Welcome in everyone, um... Today, we are focusing
our lens on a massive, grueling, and honestly,
somehow, a largely forgotten theater of World
War I. Yeah, it really is overlooked. It is.
We are doing a depth dive into the Mesopotamian
campaign, and our foundational material for this
is a really comprehensive historical overview,
basically a detailed article that breaks down
this entire four -year struggle from 1914 all
the way to 1918. Right, and it's a remarkable
piece of history. I mean, the sheer scale. of
the logistical and the human challenges involved
here is just staggering. Completely staggering.
And our mission today for you listening is to
figure out why this campaign happened in the
first place, how it resulted in one of the absolute
worst military disasters for the Allies, and
how its chaotic aftermath literally laid the
groundwork for the borders of the modern Middle
East. Exactly. It's all connected. OK, let's
unpack this. We have to start with the geopolitical
landscape of 1914. Like, why were the British
even deploying forces to Ottoman Iraq? Right.
What was the actual prize here? And historical
records make it incredibly clear. It was all
about oil. Specifically, they needed to protect
the Anglo -Persian oil company fields in Persia.
And they had to secure this crucial waterway
known as the Shat al Arab. What's fascinating
here is just how vital that specific resource
had suddenly become and why it represented a
total paradigm shift in global strategy. How
so? Well, you have to remember the context of
the era. Prior to this, the British Royal Navy
ran on coal. Which they had plenty of. Exactly.
Britain had massive domestic coal reserves. They
controlled their own fuel supply completely.
But they had just transitioned their Navy to
build these massive new turbine based dreadnought
battleships. And those didn't take coal. No,
they didn't run on coal. They ran on oil. So
literally overnight, the defense of the British
Isles was no longer self -sufficient. Their national
security suddenly depended entirely on controlling
foreign territory. Man, that is a massive strategic
vulnerability. Huge. And on top of fueling the
ships, the petroleum from this region provided
a chemical compound called toluol, which if you
don't know, toluol is literally the T in TNT.
So it was absolutely essential for the production
of military high explosives. This wasn't just
about economic. This was about raw industrial
military power. I mean, you could not fire a
modern artillery shell or sail a modern battleship
without the resources sitting in the Persian
Gulf. Which perfectly explains why London was
getting increasingly anxious about German influence
in the region. The railway, right? Yeah, the
primary threat wasn't just the Ottoman Empire
itself, but rather this massive infrastructure
project backed by Germany, which was the Berlin
-Baghdad Railway. Right. British strategists
viewed that railway as a dagger pointed directly
at their sphere of influence in the Gulf. In
fact, Sir Edmund Barrow, he was the military
secretary to the India office. He explicitly
argued that forces needed to be deployed to the
Gulf, not just to protect the oil. but to signal
to the Turks that Britain meant business. And
obviously that signal naturally provoked a pretty
heavy response. By November 1914, the Ottoman
government mobilized politically and religiously.
The sheik will Islam actually declared a jihad
against the Allies. Right, a holy war. Exactly.
And for context for you listening, the sheikal
Islam was the highest religious authority in
the Ottoman Empire. So this wasn't just political
rhetoric. It was a legally and spiritually binding
call to arms designed to sway local Arab loyalties.
So the reality on the ground. proved far more
complex than declarations made in Constantinople.
Yeah, the Ottomans struggled to control those
Iraqi provinces, didn't they? They did. They
were constantly dealing with border disputes
with Persia and local uprisings. Ultimately,
the regional power dynamics were very often dictated
by the powerful local Arab tribes rather than
the distant empires attempting to claim sovereignty
over them. Just imagine the tension of this era.
You have these global empires playing a high
stakes chess game over a resource that was just
beginning to shape global power. A powder keg.
It is. Yeah. So the opening move of this chess
game was the Fowl Landing in November 1914. The
British Indian Expeditionary Force D, specifically
the 6th Puna Division, assaulted the old fortress
at Fowl. And we should note the numbers here.
Yeah, the military logs show that this massive
British Indian force was opposed by just 350
Ottoman troops. 350 troops equipped with just
four artillery guns. Right. So they quickly took
the fort, secured the coastline, and began advancing
toward the city of Basra. And we really need
to emphasize a point that historical accounts
highlight here. The vast majority of the quote
unquote British forces fighting in this entire
campaign were actually soldiers from the British
Indian Army. That is a critical distinction,
and it often gets totally lost in the broader
narrative of the First World War. Yeah. It was
the Indian military's responsibility to mount
and supply this campaign. That dynamic was actually
dictated by a pre -war agreement between the
Indian and British military offices. The financial
and the human cost was largely borne by India.
