Annex 1 |
Iraq – 1583 to 1960
9.
In 1912, the
Royal Navy changed from coal to oil. To secure this oil for
Britain, in the
spring of
1914 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, acquired
for the British
Government
a 51 percent share in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (in 1904 a
British
prospector
had discovered oil in Persia, forty miles from the Mesopotamian
border;
in 1909 the
oilfield was acquired by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, whose
principal
shareholders
were British). The British Government’s 51 percent share in
Anglo-Persian
Oil made
Basra, and al-Faw at the head of the Gulf, a vital British
interest.
10.
On 29 October
1914, in the early months of the First World War, two
German
warships,
flying the Turkish flag, bombarded Russia’s Black Sea ports.
Britain, allied
to Russia,
ordered Turkey to end the bombardments. The British ultimatum
expired
on 31
October. On 7 November a British and Indian military force landed
at al-Faw.4
Marching a
hundred miles inland and crossing the Persian border, it occupied
the British
Government-owned
Persian oilfields. It then marched back into Mesopotamia, to
Basra,
which it
captured on 22 November.
11.
That November,
the Ottoman Government having declared that the
Anglo-Ottoman
Convention
of 1913 was null and void, Britain, to protect its interests at the
head of the
Persian
Gulf, declared Kuwait an independent sheikhdom under British
protection.
12.
In London, on
19 March 1915, the War Council – headed by the Prime
Minister,
H.H.
Asquith – discussed various plans to partition the Ottoman Empire
once it had
been
defeated. Only Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, opposed
partition and
annexation,
telling the War Council that he wanted Britain to make a good
impression on
the British
Empire’s Muslim subjects (of whom there were more than fifty
million in India)
by setting
up an independent Muslim State in all the Arab regions of the
Turkish Empire:
Arabia,
Syria and Mesopotamia.5
13.
Fighting
against the Turks continued. In August 1915, after the British
occupied
Nasiriyah,
a civil administration was set up in Basra for the whole southern
area.
14.
A steady
stream of reinforcements reached Basra during the second half of
1916.
That
October, Lieutenant William Slim (a future Field Marshal) who had
been badly
wounded at
Gallipoli a year earlier, arrived. In the fighting that followed,
he was wounded
again, and
awarded the Military Cross. Slim remembered Basra as “a very
unpleasant
4
British
troops again landed at al-Faw on 20 March 2003, at 2200 hours
(local time), when 40 Commando,
Royal
Marines and US Marines came ashore, followed within an hour by 42
Commando Royal Marines.
5
War
Council, 19 March 1915: Cabinet Office papers, 22/1.
6
Quoted by
Lt Gen Sir Graeme Lamb, Public hearing, 9 December
2009.
223