#Lazghine Ya’qoube#
When all is said and done, it is not Sir Mark Sykes and Monsieur George Picot – signatories of the shoddy agreement that bears their names – to solely blame for the abrupt creation of the Middle East in the wake of World War I, 1914- 1918.
They may have so indiscreetly drawn lines in the sand, yet it rather, in the main, owes to the archaeologists-turned-kingmakers, Thomas Edward Lawrence and Gertrude Lowthian Bell, the infamous credit of so fanatically shaping then Middle Eastern Arab states that rose out from the ashes of the old Ottoman Empire.
Ploughing through the depths of WWI – it must be admitted – is just like peeling an endless multi- layered onion; each layer gives place to a new, and yet more complicated one. To begin with, let us digress to 1914.
When the Great War broke out, the Ottoman Empire was pulled into the maelstrom on the side of Germany, pitted against the Allies (Great Britain, France, and Russia). The Great War would catapult Bell as well as Lawrence to the pinnacle of their famed political careers in the Levant.
Few weeks after Britain had declared war on Germany on August 4, Bell had sent a learned report to both the War Office and Foreign Office drawing attention to the position of “Arab Unionists” who could embrace the British cause in case Turkey enters the war. Bell held a well- seated conviction that Arab Unionists in return for a kind of recognition, would throw off the Turkish yoke.
It was in late May when Bell had returned home ending a 15-years-long journey in the Levant, where she had been, since 1899 to be pedantically accurate, crisscrossing the vast expanses of Levant. A rarity for a woman at the time.
Lawrence, who used to be at the time at Carchemish in northern Syria, was instantly recalled to Cairo. With the rank of First-Lieutenant, he was seconded to the Arab Bureau, established mainly to counter Germany’s Anti- British propaganda which was in the ascendant.
On the field, against all expectations, Ottoman forces in January 1915 mounted an attack against the British forces in the Suez Canal. Although the offensive came to no fruition, Turkey would soon inflict a bone- breaking loss on the Allies in Gallipoli, where the seismic factor of the terrain did not obscure the skill of Ottomans defenders.
Likewise, in Iraq, following a rapid advance, the British were stuck at Kut al-Amara. In the war effort, these were, in all, serious reverses for the British and important victories for the Ottomans.
It was necessary now to secure a footing in the enemy’s lines, neutralize the Arabs, and tie down the Ottomans as much as possible. All these three minor objectives served the ultimate one of distracting attention from Baghdad and Cairo, in order to preserve the British prestige.
In November 1915, Bell, perforce, was seconded to the Military Intelligence in Cairo. The secret office was in need of her profound knowledge of the Arab tribes, geography, and most importantly, the intricates of life in the Middle East.
In December, with the rank of Major, she joined the Arab Bureau, becoming the only paid female political officer in the British Army. She would play a fundamental role in directing hostilities and most importantly in drawing the map of the Middle East when weapons would fall silent in 1918.
In Cairo, the Queen of the Desert, spent her six-week-long staying in intense deliberations and hectic consultations, for the most part, with Lawrence, whom she had met in Carchemish back in 1911. In the years preceding the war, both had developed a deep understanding of Arab culture and fully mastered Arabic.
They were now, thereupon, trying to devise a scheme to incite Arab tribes against their Turkish rulers, in a mission similar to the one Lord Byron had done in Greece a century ago.
Back to hostilities. In April 1916, to avoid starvation, the whole British garrison at Iraq’s al-Kut surrendered, ending a 147-day long siege. Further still, the Reliving Force to Kut, was almost dragged to its death.
Abstractedly, Kut was intended to be a set-off to Gallipoli. Concretely, it wasted an army in detail. Yet, unlike Gallipoli, where German advisors and fighters where on the Ottoman side, Kut was Turk against British. It was a national disaster, politically speaking.
