Vol. 26 No. 24 · 16 December 2004
pages 34-35 | 3140 words
Diary
Charles Glass
Mosul, said by some to be modern Iraq’s second and by others its third most populous city, was originally awarded to France as part of Syria under the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement. François Georges-Picot, the French delegate at the secret negotiations that divided the Ottoman Empire into British, French and Russian satrapies, laid out France’s dubious claim to Mosul and the area around it. Foreign Office notes of secret discussions in London on 23 November 1915, ‘Results of second meeting of Committee to discuss Arab question and Syria’, report that M. Picot stated his view that ‘France would never consent to offer independence to the Arabs’ and claimed all of Syria, Palestine, Lebanon, Mosul, Diyarbekir and Cilicia for France. (After the war, France took Syria and Lebanon. Palestine and Mosul went to Britain. Turkey held Diyarbekir and Cilicia.) An unnamed India Office official said that, until twenty years before, Mosul vilayet had been attached to the districts of Basra and Baghdad, both claimed by Britain. According to the minutes, ‘M. Picot replied that it was impossible to consider the situation of twenty years ago as affecting the situation much today; that the French claim to Mosul consisted in the fact that since about twenty years the French had had schools there; that many of the inhabitants spoke French and were imbued with French interests.’
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Letters
Vol. 27 No. 1 · 6 January 2005
From Charles Glass
In my Diary from Mosul, I said that Sheikh Mahmoud became president of the Mahabad Republic (LRB, 16 December). In fact, Qazi Mohammed was president of that short-lived Kurdish republic in 1946. Sheikh Mahmoud called himself the king of Kurdistan when he rebelled against the British occupation. The British expelled him to India as part of their repression of the Kurds who fought against being included in Iraq. Qazi Mohammed was executed by the shah in 1946, and Sheikh Mahmoud died of natural causes in the 1950s.
Charles Glass
London W11
Vol. 27 No. 2 · 20 January 2005
From David McDowall
Charles Glass is wrong to describe Britain’s seizure of Mosul in 1918 as motivated by oil (LRB, 16 December 2004). The British in Mesopotamia were driven by strategic concerns: defending the plain would be much easier if a protective ring of mountains was also in British possession. Retaining the Kurdish hills enabled Britain, almost bankrupted by the cost of the war, to control the new Iraq with just a handful of infantry battalions under the overall command of the RAF. The presence of oil in the Mosul region had been known for many decades, but not its potential. A preliminary geological survey in February 1919 showed that the oilfield could be exploited only by a company ‘rich enough to face indifferent success or failure’. At the end of the year further investigation indicated a much greater potential and in March 1920 the cabinet concluded that ‘the oil-bearing regions of Mosul are essential to the revenues on which the future of the whole country will depend.’
On 13 April 1920 the various interested departmental heads convened at the Foreign Office to decide the terms to inflict on the Ottomans. The word ‘oil’ was not mentioned once, not even by the Admiralty (which might have wanted it for the navy). Furthermore, the India Office, still running the new Iraq, offered a hostage to fortune in allowing the northern Kurdish zone (which included the oilfields) to detach itself and join a Kurdish state to the north if such a state came into being. (The wording offered at that meeting entered the Treaty of Sèvres virtually unaltered.) Britain was willing to accept this because it foresaw a Kurdish state as a friendly buffer on the northern border of Iraq. The oil was not so important. What Britain feared above all was a hostile Turkey ready to take a geographically defenceless Mesopotamian plain. Britain and Turkey each made a generous offer on the oil resources on condition that the other ceded sovereignty. Both knew that control of the mountains, not the oil, was vital. The first gusher of the Kirkuk oilfield was not struck till 1926, after the League of Nations had finally awarded the area to Iraq, not Turkey.
David McDowall
Richmond, Surrey
Vol. 27 No. 4 · 17 February 2005
From Will Podmore
David McDowall seeks to deny the role of oil in the British occupation of Iraq in 1918 (Letters, 20 January). Yet in 1924, the Admiralty informed the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, that ‘from a strategical point of view, the essential point is that Great Britain should control the territories on which the oilfields are situated.’ Five weeks later, Curzon lied to the Times: ‘Oil had not the remotest connection with my attitude, or with that of His Majesty’s Government, over Mosul.’
Will Podmore
London E12
