Iraq Since the Invasion: People and Politics in a State of Conflict by Keiko Sakai & Philip Marfleet

Author:Keiko Sakai & Philip Marfleet [Sakai, Keiko & Marfleet, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367193683
Google: d_ZTzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 51988384
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-01-15T10:20:52+00:00

The Levies

Some British strategists viewed Iraq as a site for new settlement. Colonial ventures undertaken from Europe had long focused upon the “civilisation” of occupied territories by means of implanting settlers committed to European agricultural techniques and to the principle of private property in land. In the case of Britain and its colonies, “plantation” of settlers had been under way since the seventeenth century, notably in Ireland, the Americas, Australasia, and South Africa. For some imperial strategists this was to be accomplished in Iraq by mobilising people from India, who for almost a century had been transported to British colonies as part of systems of indentured labour. According to one presentation to the British parliament, Mesopotamia would have “irrigation works and canals all in working order under the British government … the banks along its rivers populated and cultivated by flourishing Indian colonies transported from the banks of the Indus [in the western provinces of ‘British’ India]”.15 This instrumental approach to migration revealed much about imperial attitudes as they affected Iraq, which was to be reshaped by demographic engineering as well as by military occupation and imposition of a centralised regime.

Mesopotamia had already been addressed as if a frontier region of the British Empire. In 1914 British troops based in India landed at Fao near Basra—a measure intended to secure British interests vis-à-vis the Ottoman government, which seemed likely to join the Central Powers in conflicts that were to become a “world” war. Their commanding officer was instructed that if war broke out between the Ottomans and the British he was to occupy “Turkish Mesopotamia”.16 When war was declared the British marched on Basra, starting a long military campaign during which they suffered heavy losses among a force that reached over 100,000 men. The invasion was undertaken largely by divisions of the Indian Army directed by officials in Bombay who, observes Peter Sluglett, “seemed inclined to view the operation as a kind of frontier war, with IEF [India Expeditionary Force] ‘D’ pushing ever onwards to subdue the rebel forces beyond”.17 When the IEF met serious Ottoman resistance London transferred command from India to the British War Office, converting the IEF into a Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force (MEF). Its strategies did not differ fundamentally from those of the Indian command, however: in particular, resistance of the local population was viewed as “rebel” activity to be tackled like dissidence on the borders of the Raj. British authorities established a civil administration in areas under their direct control, creating a judicial department that used Indian models to write an Iraq Occupied Territories Code and Tribal Criminal and Civil Disputes Regulations.

An apparatus of colonial rule was established using well-tried methods including the mobilisation of specific ethnic groups vis-à-vis the wider population. This included the enrolment of Assyrian Christians into a British trained and officered detachment—the Levies. Most Assyrians had been compelled to leave Anatolia as part of the process of “unmixing” associated with emergence of the Turkish state. They hoped to return to the Hakkari

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.