty-four miles away. ‘Naturally,’ he comments drily, ‘speaking the local dialect of Arabic was obligatory.’ Despite the heat, he revelled in the area. He noted the glory of its flora and fauna; the sudden relieving chill when the sun dips; the mahailas (river barges) flying their green Shia banners on the stern, carrying Arab and Persian pilgrims to Kerbela and Nejef (‘the Vatican of Iraq’), their lockers below laden with corpses for burial. He took a tape measure to the mudhif of Sheikh Mohammed of the Albu Said and found it was 100 feet long – though Hedgcock measured one that was 8 feet longer on the Chahala. He shot duck and rode his horse. He was in seventh heaven. But quite suddenly, the British idyll in the Sumerian Garden of Eden was shattered.

  The British administration in Baghdad after General Maude’s
entry into the capital had soon found itself struggling in a morass of political intrigue. The rulers of British India had visualized, when General Barrett’s force landed at Basra, the annexation of Basra governorate. But now the idea of acquisition had burgeoned like some exotic flower. A post-war conference of the victorious Allied Powers at San Remo arbitrarily divided the Middle East into mandates for the British and French. As an outcome of dubious and undignified manoeuvres, the British secured a mandate from the League of Nations over all Iraq. (Some British officials had thought of adding the entire country to the British Empire, but the thought perished.) Iraqi intellectuals in Baghdad, Mosul and Basra, however, had made up their minds that if the Turks were expelled Iraq would become instantly and gloriously independent and republican. The Iraqis who cherished this dream – politicians, students, officers, religious divines of Nejef and Kerbela – had been considerably encouraged to develop it by the wartime play British statesmen and senior officials in Mesopotamia had made with the heady word ‘self-determination’. The mandate of the British was nothing more than a crude mask for continued foreign rule. They felt promises had been broken. Bitterness mounted to volcanic proportions, and by 1920 – so soon after the euphoric days of British victory and high hopes for free Arab—British relations – the Iraqi feeling of betrayal was about to explode into a violent insurrection that for a time deprived the Baghdad administration of its control over about three-quarters of Iraq.