Most gravely, it was whispered among the believers that God was with the Kaiser, and the Caliph. The last of a forlorn hope vanished. The year 1915 and 1916 were disastrous to the cause of Allies.
It was, mainly, the Iraqi menace that dictated a new strategy. The whole policy seemed to be wrong. British prestige in the east was diving into wane. The jugular vein of the British empire was to be severed.
In May, Sykes invited Picot to a room at the Foreign Office. The circumstances in which the wartime pact was signed remain foggy. Yet it chiefly aimed at bringing the French to the scene in Syria and the Russians to Kurdistan. Yet both sides had their chronic headaches elsewhere.
While the ardent eyes of the whole world riveted on the stalled fronts in the West and in the East, a great event was at explosion point in the vast inaccessible and remote Arabia.
In Hijaz, Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, had exchanged letters with Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, regarding a British-backed Arab revolt in return for a sort of Post-War self-rule. Yet, for a long-time, McMahon’s purposely vague pledges made Sharif anomalous.
Events on the ground made Hussein at the end of his tether. In May, the Governor of Syria, Jamal Pasha had executed prominent Arab Nationalists in Damascus and Beirut. The British so pathetically exploited the infamous deed.
Orders were given on large scale for propaganda to encourage a strong desire for movement. For Faisal, Hussein’s third son, putting the heads of his friends on the scaffold, was only the match the set fire to a parched straw.
The uprising against the Ottoman Empire in Hijaz, which would morph into a fallout invasion of Syria and Iraq in late 1918 was a world-wide importance destined to give birth to the Middle East that we know today.
It was on June 9, 1916, when Hussein denounced Anwar, Talaat, and Jamal, the three pashas at the post of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP). That was only a signal. The following day, he proclaimed a revolt. Yet the Ottomans made the mincemeat of Sharif’s half-backed adventure. He was caught off guard. He appealed for help.
With Bell sent momentarily to India, to garner support for the Levant, no one but Lawrence could fit the bill. He was commissioned to join Operation Hedgehog in Hijaz, solely to liaise with Faisal.
Lawrence, whose persuasive eloquence had failed to reach a compromise with Halil Pasha, the Turkish commander at Kut, had now to relieve his country’s precarious position. His own personal motive, not inexcusably, was to curtail the rising star in the Levant of Kaiser Wilhelm II, which had always agitated him in the years preceding the war.
Without a single day of military training, no one could have foretold Lawrence’s unlabored success. Yet when push came to shove, he was the right man, at the right place, at the right time.
Lawrence imbued Faisal’s regular Hashemite forces and unruly Bedouin tribesmen with a dream, fictional yet motivational. They saw in him an honorable and trusted agent of the British Government.
Under false pretenses though, he gave Bedouins a cry that made motley of discrete malevolent tribes into a homogenous unit. He imbibed them with the spirit of rebellion, understandably, with a free hand to loot, which became addendum to every victory. He tapped into their feelings, and they rose to the occasion.
He developed the doctrine of a successful guerrilla warfare against Ottoman positions and most importantly the Hijaz Railway. Lawrence’s unceremonious and incomparable capture of Aqaba, the other horn on the head of the Red Sea, corresponding with that of Suez, in July 1917, exceptionally made headlines.
Aqaba – Biblical Eilat – asserted, in unequivocal terms, that he was not building castles in the air. Aqaba was a significant victory not only for the Arabs and the British, but most significantly for the Jewish community as well. It was a stepping stone for the British forces – bogged down for a while in Sinai – to occupy Palestine. The surprises of that day were not yet ended.
On October 31, 1917, the War Cabinet in Whitehall put the finishing touches to the enactment which would be known later as the Balfour Declaration. That same day, modeled on Aqaba, Desert Mounted Corps galloped free rein into Beersheba.
Epochally, the battle of Beersheba – Biblical Be’er Sheva – where Abraham, Sarah, and their son, Isaac, are believed to have settled – not drawing a long bow – made the probability of the Promised Land a future possibility.
