War Post

The Fall of Baghdad by Edmund Candler, Manchester Guardian, 16 March 1917

Our vanguard entered Baghdad soon after nine o’clock this morning.  The city is approached by an unmetalled road between palm groves and orange gardens.

Crowds of Baghdadis came out to meet us: Persians, Krabe, Jew, Armenians, Chaldeans and Christians of diverse sects and races.  They lined the streets, balconies and roofs, hurrahing and clapping their hands.  Groups of schoolchildren danced in front of us, shouting and cheering, and the women of the city turned out in their holiday dresses.

The people of the city have been robbed to supply the Turkish army for the last two years.  The oppression was becoming unendurable, and during the last week it degenerated into brigandage.  I am told that the mere mention of the British was punishable, and the people were afraid to talk freely about the war.

It appears that the enemy abandoned all hope of saving the city when we effected the crossing of the Tigris on February 23.  After that date, the Turkish government requisitioned private merchandise wholesale, and despatched it by train to Samara.  Thirty or forty thousand pounds worth of stuff is believed to have been officially looted, including five thousand sacks of flour.

The German Consul left weeks ago, and the Austrian two days since.  The bridge of boats, the Turkish army clothing factory and Messrs Lynch’s offices were blown up or otherwise destroyed last night, and the railway station, the Civil Hospital and most British property except the Residency, which had been used as a Turkish hospital, were either gutted or damaged.

As soon as the gendarmery left at two o’clock this morning, Kurds and others began looting.  As we entered from the east this morning, they were rifling, and among the first citizens we met were merchants who had run out to crave our protection.

Regiments were detailed to police, the bazaar, and houses and pickets and patrols were allotted, but there was much that it was too late to save.  Many shops had been gutted, and the valuables had all been cleared.  The rabble was found busily engaged in dismantling the interiors, tearing down bits of wood and iron and carrying off bedsteads.  They had even looted the seats from the public gardens.

Our entry was very easy and unofficial, and it was clear that the joy of the people was genuine.  No functionaries came out to meet us.  There was still fear of reprisals.  Our own attitude was characteristic.  There was no display, or attempt at creating an impression.

The troops entered, dusty and unshaven, after several days hard fighting.  Fighting between the 7th and 10th had been heavy, and extraordinary gallantry was shown in crossing the Diala river.

Source: Source Records of the Great War, Vol. V, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni 1923. Find it online here.

Contemporary Baghdad reading can best be found here. The photo is from the Digital Journalist.

Jonathan Steele, writing in The Guardian from Tyre, Lebanon, argues that the three week-long of rocket and air strike exchange, no matter the outcome, is a victory for Hizbullah. "Hizbullah is already the hero, a desperately longed-for proof of success," against Israel’s image of invincibility. Versions of this opinion have been expressed already for the last few weeks, but now with 100,000 Shi’ite protesters in Baghdad, an elected, protected Iraqi government condemning Israel, Steele’s point that "Hizbullah’s victory may do less damage to Israel than to other Arab regimes" bears attention.

The success of a Shia insurgency will encourage other Shias around the region, including those in Saudi Arabia. To the consternation of his American protectors, Iraq’s Shia prime minister, Nuri al- Maliki, did not condemn Hizbullah. But the Sunni/Shia issue should not be exaggerated. Hizbullah’s appeal across the Arab world is a wider matter of Islamism and the struggle against corrupt despotism. Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Jordan - and even in the medium term Syria, which has backed and armed Hizbullah - will feel the shockwaves running through the Arab street.

Those who argue from their pulpits in the mosques that secular modernity inevitably means decadence and selfishness will have gained new followers. Those who say that only Islam can provide the pride and backbone needed to confront the west’s cultural and military interventions will be stronger.

Israel’s Lebanese adventure, and the Bush/Blair folly in supporting it, have done the west damage that will last for many, many years.

Read the rest here.

Something about Middle Eastern political commentary has me unsettled. Perhaps it is the knowledge that within the analysis and theories of how Baghdad might shape Beirut which in turn might shape Riyadh, or Cairo, are the thousands of dead bodies and hundreds of thousands of displaced ones. Considering how the Saudi government might cope with what other commentators have gloomily called a "Shi’ite crescent" from the Bekaa through Baghdad to Tehran overlooks, just like the New York Times and every other American media outlet, the appalling toll on Lebanon and Gaza. The complete devastation of a state and the continued leveling of any shred of modern, hopeful life in the Occupied Territories by the Israeli government are the obvious but shunned details in all of this political talk. In reading someone like Steele, I want to believe that he’s not treating the ruin of Lebanon and Palestine as just proof of a political theory, but rather another grim moment in the on-going and supported violence in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.

