British occupy Mosul

Early in the morning of 4 November 1918 Major-General H.D. Fanshawe, commander of the British 18th Division, arrived in Mosul and took over command from General R.A. Cassels, whose cavalry had been holding the hills and roads around the city since the previous day. The British chronology of the war records the occupation of Mosul by British troops under 4 November. In reality it was more of a halfway stage: Cassels had entered the city with his staff at noon on 3 November, but the Turkish garrison was still there, and the commander of the Turkish Sixth Army, Ali Ihsan Pasha, refused to hand it over. The British took over the whole city only on 10 November. All this happened after the Armistice of Mudros, which had come into force at noon on 31 October.

The march after the armistice

When the armistice came into force, Cassels’s 11th Cavalry Brigade, which a few days earlier had cut off the Turks’ line of retreat and brought about the surrender at Sharqat, stood near Qayyarah, about 60 kilometres south of Mosul. General William Marshall, the commander-in-chief in Mesopotamia, learned of the armistice from a War Office telegram on 1 November, and received its full text only a day later. Meanwhile news reached him that the Turks were evacuating Mosul and that there was a threat of disorder in the city. He therefore ordered Cassels to advance “in the interests of law and order”. The order reached the cavalry just before midnight on 1–2 November.

The Turks did not intend to give way without objection. The commander of their 5th Division, who with one infantry regiment and a few guns stood astride the road about 8 kilometres short of Mosul, called on Cassels to return to Qayyarah, since the fighting had ended. On 2 November the political officer, Colonel Gerard Leachman, went to see Ali Ihsan. The Turkish commander declared that he would not give up Mosul, but that he had no intention of fighting either, and agreed to the British occupying the hills above the city. Cassels met him in person and they agreed on a line about 3 kilometres from the city. According to the British official history (F.J. Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. IV) the conversation was “throughout of a most friendly nature”.

In the evening, however, a new order arrived from Marshall. The War Office had directed that Mosul be occupied, invoking Article 7 of the armistice, which allowed the Allies to occupy any strategic point, and Article 16, which required all garrisons in Mesopotamia to surrender to the nearest Allied commander. On the morning of 3 November Cassels rode ahead to Ali Ihsan, and at noon reported that he was in Mosul and that his troops held points around the city and all the main roads. In the afternoon the commander of I Corps, General Alexander Cobbe, flew in with a letter from Marshall. Ali Ihsan replied that without an order from his own government he could not comply. In the evening, when he had at last received the text of the armistice, he argued that Mosul did not fall under Article 7, and that Article 16 did not apply to him, because he commanded a field army and not a garrison.

The evacuation

The government in Constantinople also protested through Admiral Calthorpe. London did not give way but agreed to soften the terms: the Turks did not have to go into captivity, but only had to hand over the weapons from their depots and leave for wherever Marshall directed. On 7 November Marshall came to Mosul and ordered Ali Ihsan to withdraw his troops from the whole vilayet, beginning the next day, so that by 15 November there would be no Turkish soldiers left in it. Ali Ihsan agreed, but under protest. On 9 November the Turkish government at last ordered its commander to evacuate, and on 10 November the British took over the whole city. The Turkish troops left for Nusaybin to be disbanded, and Ali Ihsan gave up his command.

In Mosul the war was over, but a dispute began that lasted several more years. The Turks considered that the city had been occupied in breach of the armistice and that the Mosul vilayet, inhabited largely by Kurds, should remain with Turkey. Britain incorporated it into the Iraq it was creating. The dispute, which was also about oil, was settled only by the League of Nations in Iraq’s favour, and Turkey accepted the loss of the vilayet in a treaty of 1926.