And as those Indian troops pushed forward, they
actually found an unlikely strategic ally in
Sheikh Mubarak al -Sabah, who was the ruler of
Kuwait. He was instrumental. He was. He actively
supported the Allied war effort, sending forces
to attack Ottoman positions at places like Um
Qasr and Basra. And in exchange, the British
government officially recognized Kuwait as an
independent government under British protection.
And the symbolism of that alliance was immediate.
Sheikh Zubarak actually changed his flag. He
removed the Ottoman symbol and replaced it with
the word Kuwait written in Arabic script. Wow.
Yeah. His military support, combined with his
previous efforts to obstruct that Baghdad railway,
effectively secured the Persian Gulf against
any immediate Ottoman or German reinforcements.
So the British Indian forces are stringing together
these early successes. They capture Basra, but
the Ottomans do quickly regroup. In April 1915,
they launch a major counterattack at the Battle
of Shaiba. Which does not go well for them. No.
The Ottoman commander, Suleyman Askari Bey, gathered
about 4 ,000 regular troops and 14 ,000 Arab
irregulars. But the assault fails disastrously
against entrenched British infantry and cavalry.
The Ottomans suffered devastating losses, around
2 ,400 men. And the fallout from Shaiba was severe,
particularly on the Ottoman command. Suleyman
Askari Bey... who had been wounded in the fighting
was so devastated by the collapse of his forces
that he actually took his own life in a hospital
in Baghdad shortly afterward. It really underscores
the immense crushing pressure these commanders
were operating under. Absolutely. But on the
British side, that decisive victory at Shaiba
led directly to a very dangerous phenomenon,
which was mission creep. Well, and it wasn't
just Mission Creek born of overconfidence on
the ground. It was immense political pressure
originating from London. From the politicians.
Right. You have to look at the broader war. By
1915, the Western Front in Europe was a muddy,
horrific stalemate. British politicians, men
like Lord Kitchener and regional commanders like
General Sir John Nixon, they were desperate for
a headline grabbing victory. They just wanted
some good news. Exactly. So, against the explicit
advice of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff,
who warned that advancing further was logistically
unsustainable, they ordered the troops to push
another 100 miles up the Tigris River toward
Baghdad. The primary justification wasn't even
strategic. It was simply to boost Imperial prestige.
Here's where it gets really interesting, because
that political hubris sets the stage for absolute
disaster. It does. The British force, led by
Major General Charles Townsend, pushes north.
In November 1915, they clash with entrenched
Ottoman forces at the Battle of Kisifon, which
is just 25 miles south of Baghdad. It's a brutal
five -day stalemate. Both sides take heavy losses.
Right. But Townsend realizes his supply lines
are stretched to the absolute breaking point,
and he has to retreat. pulls his exhausted men
back to a town sitting in a loop of the Tigris
River called Kut Al Amara and he digs in. The
retreat to Kut proved to be the pivotal turning
point of the campaign. By December 1915, the
siege of Kut had officially begun. They were
completely trapped. Yeah, the Ottoman forces
relentlessly pursued Townsend and completely
encircled his position. The geography of Coote
was a double -edged sword. The river loop provided
natural defense, but it also made it impossible
to break out without heavy support. And the Ottomans
had some expert help, too. They did. They brought
in a highly experienced 72 -year -old German
general and military historian, Colmar von der
Goltz. And he didn't just lay siege to the town.
He engineered formidable layered defensive trench
networks further down the river to block any
British relief forces that were trying to push.
North. And the British did launch several massive
relief attempts. General Fenton Aylmer led desperate
pushes between January and March 1916. We're
talking about the battles of Sheikh Sa 'ad, the
Wadi, Hana and the Dujayla Redoubt. And every
single one failed. Every single attempt was repelled
by von der Goltz's defenses. The casualties were
staggering. Thousands of British and Indian troops
were just gunned down in the mud trying to break
the siege. They even attempted early aerial resupply.
They were dropping sacks of flour from primitive
biplanes, but most of the drops missed the town
entirely or just fell into the river. Which is
crazy to think about, biplanes dropping sacks
of flour. Right. Meanwhile, inside Coote, the
conditions deteriorated into a total nightmare.
The winter was freezing, the mud was relentless,
and disease ran rampant. The garrison exhausted
its rations, and they actually resorted to eating
their own transport horses and mules. Scurvy
was devastating the ranks. So finally, facing
total starvation, General Townsend capitulated.
On April 29th, 1916, he surrendered his remaining
force. 13 ,164 British and Indian soldiers marched
into Ottoman captivity. It was completely unprecedented.
Yeah. Historians routinely classify the fall
of Qut as the worst defeat of the Allies in World
War I. It was an unmitigated humiliation for
the British Empire. They had pushed too far purely
for political optics without the logistics to
sustain the advance, and the troops paid a horrific
price. If we connect this to the bigger picture,
the sheer scale of the Kut disaster forced a
total reckoning within British military strategy.