Most of all the damage of "Israel’s Lebanese adventure, and the Bush/Blair folly in supporting it" is that these officials, supposedly responsible leaders of free and democratic states, continued to endorse the dismantling of Lebanese life and society, and the deliberate, naive aggravation of anti-Israeli and anti-American emotion.

The war needs its fighters. As much as some fighters increasingly seem to need the war, touting their 60 kills ("It’s like hearing classical music playing in my head.") or threatening other soldiers after the murder of Iraqis ("If you say anything, I’ll kill you."), there are mothers in the America following their sons and daughters to Iraq. The AP is picking up the worst frequencies from Iraq, war fans might say, and of course so many of the soldiers over there, haggard and stressed, just want to come home, after finally securing that road or building that hospital.

Steven Green just wanted to go home alive, though he went to Iraq because he wanted to kill people. It was the morbid boredom of Iraq, he says, that got to him. "I mean, you kill somebody and it’s like, ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza.’"

Laurie-Ann Fuca, the Tucson mother in boot camp, is going to be a medic, which is a good thing. It doesn’t look like we need more killers.  

The photo is by Robert Capa, "Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936."

Baghdad’s North Gate War Cemetery, where thousands of British soldiers are buried.  

While I agreed to steer away from New York Times war coverage for a few days - admittedly it dominates other news links on this site - there are two articles from the past two Sundays that I want to include here. The first, from two Sundays ago, is an article where Dexter Filkins goes searching for Gertrude Bell’s tomb, and finds the old British diplomat buried with other foreign workers and soldiers in a British cemetery in Baghdad. The North Gate War Cemetery, described in detail in Jon Lee Anderson’s The Fall of Baghdad, is a strange scene: thousands of British soldiers, plus a few British diplomat-types (Britain’s 1920s version of the Coalition Provisional Authority), buried in a cemetery that, despite the presence of devoted caretakers, is always described as aged and overgrown. There are five other British war cemeteries in Iraq, and Filkins explores most in this article, stopping for a while at Kut, the site of the disasterous seige of 1916. Here’s Robert Fisk’s own description from the early days of the current war.

Some of Anderson’s description of the North Gate War Cemetery:

"Some of the headstones had broken off and lay toppled and neglected. Those still standing were etched with Christian crosses and the insignias of the dead men’s regiments: an elephant and palm for the Ceylon Sanitary Section, a castle standard for the Essex Regiment, an a stag’s head for the Seaforth Highlanders. On the headstone for 201775 Private S. Brown of the Dorsetshire Regiment, who died on September 28, 1917, at the age of twenty-five, were carved the words,"Peace, Perfect Peace." Many of the graves were anonymous and inscribed with the same message: "Four Soldiers of the Great  War—Known unto God."

Yesterday, Sabrina Tavernise documented the injured civilians of Baghdad, whose numbers, stories, and suffering are never clearly presented, not least in the American media. First Filkins starts a thread of compelling, death-of-a-soldier stories, and now the Week in Review shows the Iraqi version of Eugene Richards photos for the Nation. The photographer of these Iraqi casualties is Farah Nosh of Getty Images. Included in the online post of "The Instant When Everything Changed" is a long slideshow of images and interviews (somehow I can’t lift a photo of a slideshow, or I’d include one here).

The rape and murder plot of Steven Green and five others from the 101st Airborne; the Southern Poverty Law Center study of white supremacists in the military; the continued misconduct of seemingly unsophisticated soldiers.

How did the British-Indian army in Iraq 90 years ago compare to today’s American force? One can’t offer a full sweep, but this excerpt from Radhika Singha’s 2004 article for The Hindu Magazine reveals some of the composition of the British-Indian force based in Basra during World War I.

Basra had to be transformed into a port from which a major military campaign could be conducted. Roads, bridges and railways had to be constructed, unreliable rivers and water channels harnessed for transport and irrigation. The army command sent telegram after telegram pressing for labour from India to construct wharfs, quays, barracks, and storage units, and to provide a myriad other services. This could mean literally, like the Hebrews of old, digging into the mud of Mesopotamia to mould bricks for construction material. Porters were also needed to unload coal, munitions, food, and construction material and re-load it to send up river. Local labour was scarce, and the Arabs who were being "rescued from Ottoman tyranny" were usually described as vicious marauders or treacherous informers. Often a village or two or more was/were levelled to keep the locals in line.

