The Anglo-Iraqi treaty

On 14 December 1927 in London William Ormsby-Gore, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the British Colonial Office, and the Prime Minister of Iraq, Ja’far al-Askari, signed a new treaty between Great Britain and the Kingdom of Iraq. In its first article King George V recognised Iraq as an “independent, sovereign state”, and in its eighth he promised that, provided the present rate of progress was maintained and all went well in the interval, he would support Iraq’s candidature for the League of Nations in 1932. It is sometimes said that on this day Iraq “gained independence from Britain”. This is not true. The 1927 treaty never came into force, because its ratification was made conditional on two further agreements that were never concluded, and Iraq remained a mandated territory under British control until 3 October 1932, when it was admitted to the League of Nations under a different treaty, signed in Baghdad in 1930. The December document mattered for another reason: for the first time it set a date from which the British were prepared to discuss the end of the mandate.

A kingdom under mandate

The lands of present-day Iraq – the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul – were conquered by the British in 1914–1918 in the Mesopotamian campaign; Mosul they occupied only after the armistice with Turkey. In April 1920, at the San Remo conference, the powers granted Britain a League of Nations mandate over Mesopotamia, confirmed in the Treaty of Sèvres. Under Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, a Class A mandate covered peoples whose existence as independent nations could be provisionally recognised, on condition that the mandatory gave them advice and assistance until they were able to stand alone. In practice the country was run by British officials, many of them brought in from India. In the summer of 1920 a revolt broke out that united Shia clerics from Najaf and Karbala, the tribes of the Euphrates and Sunni nationalists from Baghdad. Its suppression cost the lives of several thousand Iraqis and several hundred British and Indian soldiers, as well as millions of pounds.

David Lloyd George’s government then changed its method. At the Cairo Conference in March 1921 the Colonial Secretary, Winston Churchill, and his advisers, among them T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, decided to give the throne of the new state to Emir Faisal, son of the Sharif of Mecca and leader of the Arab Revolt, whom the French had driven out of Damascus a few months earlier. After a plebiscite organised by the British, Faisal was crowned King of Iraq on 23 August 1921. Instead of direct rule there was to be an Arab government and parliament, and Britain was to exercise its rights as mandatory on the basis of a treaty of alliance.

The first such treaty was signed in Baghdad on 10 October 1922. It gave the British High Commissioner the right to advise the King on foreign policy and finance, placed British advisers in the ministries and secured decisive British influence over military affairs. The Iraqis received it with indignation, and the Constituent Assembly approved it only in June 1924, under pressure from the High Commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs. Soon Iraq was threatened with the loss of Mosul, which Turkey claimed. The question had not been settled by the Treaty of Lausanne, so it went to the League of Nations. In December 1925 the League Council awarded the disputed vilayet to Iraq, but on condition that the British mandate was extended. Accordingly, on 13 January 1926 another treaty was concluded, extending the relationship established in 1922 to 25 years, unless Iraq became a member of the League of Nations sooner. In Article 3 the British promised to examine the question of Iraq’s membership in August 1928 and every four years thereafter.

Negotiations in London

In the spring of 1927 Faisal began discussing with the High Commissioner Iraq’s admission to the League as early as 1928. In July the British government replied that it would take up the matter at the League in 1932, if all went well. In Baghdad this was received with great disappointment. Toynbee later surmised in the Survey of International Affairs that London feared opposition from France and Persia, and also how the League Council would receive a proposal to end the mandate so soon after it had itself agreed, over Mosul, to extend it by a quarter of a century. The Iraqis nevertheless wanted to keep negotiating. In August Faisal travelled to Europe and stayed at Aix in France, and in September he brought the Prime Minister, Ja’far al-Askari, to London to stay in touch with the Colonial Office. The Colonial Secretary, Leo Amery, had just left on a tour of the Dominions, and the matter was handled by his deputy Ormsby-Gore and by Dobbs.

In October the British government decided to open formal negotiations. Britain was represented by Dobbs, Iraq by Ja’far al-Askari, assisted by the Iraqi Minister of Justice and Iraq’s diplomatic representative in London. Faisal arrived in London on 20 October to be close to the delegation. The first formal session took place on 25 October. The talks lasted a little over a month and at one point nearly broke down: on the King’s orders Ja’far had already left London for Baghdad, and he was recalled by telegram from Marseille only after an informal conversation between Faisal and British ministers. Agreement was reached at the beginning of December, the King and Dobbs left for Baghdad, and the treaty was signed on 14 December. In the background there was unrest in the desert: from 5 November Wahhabi raiders from Najd, Ikhwan warriors who had slipped out of the control of King Ibn Saud, attacked Iraqi police posts and shepherds’ camps, and the Royal Air Force struck at their bands. Six months earlier, in the Treaty of Jeddah, London had recognised the full independence of Ibn Saud’s state, even though he had shown no ambitions with regard to the League.

What the treaty said

The treaty had sixteen articles and, as Toynbee observed, its substance differed little from the treaties of 1922 and 1926 that it was to replace. What changed above all was the language. Both parties concluded it “on a footing of equality”. Britain recognised Iraq as an independent and sovereign state (Article 1). The parties were to hold “full and frank consultation” on matters of foreign policy affecting their common interests (Article 4). The High Commissioner was no longer described as an adviser whom the King was bound to follow: Faisal undertook merely to keep him informed of events and of the government’s plans, and the High Commissioner could draw the King’s attention to matters that London considered dangerous to Iraq or to its treaty obligations (Article 5).

