Fighting along the Tigris and Euphrates
The British-led Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force landed near Basra in November, 1914, just after Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire. The vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul were Ottoman-controlled provinces then, with a disparate population of Sunnis, Shi’as, Kurds, Christians, and Jews. Dispatched from India, the Expeditionary Force counted thousands of Indian soldiers among its ranks. During all of World War I, India provided over 1.25 milion men to the war effort, including 827,000 combatants; 250,000 Indian men were serving abroad at any one time, whether in France, Egypt, East Africa, though mostly Mesopotomia– Turkish Arabia in contemporary British language. Their experience in France was well-presented David Omissi’s book Indian Voices of the Great War: Soldiers’ Letters, 1914-1918, but how Indian soldiers reacted to duty in Mesopotamia is less documented.
Indian cavalry advancing near Basra, 1914-1918
This site will seek to present the experience of the Indian soldier in the Mesopotamian Expedtionary Force during World War I as part of a greater effort to approach and imagine the expererience of foreign soldiers in Iraq. The March 2003 American-led invasion, Operation Iraqi Freedom, is still underway, and while reaching a kind of transhistorical truth about Iraq and foreign soldiers is not the goal of comparing 1916 to 2006, the narrative of the soldier, whether an Indian cavalryman near Basra or an American Marine calling in an smart-bomb airstrike outside Fallujah, seems crucial to imagining the current war. Knowing whose boots pounded the desert before American soldiers does not offer the same rapid hit as contemporary political talk. Perhaps that’s the point. While the daily dispatches from field reporters are vital to understanding this war, the unguided political commentary could stand to be replaced by other ideas: the history of the region, visual contrasts of desert combat across a century, and a new imagination of Iraq not as a place translated by cable news, but instead by its historical record, even if that record exists partly in India Office reports and letters home to Bombay.
