Fallujah Redux: The Anbar Awakening and the Struggle with Al-Qaeda by Daniel Green William Mullen

Author:Daniel Green, William Mullen [Green, Daniel R.; Mullen, William F.]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612511436
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

Chapter 7

The Fallujah Awakening

I believe that government starts at the bottom and moves upward, for government exists for the welfare of the masses of the nation.

Ramon Magsaysay, Philippine president who successfully defeated the Huk communist insurgency in the Philippines in the 1950s (www.rmaf.org.ph/)

As the Ottoman Empire broke apart in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and after World War I finished it off, occupying British forces assigned political agents to various parts of Iraq in order to extend their rule from Baghdad. The agent they assigned to Al-Anbar was Gerard Leachman, a veteran of the Boer War and numerous conflicts on the frontier of India against Pashtun tribesmen and the great hero of the Siege of Al Kut, where he had led the only successful breakout of British forces from Turkish encirclement. He was a hard man and had incorporated the ethos of the Indian frontier, in which tribes were punished for raids into the settled areas as part of the British government’s closed border policy. For a brief while, even Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit worked with Leachman as he imposed British rule on the tribes along the Euphrates. Kermit Roosevelt would eventually write about these experiences in his book War in the Garden of Eden. Leachman was eventually killed by a Zobai tribesman on August 12, 1920, in a small building halfway between Fallujah and Baghdad. He was shot in the back by the son of the tribe’s leader, the ancestor of Dr. Harith al-Dari, the current leader of the Zobai tribe, as he was exiting the building. His murder launched a tribal uprising against British rule in Iraq and eventually led to the Cairo Conference of 1921 that installed King Faisal, of Lawrence of Arabia fame and one of the three sons of Sherif Hussein of Mecca, as king of Iraq. The British eventually drew down their forces in Iraq but maintained a series of airfields in the country to help the new Iraqi state enforce its rule on the tribes. One of their chief air bases was in Habbaniyah in Al-Anbar Province just west of Fallujah, and a series of crumbling British forts persists to this day in the region. One of the provisions of the Anglo-Iraq Treaty of 1921, which was the negotiated withdrawal of British forces from Iraq, was the arrest of Harith al-Dari, the leader of the Zobai, and his son for the murder of Gerard Leachman. To this day, the Zobai tribe considers itself one of the leading tribes of modern-day Iraq because of its role in removing the British, and it acted as such in post-2003 invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein eventually funded a film about the murder of Leachman, and today a small memorial commemorating the event is in Zobai tribal territory east of Fallujah.

For the next two decades things were relatively quiet in Al-Anbar Province, but in April 1941, the Iraqi military deposed King Faisal II, who fled to Jordan and to the protection of his grandfather’s brother, King Abdullah.

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