British take Samarra

On 24 April 1917 General Alexander Cobbe’s troops occupied Samarra, a town on the Tigris about 125 kilometres north of Baghdad. The Turkish XVIII Corps, defeated two days earlier at Istabulat, no longer tried to defend it. The British chronology of the war records the capture of Samarra under 24 April, with a note that it took two days, 23 and 24 April. F. J. Moberly’s British official history of the Mesopotamian campaign explains the entry: on 23 April the British reached the railway station, and the town itself, which lies opposite the station on the left, eastern bank of the river, a day later. Arnold Wilson, a British official and historian of the campaign, says briefly that Samarra was occupied without a fight on the morning of 23 April.

The station and the locomotives

On the morning of 23 April, after a night in which the Turks had once again slipped away from their positions, the British moved forward. They met no one. At ten o’clock the leading 21st Brigade of the 7th Division reached Samarra station. The buildings had been blown up and were still burning, but sixteen locomotives and about 250 wagons had been left on the tracks. All the engines were damaged, but some of them could be repaired, and three-fifths of the wagons were usable. In the afternoon Colonel Cassels’s cavalry came upon a small Turkish rearguard a few kilometres north of the station, which withdrew, leaving eighteen prisoners. After that XVIII Corps offered no further resistance and went off towards Tikrit.

On 24 April Cobbe occupied the town, where the British found 340 sick and wounded Turkish soldiers. Moberly recalls that Samarra had once been the capital of the country. In the 9th century the Abbasid caliphs resided here, and in 363 the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate died of his wounds nearby. For Shia Muslims it was a holy place: Samarra had a shrine with the tombs of two imams, and here, according to tradition, the twelfth imam vanished, whose return the faithful await.

The railhead

Samarra was the terminus of the railway from Baghdad, a section of the German-built Baghdad Railway opened in 1914. A year earlier the prisoners taken by the Turks after the surrender of Kut had travelled to Samarra along this same line, crammed into open cattle trucks. From here they went on on foot in the summer heat, and many of them did not survive the march. Now the line was in British hands. On 28 April they built a pontoon bridge over the Tigris at Samarra. Linked to Baghdad by rail, the town became a good advanced post covering the provincial capital, situated not far from the point where the Tigris leaves the foothills for the plain.

The capture of Samarra completed the operations on the right bank of the Tigris that Maude had begun immediately after taking Baghdad with the action at Mushahida. On the left bank fighting was still going on. Ali Ihsan Bey’s Turkish XIII Corps came down from the mountains into the valley of the river Adhaim to threaten the British from the east. On 24 April General William Marshall’s column drove it back at Dahuba, and on 30 April fought a hard battle with it where the Adhaim leaves the Jabal Hamrin hills, after which the Turks withdrew into the hills.

End of the spring campaign

This brought Frederick Stanley Maude’s spring campaign to an end. Moberly states that in April the British took about 3,000 prisoners and 17 guns. Over the last three weeks the shade temperature had reached at least 43 degrees every day, sandstorms raged and water was hard to come by. Maude wrote in his letters that it was nearly 12 degrees hotter than in April of the previous year, and that the heat would soon bring all operations to a halt. At the beginning of May his troops dispersed to summer quarters.

The main body of XVIII Corps, by British intelligence estimates fewer than 5,000 rifles with 24 guns, stood at Tikrit, with its advanced guard about 20 kilometres above Samarra. Maude was convinced that a small advance by the Russians from the Diyala would have been enough to make the Turks give up the whole Mosul district, but the Russian army, disorganised after the revolution, would not move. The British therefore had to reckon with the possibility that the Turks would bring fresh divisions to the Tigris and try to retake Baghdad. Maude resumed the advance up the river only in the autumn.