Скачать или смотреть Excerpts: WWI Mesopotamian Campaign and Post-war Iraq

In this short excerpt from our video on Gertrude Bell: the Desert Queen, we look at her involvement in the Mesopotamian campaign in 1917, which was floundering, partly through poor intelligence and partly through strained resources. The British Garrison at Kut, halfway up the Tigris between Basra and Baghdad became completely enveloped in a Turkish counter-operation, such that thousands of soldiers were forced to surrender. This humiliating debacle finally forced the War Office to allocate more troops and materiel to the theatre, and with Gertrude’s cajoling of local sheikhs to assist, Kut was Liberated and Baghdad was captured by March of 1917. As the Turks withdrew, they pursued a scorched earth policy of destroying infrastructure and burning administrative records and buildings, as well as bribing warlords to raid British supplies. When the British moved northwards they found a province in complete disarray. There had been a drought for several years, no investment in maintenance of irrigation and infrastructure for over a century, the people were starving and endemic disease was rife. But with records destroyed, and the entire corrupt and dysfunctional Turkish Judiciary and governance mechanism now gone, they had to almost start from scratch, appointing poorly equipped Arabs to take over the reins of all the arms of local government, from Healthcare, to Education, Law and Policing. When the Cairo Conference was convened in 1921, it was clear that independent self-rule was going to be problematic, given lack of a unified ethnic and sectarian population. The allied powers believed it would be best to promote the sons of the Sharif of Mecca, as having the greatest legitimacy to both unify and rule the Arab people, though this option was itself to become beset by problems and the region we now know as Iraq would continue to be plagued by coups and insurgencies for decades.
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