They finally realized that the fundamental problem
wasn't a lack of manpower. It was the supplies.
Exactly. It was a total failure of infrastructure.
Before Koot, supply ships arriving from India
sat at anchor for days at Basra, just waiting
to be unloaded by small wooden boats. Wow. Yeah,
there were no deep water berths, no warehouses,
and virtually no roads. So they initiated a massive
engineering overhaul. They essentially built
a modern logistical network from scratch right
there in the desert. They dramatically expanded
the port facilities at Basra, dredging the river,
building wharves. They laid down paved roads,
constructed massive new hospital complexes, established
organized supply dumps, and critically, they
built a railway system. Which changed everything.
It did. They also deployed a specialized fleet
of shallow -draft river steamers to efficiently
move thousands of tons of supplies up the Tigris.
With that ironclad logistical foundation behind
him, the new British commander, Lieutenant General
Stanley Maude, launched a methodical, highly
organized offensive in December 1916. There were
no reckless dashes for glory this time. He systematically
dismantled the Ottoman defenses, bypassed their
strongholds, and by March 1917, he captured Baghdad.
And a week after taking the city, Maude issued
what became known as the Proclamation of Baghdad.
The historical text notes that in this document,
he explicitly claimed to the local population,
and I'm quoting here, our armies do not come
into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies,
but as liberators. A very bold statement. Yeah.
Now, as observers of history, we are simply reporting
the text of the proclamation. We aren't taking
a side on it, but it remains a highly significant
piece of imperial messaging regarding how the
British wanted to be perceived in the region.
It was certainly a calculated political statement.
But, you know, while the tactical battles were
shifting in favor of the Allies, the true enemy
in the Mesopotamian theater was the environment
itself. Yeah, the numbers are grim. The statistics
detailed in military medical records are just
staggering. Over the course of the campaign,
British Empire forces suffered roughly 85 ,000
battle casualties. But they recorded over 820
,000 hospitalizations for non -battle causes.
Over 800 ,000 hospitalizations just from the
environment? Yes. The troops were operating in
profoundly hostile conditions. Extreme heat in
the summer that regularly topped 120 degrees
Fahrenheit, freezing rains in the winter. They
had to march through sandy deserts and treacherous
malaria -ridden marshes. And disease was just
everywhere. Disease actually claimed the lives
of double the number of Ottoman soldiers compared
to combat wounds. Cholera, dysentery, typhus,
they were rampant. In fact, cholera did not discriminate
by rank at all. Both the British General Maud
and the German General Funder Goltz died of the
disease during the campaign. And the human toll
extended far beyond the trenches. The records
document harrowing realities for prisoners of
war and the local civilian population. When those
13 ,000 British and Indian soldiers surrendered
at Cudditt, they weren't just put into camps.
They were subjected to brutal, 700 -mile forced
marches across the desert and mountains to prison
camps in Anatolia. 700 miles. Yeah. Diaries recount
a specific 250 miles stretch from Mosul, where
prisoners were given a little more than a liter
of water a day, and those who collapsed from
exhaustion were frequently clubbed to death by
their guards. Thousands did not survive the journey.
And the civilian population in the region suffered
equally unimaginable horrors as the war dragged
on. By 1918, the constant requisitioning of supplies,
combined with administrative collapse and a flood
of displaced refugees, it plunged cities like
Mosul into absolute famine. Accounts from local
officials in Mosul paint a devastating picture.
Municipal workers were dispatched daily to tour
the city streets just to collect the dead bodies
of those who had starved overnight. The famine
was so severe that desperate citizens were reduced
to eating cats and dogs just to survive. It's
horrifying. It was a region entirely broken by
the relentless grinding machinery of this global
conflict. Which brings us to the closing act
of the war and the immediate scramble for the
spoils. By October 1918, the Ottoman Empire was
collapsing on multiple fronts. The armistice
of Mudros was signed on October 30th, which officially
ended hostilities and required both Ottoman and
allied forces to remain in their current positions.
But the British had received highly specific
instructions from the War Office in London to
score as heavily as possible before the whistle
blew. Right. So even after the armistice was
officially signed and active combat was supposed
to cease, the British commander on the ground,
General Alexander Acab, did not stand fast. Despite
furious diplomatic protests from on the Turvey
government, British troops kept advancing for
another 15 days. They just kept going. They kept
going. Their objective was singular, to march
unopposed into the province of Mosul and physically
occupy its incredibly rich, newly discovered
oil fields. This raises an important question,
though. What happened to the local populations
who actually lived in these territories? Yeah,
what happened to them? Throughout the war, Arab
factions who had fought alongside the Allies,
participating in the broader Arab revolt, genuinely
believed that the expulsion of the Ottomans would
lead to their own sovereign independence. But
the geopolitical reality of the post -war settlements
proved bitterly disappointing. Because they didn't
get independence. No. Instead of granting independence,
the victorious powers established the British
Mandate of Mesopotamia. From the perspective
of the local population the British had simply
swapped out one distant imperial ruler for another.
