Surrender at Sharqat

At dawn on 30 October 1918 white flags appeared over the Turkish trenches on the plateau north of Sharqat (today Al-Shirqat). At 7.30 a.m. the commander of the Turkish Tigris Group, Ismail Hakki Bey, surrendered to Lieutenant-Colonel Shoubridge of the 112th Infantry of the Indian 17th Division. Together with him all his troops laid down their arms, caught between the British infantry to the south and the cavalry that for four days had been barring their road to Mosul. The same day, in the harbour of Mudros on the island of Lemnos, representatives of the Ottoman government signed the Armistice of Mudros. The British chronology of the war records under 30 October the end of the Battle of Sharqat, which by its reckoning began on 28 October, and the surrender of the “Turkish army on the Tigris”.

Three days in the pincers

A week earlier the I Corps of General Alexander Cobbe had set off up the Tigris. The Turks gave up the position at Al-Fatha without a fight and defended themselves in the hills on the right bank of the river, but on 26 October the 11th Cavalry Brigade of General R. A. Cassels forded the Tigris at Hadraniya, about 20 kilometres above Sharqat, and took up position at Huwaish across the road to Mosul. Ismail Hakki Bey had orders not to fall back beyond Sharqat before 31 October and was waiting for relief from the Turkish 5th Division.

On 28 October the Turks attacked Cassels. Some 2,500–3,000 infantry tried to outflank his right wing, while a detachment of the 5th Division approached from the north. The cavalrymen held on thanks to dismounted counter-attacks by the 7th Hussars, the accurate fire of a horse artillery battery and sixty machine guns, and Gurkhas crossed the river to join them from the column of General G. A. F. Sanders, which had marched about 53 kilometres overnight along the left bank of the Tigris. In the afternoon the 7th Cavalry Brigade arrived after a forced march. The same day in the south the 2nd Battalion, Royal West Kent, took a Turkish line less than 6 kilometres short of Sharqat.

On 29 October the 13th Hussars galloped across the open plain to the foot of a steep spur held by the Turks on the northern flank, dismounted in dead ground and stormed the summit with the bayonet, losing only seven men. The hussars and lancers took 985 prisoners, the whole Turkish 13th Regiment of the 5th Division, which was to have come to the rescue. In the afternoon the exhausted 17th Division, which Cobbe had sent forward during the night despite the objections of its commander, attacked the main Turkish position about 5 kilometres south of Huwaish. Around a thousand Turks came out of their trenches to counter-attack, and in the dust and the dusk the attack broke down. The division lost about 500 of its 3,000 men, but the Turks were now pinned down.

Surrender

Ismail Hakki Bey later explained to the British that he had intended to slip away westwards into the desert on the night of 29–30 October and get back to the Tigris at Qaiyara. He gave this up because the sounds of fighting in the north led him to believe that the 5th Division would break through the cavalry. The officers he sent to it did not get through the British lines. He had no other communications either: the German wireless station had left for Mosul, and the last two aircraft, according to their German pilots, were unfit to fly. On the morning of 30 October he concluded that there was no hope left.

After the surrender the 7th Cavalry Brigade and the armoured cars moved north. At Qaiyara, about 26 kilometres from Huwaish, after a lancer charge they took some 200 Turks with machine guns and a gun, captured a steamer and depots, and then caught up with a column and seized about a thousand men of the Turkish 14th Regiment. According to the British official history (F. J. Moberly, The Campaign in Mesopotamia, vol. IV), from 18 to 30 October Cobbe’s troops took 11,322 prisoners, 51 guns and 130 machine guns, themselves losing 1,886 men, 1,504 of them in the 17th Division. These figures cover the whole operation. The war correspondent Edmund Candler wrote that Ismail Hakki Bey himself surrendered with about 8,000 men. According to the report of General William Marshall, the whole Turkish 14th Division, most of the 2nd Division and parts of two regiments of the 5th Division went into captivity, with their artillery and transport.

The surrender ended the fighting in Mesopotamia. The Turkish Sixth Army of Ali Ihsan Pasha, as Moberly wrote, “had practically ceased to exist”. The Armistice of Mudros came into force at noon on 31 October, but the fate of Mosul was not yet settled. The British entered the city in the first days of November, invoking the armistice, against the protests of Ali Ihsan, and the dispute over the Mosul vilayet dragged on for years.