This text,
on early British involvement in Iraq, was prepared by Professor Sir
Martin
Gilbert
before he was taken seriously ill in 2012. Sir Martin died on
3 February 2015.
The text
that follows is a tribute to Sir Martin’s valuable contribution to
the work of the
Inquiry.
1.
The sources
for this survey of British involvement with Iraq from 1583 to 1960
are
principally
the Admiralty, Cabinet Office, Colonial Office, Foreign Office,
India Office,
Treasury,
War Office, Ministry of Defence and Air Ministry archives at the
National
Archives.
Other sources include the private papers of H.H. Asquith, Winston
Churchill
and David
Lloyd George. Published sources include Special
Report: Progress of Iraq,
During the
period 1920-1931. Colonial
Office Paper 58 (His Majesty’s Stationery Office,
1931); A.J.
Barker, The
Neglected War: Mesopotamia, 1914-1918 (Faber and
Faber,
1967);
Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer Haldane, The
Insurrection in Mesopotamia,
1920 (William
Blackwood, 1922); Philip Willard Ireland, Iraq: A
Study in Political
Development
(Jonathan
Cape, 1937); and Stephen Hemsley Longrigg, Iraq,
1900 to
1950
(Oxford
University Press, 1953); Robert Lyman, Iraq 1941: The
Battles for Basra,
Habbaniya,
Fallujah and Baghdad (Osprey
Publishing, 2006); Brigadier‑General
F.J. Moberly,
The
Campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914-1918 (4 volumes,
Historical
Section,
Committee of Imperial Defence, 1925); Daniel Silberfarb,
The
Twilight of British
Ascendancy in
the Middle East: A Case Study of Iraq, 1941-1950 (St
Martin’s Press,
1994); and
Peter Sluglett, Britain in
Iraq: Contriving King and Country (I.B.
Tauris, 2007).
Certain
sources are given in the footnotes.
2.
Britain’s
interest in what is today Iraq goes back more than four hundred
years, to
1583 when
an English merchant, John Eldred, left London on a five-year
journey that
took him to
Baghdad.1
The first
British military involvement came in 1775, when the
Ottoman
Turks faced a sustained Persian attack on the Shatt al-Arab
waterway. The
Turkish
Sultan asked Britain to defend the waterway; the British Prime
Minister Lord
North
agreed, and the Royal Navy drove the Persians out of the Sultan’s
domains.
3.
Under the
Ottomans, what is now northern Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan was within
the
province of
Mosul. What is now central Iraq was the province of Baghdad, and
southern
Iraq the
province of Basra. All three provinces were to become the British
Mandate of
Mesopotamia
(the Land of Two Rivers – the Tigris and Euphrates), later known as
Iraq.
1
John
Eldred, Journal of
His Voyage (in
Hakluyt’s Principal
Navigations, first
published in 1599).
221