Searching for this story in the National Archives I came across an urgent letter from the British military command in Mesopotamia asking for 450 latrine sweepers from India. This was followed by a flurry of telegrams pressing the issue. To put it impolitely, the s*** was piling up in Basra. But why was this correspondence put into a confidential file? Sweepers in the bazaars of India had heard enough about conditions in Mesopotamia to resist going overseas. The military and civil authorities were discussing whether they could impress this labour. There was another reason for discretion. Cholera had broken out in Basra, a fact which had to concealed from public knowledge, especially from those who were being sent unawares into this epidemic front. One suggestion was that the so called "criminal tribes", always under the shadow of the police, could be given a choice between some form of internment or going to Mesopotamia. The solution finally chosen was to recruit in jails, persuading low caste prisoners to become latrine sweepers for a remission of sentence.

… One strategy was to try and transform the stigmatising disciplines of jail into the honourable disciplines of the military. The men sent as sweepers began to refuse to clean latrines, saying they would only clean away mule droppings. Some of those in the labour corps began to fashion head gear and clothes resembling the soldier’s uniform. They would cultivate a military bearing, trying to take a disciplinary flogging with manly indifference, and giving a smart salute after it. Prisoners appointed as overseers asked for the designation havildar, evoking police or military service, instead of the jail designation — daffadar.

They shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

They shall not return to us, the strong men coldly slain
In sight of help denied from day to day:
But the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain,
Are they too strong and wise to put away?

- Rudyard Kipling, "Mesopotamia," 1917 

Many of the soldiers who return from this war survive injured in veteran hospitals, on edge at home (a former Time magazine Marine of the Year who fired his shotgun at a crowd from his home, "under attack"), on a Delta flight, (where one veteran now has been detained for charging the cockpit door as the flight prepared to land). Magazine stories, soldier’s memoirs, and now, even, breaking nightly news fill some of the answer to how soldier live after Iraq.

Indian cavalry on the march on the flooded Shaiba road, Mesopotamia.

50,000 Indians died during World War I - nearly half or more of them buried across Iraq or north towards Anatolia. Hundreds of thousands returned to India as veterans. With American veterans in mind, the image of an Indian man stepping of a ship in Bombay after his service in Mesopotamia is now filled with thoughts of similar agony. As he wandered down the city streets to arrange transporation northward to the Punjab (the home of a majority of Britain’s Indian recruits), how did he cope with his return? He did not have an airplane cockpit door to charge, or, likely, a shotgun to fire at party-goers outside his suburban home when thoughts of his Iraq war frayed his senses. How did he return home? What did he do?

The American military needs soldiers, so they forget about Timothy McVeigh. A story in today’s New York Times:

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.

"Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman’s war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and ‘cleansed.’ "

"As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."

Rape, murder, Abu Ghraib, graffiti, Aryans in the ranks of the military, maybe in the thousands. George Bush’s spokesman Dana Perino: "He believes that 99.9 percent of our men and women in uniform are performing their jobs honorably and skillfully and they deserve our full appreciation and gratitude."

I sat under a porch on the morning of the 4th of July in Massachusetts, watching an annual parade go by in the sun. Like lots of people in the Northeast, I began the holiday looking at the New York Times front page story of a scraggly former Army private being escorted out of jail in North Carolina. Steven D. Green was convicted July 3rd of raping and killing an Iraqi woman and her family four months ago, and in the past few days the story was expanded, opening some questions: was the rape victim 25, as Army documents originally said, or 20 (other US officials), or 16 (town officials in Mahmudiya, Iraq), or 14 (a neighbor in Mahmudiya); if her younger sister was 10, or younger; how often the young woman had been harassed at nearby checkpoints by other American soldiers before Private Green locked himself in a room with her in her family’s home in Mahmudiya; and, if the recent June capture, torture and killing of two American soldiers who were serving in Green’s company were retaliation for the rape of the young woman and the murder of her and her family (minus her brothers, who were all at school that day). One of the things that is clear now, at least, is that the soldiers were drunk driving their Humvee out of the base, and when they entered the house.

The headline of the Times July 5th story, "Inquiry Into Iraq Killing Focuses on Supervision of Soldiers," was maybe a litle understated. As with the current Haditha investigation, the military and the White House have given tepid commentary on Green, keeping up a sort of theater of detachment, which will eventually lead, we’re told, to punishment. We know, after all, President Bush believes "that 99.9 percent of our men and women in uniform are performing their jobs honorably and skillfully and they deserve our full appreciation and gratitude," thanks to one of his spokesman.

Full Apprecaition. Gratitude. Praise the men and women whose fight we know little about. Praise them, trumpeted by the Army in combat photographs that rotate on the front page of its official website:

An amputee running with a beaming President.

An imposing cannon on the top of a Humvee before a no-shit, sun-shaded soldier, with his trigger finger.

And, in a photo posted last December (now removed from the site, as far as I can tell, but mentioned today by the Times David S. Cloud), an Army private preparing "to blast a lock off the gate of an abandoned home during a search of homes" in the town of Mullah Fayed. Ignore the fact that that private was Steven Green.