And the local population did not accept that
quietly. That profound sense of political betrayal
led directly to the formation of anti -colonial
secret societies. We're talking about groups
like the League of the Islamic Awakening in Najaf
and the Guardians of Independence in Baghdad.
This boiling frustration rapidly escalated, erupting
into the massive Iraqi revolt of 1920. And suddenly
the British found themselves in a highly precarious
and very expensive situation. Right. Following
the exhaustion of World War I, the British government
was practically bankrupt. They could not afford
to maintain a massive garrison army in the Middle
East. To put down the 1920 revolt, they relied
heavily on a brutal new tactic, which was using
the Royal Air Force to conduct widespread bombing
campaigns against insurgent villages. Wow. But
British leadership... Specifically, Winston Churchill,
who was then serving as secretary of state for
the colonies, realized that ruling by force alone
was financially and politically unsustainable.
Which led directly to the Cairo Conference in
1921. Churchill convened British military and
political leaders to figure out how to draw the
borders and establish governments that would
protect British strategic interests, namely the
oil and the routes to India as cheaply as possible.
Exactly. And their solution was to establish
Hashemite Kingdom. They installed Faisal as the
first monarch of Iraq. But it is crucial to understand
for you listening that Faisal was not from Iraq.
No, he wasn't. He was a Hashemite royal from
the Hejaz region near Mecca in modern day Saudi
Arabia. The British essentially imported a foreign
king. who belonged to the Sunni sect, to rule
over a territory comprised of complex, pre -existing
Kurdish, Sunni, and majority Shia populations.
They were literally drawing arbitrary lines on
a map and installing proxy rulers to secure their
geopolitical assets. Which baked deep instability
right into the very foundation of the new state.
Absolutely. And the diplomatic hypocrisy regarding
those assets is pretty staggering too. In 1923,
during negotiations over the final borders with
the newly formed Republic of Turkey, the British
Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, stood up and
tried to argue that the existence of oil in the
Mosul area was, quote, no more than hypothetical.
Hypothetical? Yeah, he was actively trying to
disclaim that oil was the motive for Britain's
aggressive territorial claims. But historians
look at the internal communications of the time
and flatly state, quote, England wanted oil.
Mosul and Kurds were the key. They knew exactly
what was in the ground and exactly why they were
fighting for it. It was a deliberate, calculated
partitioning of the former Ottoman Empire. The
ownership of the Mosul province and its underlying
resources became a massive international dispute,
precisely because everyone knew that hypothetical
oil was the future lifeblood of the global economy.
Let's take a step back and look at the journey
we just took today. Yeah. This was a brutal four
year military campaign triggered by a modernizing
empire's urgent thirst for oil and a deep strategic
paranoia about rival European powers. It was
marked by catastrophic political hubris that
led directly to the horrific disaster and starvation
at cut. But it was ultimately won through sheer
logistical willpower, building deep water ports,
hospitals and railways right in the desert. And
it culminated in broken promises to the local
Arab population, sparking armed rebellions and
leading to the arbitrary drawing of the modern
borders of the Middle East. Right. And for you,
the listener, understanding the mechanics of
this campaign is crucial because it acts as the
Rosetta Stone for modern Middle Eastern geopolitics.
Whenever you look at the news today and see complex
disputes over borders in Iraq or international
tensions over oil rights or just the deeply complicated
legacy of Western intervention in the region.
You are looking directly at the ghosts of the
Mesopotamian campaign. You really are. It is
a prime textbook example of how the logistical
infrastructure of war and the insatiable demand
for resources can literally redraw the map of
the world and shape human history for a century
to come. It is history that is still actively
breathing today. But before we wrap up, we want
to leave you with a final lingering thought to
explore on your own. We talked extensively today
about the sheer volume of troops from the British
Indian Army who fought, suffered, and died in
the heat and mud of Mesopotamia. These Indian
soldiers experienced firsthand the vulnerabilities,
the strategic miscalculations, and the massive
failures of their British commanders. So consider
this. How might the site of that catastrophic
imperial failure at Cote, combined with the sudden
realization of their own indispensable military
value to the empire, have quietly seeded the
growing demands for independence back home in
India in the decades that followed. It's a profound
question about the long -term unintended consequences
of imperial warfare. Thank you all for joining
us on this deep dive into the past. Keep questioning,
keep learning, and we'll catch you next time.