It is from Beersheba where the British would creep into the rest of Palestine. In December, Jerusalem was taken. Edmund Allenby, British C-in-C in Egypt, who used to hardly give Lawrence the time of day, invited him now to the victory march. From a diversionary front, the Middle East became the center stage in the war.
Yet a month earlier, in November, the Bolsheviks had assumed full power in Russia. It was now impossible to foretell with certainty to where events could end up. Russia’s diminished fighting capacity had brought considerable relief to Germany in the West and to the Ottomans in the East. It threw, for a while, all calculations to the winds.
Early in 1918, Jamal pasha, to block the British from taking Syria, offered Faisal some kind of autonomy which was later enlarged to give Sharif Hussein the spiritual leadership of Islam. Against this background, the cabinet on June 16, 1918, issued Declaration to the Seven; that the Arabs would keep territories conquered in the war.
Perturbed by the publicity of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration, Faisal threatened Allenby that if Britain was unable to carry its share of attack on Damascus, then he would sign a separate peace with Jamal, who was the master of situation in Syria.
Up to September, Ottoman and German troops were still somewhat on track. Suddenly, on September 15, Bulgarian divisions stationed between Vardar and Cerna left their positions, though not a foot of Bulgaria was in enemy hand. Bulgarian soldiers ceased to fight, and declared their intention of going home to gather, quite sarcastically, the harvest ready for the sickle.
On September 26, a Bulgarian Staff Officer carried a flag of truce seeking a 48-hours suspension of hostilities, which was extended to a permanent unconditional surrender. The Bulgarian collapse was a kind of a black swan event. On September 29, the Spa decided to sue for peace. The Allies were to bluff.
The situation grew worse on account of other set-backs. Coincidently, at last, the line held by Liman von Sanders and Mustafa Kamal Pasha in Gaza was pierced. In the hardest of hours, the dearest of hopes were buried. Mass desertion and indiscipline became the master of situation.
Upon reaching Damascus on October 1, Lawrence’s war, or rather more precisely the conspiracy, in Lawrence’s own words, comes to an end. He had completely achieved the object he had in view before carrying out the adventure.
The Armistice of Mudros came into effect on October 31, 1918. Not uncoincidentally, one exact year after the Cabinet endorsement of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Thus, terminated the military operations. Not all of them, however.
In November, under Article Seven of the armistice, British forces occupied Kurdish localities from Bayaze on the Mediterranean up to River Tigris. At this point commences the struggle for the post- war political settlement as far as the Middle East is concerned.
The year- long Paris peace Conference 1919-1920, focused in the chief on how to punish Germany, which was held responsible for originating the war. Pursuant to the San Remo Conference 1920, British policy on the Middle East was to be decided elsewhere once and for all.
In January 1921, Winston Churchill, the originator of Gallipoli, was appointed as Colonial Secretary. He was now assigned the task to pare to the bone British expenditure in the Middle East. Britain faced also other minor problems, not least the many beautiful wartime promises particularly those made to the Hashemites.
Before travelling to Cairo, Churchill had appointed none but Lawrence as Special Advisor to the Colonial Office. While in London, they discussed in detail the agenda. Among other things, they agreed, in principle, to establish a kind of Kurdish (much truncated) buffer state in Southern Kurdistan.
The Cairo Conference (March 1921) discussed the Kurdish Question, which was now reduced merely to the vilayet of Mosul as British forces had by November 1919 practically withdrawn from Kurdish localities from sea to river.
Forty people were invited, notable of all was Gertrude Bell, the only woman invited. Bell had in the wake of the British capture of Baghdad in March 1917, been given the title of Oriental Secretary.
Hubert Young, from the Colonial Office, proposed a separate Kurdish state be set up in Mosul. Lawrence unflinchingly shared the same opinion. Major Edward Noel, who was only invited to give advice on the Kurds, went a step further when he tacitly observed that the goal of an independent Kurdistan can now be easily attained.
