Baghdad in the First World War

Baghdad, capital of an Ottoman vilayet and the old city of the caliphs, was the goal around which the Mesopotamian campaign of the First World War was fought. In the autumn of 1915 the British set out for it with small forces, were stopped at Ctesiphon, and their expedition ended in the surrender of Kut. At the second attempt, on 11 March 1917, General Maude’s troops entered the city without a fight. For the Turks Baghdad was their most important base in Mesopotamia; for the British it was a matter of prestige in the Muslim world.

The city at the end of the line (1914)

Before the war Mesopotamia was a neglected province of the Ottoman Empire, divided into three vilayets: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul. Baghdad was to be reached by the Baghdad Railway, which the Germans had been building since the beginning of the century from Anatolia towards the Persian Gulf. When the war broke out, however, the track ran only from Baghdad to Samarra, while from the west it ended at Ras al-Ain, with gaps in the Taurus and Amanus mountains. According to the British official history these gaps were a grave hindrance to the Turks throughout the war. Reinforcements from Mosul floated down to Samarra on rafts, a journey of anything from two to ten days.

For the British, Baghdad was a temptation from the start. When troops from India took Basra in November 1914, the expedition’s chief political officer, Percy Cox, proposed a march on Baghdad. The India Office, however, allowed an advance only as far as Qurna, although in December its officials noted that from a political point of view the occupation of the city was so desirable as to be practically essential. The Chief of the General Staff in India warned that even success would weaken rather than strengthen Britain’s strategic position.

The first march (1915–1916)

In the autumn of 1915 the temptation prevailed. The commander in Mesopotamia, General John Nixon, was sure he could take Baghdad with the forces he had, and the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, expected the fall of the city to make a great impression on Muslims from Arabia to Afghanistan. The government in London, worried by the failure at the Dardanelles, was looking for a spectacular success and on 23 October agreed to the march. On 11 November General Charles Townshend’s division set out from Aziziya, and on 22 November it attacked the Turks dug in among the ruins of Ctesiphon, some 25 kilometres from the city. The Battle of Ctesiphon cost it nearly 40 per cent of its men and ended in retreat.

The expedition that was to end in Baghdad got stuck in Kut, where the Turks besieged Townshend’s division from December 1915 to April 1916. Their Sixth Army was commanded by the German field marshal Colmar von der Goltz, who died in Baghdad on 19 April 1916, ten days before the surrender of the garrison. The prisoners were driven on foot to Baghdad and on to Anatolia, and of about 12,000 men more than 4,000 died in captivity. The victor, Halil Pasha, became governor of Baghdad, and a new street in the city was named after him.

Victory lulled the Turks. In May 1916, at a conference in Baghdad, Enver and Halil decided to send a corps into western Persia instead of pursuing the beaten British, and only the weak XVIII Corps was left on the Tigris.

The capture (1917)

The second march was carefully prepared. General Frederick Stanley Maude rebuilt the army, opened his offensive at Kut in December 1916, recovered the town in February 1917 and moved on on 5 March. For three nights the Turks held out on the Diyala. When the British outflanked them along the right bank of the Tigris, Halil concluded that fighting would cost him the whole corps, and on the night of 10–11 March he withdrew to the north. The Turks blew up the German wireless station that linked Baghdad with Berlin and set fire to the stores in the citadel, and looting began in the city.

On the morning of 11 March the British entered Baghdad without a fight. The city had some 150,000 inhabitants, Muslims, Jews and Christians of various denominations, and apart from the looters it received them calmly. The soldiers who had dreamt of Baghdad for months found, however, narrow, filthy alleys, empty bazaars and ruined houses. The capture of Baghdad wiped out the humiliation of Kut and was the greatest British victory over the Turks so far. Paul von Hindenburg wrote years later that the loss of the city buried many German dreams.

On 19 March Maude issued to the inhabitants of the vilayet a proclamation written in London. In it he assured them that the British armies came “not as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators”, and recalled that since the days of Hulagu, who took the city at the head of the Mongols in 1258, Baghdad had suffered the tyranny of strangers. The British government ordered the existing administration to be kept, with Arabs replacing Turks, and local notables to be drawn into the government of the country. Civil affairs were in practice run by Percy Cox, Maude’s chief political officer.

A British base (1917–1918)

Baghdad now became a British base. Maude pushed the Turks back to the north and in April took Samarra, the terminus of the railway from Baghdad. In the summer of 1917 the Turks and the Germans intended to retake the city with the new Yıldırım Army Group under General Erich von Falkenhayn, but in the autumn they sent it to Palestine instead. Maude himself died of cholera in Baghdad on 18 November 1917 and was buried in the military cemetery outside the North Gate. In January 1918 General Dunsterville’s mission set out from Baghdad across Persia to the Caspian Sea.

After the war

In the secret Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916 Baghdad fell within the zone of direct British rule. After the war Britain received the mandate for Iraq, but its rule quickly met resistance. After the revolt of 1920 London turned to monarchy, and on 23 August 1921 Faisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca, was crowned king of Iraq in Baghdad. The Baghdad Railway, over which the powers had quarrelled before the war, linked the city with Istanbul only in 1940.