The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
39.
During the ten
years from 1922 to the end of the Mandate in 1932, when
Iraq
obtained
full independence, as government ministries were steadily handed
over to
Iraqi
control, British officials led the rebuilding of the Iraqi civilian
and administrative
infrastructure:
in health, education, communications, irrigation, the economy,
the
judiciary,
the army and the police. There were almost three thousand British
officials in
Iraq in
1922, as administrators in all departments. They were headed and
supervised by
a,
five-man, Iraq Secretariat of British officials. Of those, the
Judicial Secretary was put
in charge
of drafting a constitution for Iraq.
40.
In accordance
with the gradual but immediate Iraqiisation of the
administration,
while
British officials worked as advisers in the Ministry of Finance,
the first Minister of
Finance was
an Iraqi, Sasson Eskell, a Baghdadi Jew and a distinguished
financier and
parliamentarian
since Ottoman times. He is regarded in Iraq to this day as the
Father
of
Parliament. In the long and complex negotiations for the Iraq
Treaty, he had worked
closely
with Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence, and was at the centre of the
creation of
the new
Iraqi Government’s laws and financial structure. He was knighted in
1923.
41.
Typical of
these British civil servants was the Inspector General of Health
Services,
Henry
Sinderson, who introduced modern medicine to Iraq and became Dean
of Iraq’s
Royal
College of Medicine. Knighted in 1946 after twenty-five years
service to medicine
in Iraq,
the hospitals and clinics he established throughout the country
made Iraq a
model for
the whole region.
42.
In 1930, at
the request of the Iraqi Government, a distinguished British
politician,
writer and
soldier, Sir Edward Hilton Young, went to Iraq to advise on
economic and
loan
policy, to scrutinise the budget, and to help establish a new
currency, replacing the
Indian
rupee with the Iraqi dinar. His efforts ensured a stable Iraq
currency.
43.
By 1930 the
number of British officials in the Iraqi administration had been
reduced
to just
over two hundred; some were to remain in Iraq for another decade
and more.
The legacy
of their service and of British-built infrastructure lasted into
the era of
Saddam
Hussein and was spoken of with appreciation by several of the Iraq
Inquiry’s
Iraqi
interlocutors.
44.
During the
Mandate years, Britain also defended Iraq from attacks from across
the
Arabian
border. In December 1923, raiders from Nejd, under the control of
Ibn Saud,
launched an
attack on the tribes living in southern Iraq. The RAF drove off the
attackers
in a series
of bombing raids.
45.
In November
1927, the northeastern tribes of the Nejd carried out an armed
attack
seventy-five
miles inside the Iraqi border. Despite an RAF bombing raid on the
attackers,
228