In the same vein, Lawrence supported the idea that Faisal be installed in Baghdad but not the idea of attaching Mosul to Iraq. Conversely, Bell, supported by Sir Percy Cox, High Commissioner in Iraq, floated the idea that the Kurds would be happy to join the Arab government under Faisal, who was decided to be installed in Iraq.
According to Bell, the end of the war accelerated the course of events: not only the defeat of Ottoman forces in Syria and Mesopotamia, but also the Bolshevik Revolution necessitated redrawing the Middle East’s map.
Such a redrawing, Bell argued, meant the concretization of the creation of a strategic border in Kurdistan, and thus, the inclusion of the Kurds into the Mesopotamian schemes. Strategically, Iraq’s political and economic future would be greatly enhanced by the inclusion of Mosul.
Bell, used not to do things by halves, severely opposed the idea of any Kurdish state. Lawrence and Churchill shared a conviction that an Arab rule based in Baghdad would ignore Kurdish sentiments and suppress in the result the Kurds.
Bell and Cox argued that by attaching Mosul to Iraq, Arab Nationalists would serve as a water break against Kemalist Bolshevik ideas. That was, according to Bell, as a cheap way to maintain the British imperial presence in the region.
When Lawrence gave his full support to Churchill on the Kurds, Bell, feeling Lawrence was becoming unruly, called him “little imp.” Lawrence, turned red, retreated in silence. The pincers were closing fast upon Lawrence and Churchill, who were pursued and, step by step, brought to bay.
Militarily, the fact that the mountainous Kurdish north was not fully under British control, and that Turkish forces were still on the prowl, brought Lawrence’s proposal to naught. Bell prevailed.
As the conference was drawing to be wrapped up, Abdullah I, was ostensibly intending to march on Syria, laying claim to his brother’s (Faisal) throne awarded to France. Fearing that Abdullah might recklessly upset the applecart, Churchill invited him to Jerusalem.
Unbeknown to his life- long friend, Chaim Weizmann, WZO’s president, the Colonial Secretary drew a north-southward line stretching from Lake Tiberias across River Jordan up the Aqaba. This piece of land was named Transjordan – later Jordan. A huge blow to Jewish aspirations.
It quite boggles the mind to know that Churchill’s abrupt line roughly bisected the map of the Promised Land, according to which Weizmann had made his territorial claims in Paris, covering areas east and west of River Jordan, with Jerusalem at its center. Weizmann took the decision on the chin.
The Gallipoli menace lies at the fulcrum of British war policy in the Middle East. In Gallipoli, Churchill was driven by passion rather than reason and judgement. He played for high stakes. He earned instead infamy.
He was seen as unreliable and a one that could easily be defeated. It was a great mistake – his greatest of all – that for a long time tore apart his reputation.
Gallipoli had struck Bell twice. First, as every British citizen. Second, emotionally. Few days to the campaign, she lost Charles Doughty-Wylie, the secret agent whom she loved. She was exhausted. In Cairo, the memories of Gallipoli were still fresh in her mind. She must have felt now vindicated.
Caprice and malice, not less than strategic conditions, had combined to produce at such perilous a stage of the Middle Eastern affair a dilemma. It was a settlement where no settlement could be.
In mythology, Cadmus slays a dragon. Athena tells him to inter the teeth. The blood-stained furrow gives birth to soldiers, who naturally engage in endless wars. That is, perhaps, no exaggeration to say, just like the Middle East, over the last century.
Had the well-conceived Schlieffen Plan enforced wittingly, there would have undoubtedly no war in the East, and had the ill-advised Dardanelles Operation worked, there would have been undoubtedly no war in the Levant.
And, had Kaiser Wilhelm and the CUP pashas earned victory, we could have undoubtedly had a different shape and name for the region. But, could that have been better/worse than a violent and a bloody 20th century Middle East as we came to know it? [1]