Basra in the First World War

Basra, the chief city and port of the southernmost vilayet of the Ottoman Empire in Mesopotamia, was first the objective of Britain’s war in that country and then its rear. Troops from India took it in November 1914 to shield the refinery at Abadan and to show strength on the Persian Gulf. In the spring of 1915 the Turks tried to retake it and were defeated. For the rest of the war almost all the soldiers and all the supplies of the Mesopotamian campaign passed through Basra.

A port for oil (1914)

What the British cared about above all was oil. On the Persian bank of the Shatt al-Arab, opposite Ottoman territory, stood the refinery of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and the Royal Navy was converting its newest ships from coal to oil. On 16 October 1914 an Indian brigade sailed from Bombay to protect it. Its orders allowed the occupation of Basra only in the event of war with Turkey.

The war came at the beginning of November. On 6 November the British landed at Fao at the mouth of the river, and on 17 November they beat the Turks at Sahil. The vali of Basra withdrew his troops upriver, and looting broke out in the abandoned city. On 22 November the main force entered Basra. The next day the British flag was raised over the city, and Percy Cox read a proclamation to the inhabitants in Arabic.

The British official history describes Basra as several separate parts. On the river stood the custom house, the consulates and the houses of European firms; inland lay two small towns, Ashar and Basra proper; and a few kilometres upriver was the wharf at Maqil. The narrow lanes were deep in mud and refuse. Major Brownlow was appointed military governor, with the former British consul at Basra as his adviser.

Defending the city (1915)

In December 1914 the British pushed the Turks back from Basra by taking Qurna at the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates. In the spring of 1915, however, Lieutenant Colonel Süleyman Askerî gathered troops and thousands of tribal warriors on the Euphrates. On 9 April General John Nixon, the new commander, arrived in Basra, and on 12 April the Turks attacked the camp at Shaiba, on the edge of the desert. A British official saw a crowd of inhabitants at the Zubair gate, ready with gifts to welcome the Turks. After three days of fighting the Ottoman troops fled, and Basra was no longer under threat.

Nixon’s orders spoke of control of the whole vilayet of Basra. As early as 3 March the Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, had written that this meant occupying Amara and Nasiriyah. Both towns fell in the summer, and the fighting at Nasiriyah ended on 25 July. In the autumn Nixon sent Townshend’s division towards Baghdad, although supplies still went up from Basra by river, on a handful of steamers.

A port without quays (1915–1916)

The Mesopotamia Commission later established that in November 1914 there were practically no quays or storehouses at Basra, and ships were unloaded in midstream. The British then had three steamers and a dozen or so barges on the river. Orders for new river craft were sent to London only on 4 August 1915.

The wounded from Ctesiphon saw the consequences. On the steamer Medjidieh and her barges the badly wounded lay for thirteen days after their first dressing, with no protection from rain and cold. Major Carter, medical officer of the hospital ship Varela at Basra, described the steamer’s arrival to the commission: sides caked with dried excrement and men huddled in a pool of dysentery. The first river hospital steamer, the Sikkim, reached Basra only in mid-March 1916.

While the Turks besieged Kut, reinforcements were stuck at Basra. On 19 January 1916 Percy Lake took over command and found the port jammed: on 21 January about 10,000 infantry and 12 guns were waiting there without steamers. Lake had the port at Maqil enlarged and flood embankments built, among them a bank about 14 kilometres long, reaching almost to Shaiba.

The base of victory (1916–1918)

When in August 1916 General Frederick Stanley Maude took over command, Basra was, according to the official history, well on the way to becoming an efficient base. On an area of about 124 km² there were now quarters for 15,000 soldiers and 7,000 sick, quays for ocean-going ships, roads and bridges. After the defeat at Kut a railway, previously rejected by the Government of India, was also approved, and new hospitals were set up. Maude moved his headquarters closer to the front, and in March 1917 his troops took Baghdad.

From then on Basra was the rear. Soldiers and missions bound further on passed through it, such as General Dunsterville, who was here on 12 January 1918 on his way to Persia. The secret Sykes–Picot agreement assigned Basra to direct British rule. After the war the city became part of Iraq under the British mandate, and the port the British had enlarged became one of the most important on the Persian Gulf.