Iraq undertook to fulfil all the international obligations that Britain had assumed on its behalf, and not to amend its constitution so as to infringe the rights of foreigners or the equality of Iraqis irrespective of race, religion and language (Article 3). It was to accede to the conventions against the traffic in slaves, drugs and arms and in women and children, and to carry out the League of Nations Covenant, the Treaty of Lausanne, the Anglo-French frontier convention and the San Remo oil agreement (Article 6). It was forbidden to discriminate against nationals of League member states in trade, taxation and navigation (Article 9). The most important was Article 8: “Provided the present rate of progress in Iraq is maintained and all goes well in the interval, His Britannic Majesty will support the candidature of Iraq for admission to the League of Nations in 1932.” Disputes were to be settled by the Permanent Court of International Justice at The Hague (Article 15).

The two matters that mattered most to the Iraqis were postponed. Articles 12 and 13 provided that financial and military relations would be regulated by a separate agreement replacing the agreements of March 1924. The parties also agreed that the treaty would not be ratified, and so would not come into force, until both agreements had been concluded and the whole had been approved by the League Council. The main issue was the army: the Iraqi government wanted to introduce conscription in order to build its own force capable of keeping order, while the British, who in Iraq relied mainly on air power and Assyrian levies, advised against it for fear of tribal and Shia revolts.

A cool reception

In Britain the opposition demanded a debate. When the Labour MP Joseph Kenworthy asked for the treaty to be treated like the post-war peace treaties, the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, replied that several months would pass before ratification and there would be ample opportunity for discussion. The Leader of the Opposition, Ramsay MacDonald, asked in the House of Commons how it had come about that a Cairo newspaper had published the text before it was laid before Parliament. In the House of Lords Lord Parmoor, a former British representative on the League Council, praised the government in February 1928 for returning to the idea of a short relationship limited in time, but reminded it that the treaty could not be ratified without the consent of the League Council.

In Iraq the treaty was received coolly. People had hoped for more than a promise, and one hedged about, moreover, with the condition “if all goes well”. After the text was published in Baghdad on 20 December two ministers left the government, and on 9 January 1928 Ja’far al-Askari’s entire cabinet resigned – though, according to Toynbee, mainly because the question of conscription had been shelved. A new government was formed by Abd al-Muhsin al-Sa’dun, regarded as close to the British. Negotiations on the financial and military agreements dragged on throughout 1928 without result, and the treaty of 14 December 1927 was never ratified.

From promise to independence

The matter was decided by a change of government in London. In the summer of 1929 MacDonald’s Labour Party took office, and in September 1929 Britain announced that it would support Iraq’s application for admission to the League in 1932 without any conditions, and resolved to negotiate a new treaty that would come into force upon admission. The talks were interrupted in September by the death of the High Commissioner, Gilbert Clayton – the same man who in 1927 had signed the Treaty of Jeddah – and in November by the suicide of Prime Minister al-Sa’dun, who left a letter about the humiliations he had had to endure. On 30 June 1930 in Baghdad the Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said, and the High Commissioner, Francis Humphrys, signed a 25-year treaty of alliance. In it Iraq undertook to consult on foreign policy and to assist its ally in the event of war, handed over to the British free of charge two air bases, at Shaibah near Basra and at Habbaniya, and agreed to the passage of British troops through its territory. On 3 October 1932, after making a declaration on the protection of minorities, Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as the first mandated territory to gain independence. It was then, and not in 1927, that the British mandate came to an end.

Significance

The 1927 treaty was an intermediate step, but it set the direction: Britain accepted that the mandate in Iraq was temporary and named a date for its end. At the same time it showed what London wanted in return. The British were not after direct rule, but bases, freedom of transit and the security of the air route to India and of the oilfields – for in October 1927, two months before the treaty was signed, oil had gushed out at Baba Gurgur near Kirkuk. The 1930 formula of “independence in exchange for alliance”, negotiated on the foundations laid in 1927, became the model for Britain’s treaty with Egypt in 1936.

Independence did not bring Iraq stability. In August 1933 the Iraqi army carried out the massacre of Assyrians at Simele, and in 1936 General Bakr Sidqi staged the first military coup in the Arab world. Germany exploited resentment of the British: its envoy Fritz Grobba financed newspapers that printed extracts from Mein Kampf, and from 1939 the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, took refuge in Baghdad. After the outbreak of the Second World War Iraq broke off relations with Germany but did not declare war on it, and when Italy entered the war Iraq did not break off relations with Rome. On 1 April 1941 a group of colonels known as the “Golden Square” installed the pro-German Rashid Ali al-Gaylani in power. The British then invoked the 1930 treaty and on 18 April landed troops at Basra. At the end of April the Iraqi army surrounded the base at Habbaniya, and on 2 May war broke out. Hitler sent a group of Luftwaffe aircraft to Iraq, using Vichy French airfields in Syria, but the help came too late and was too small. At the end of May al-Gaylani’s government collapsed, and on 1–2 June a pogrom of Jews, known as the Farhud, took place in Baghdad. The British occupied Iraq until 1947 and used it as a base for the Syrian campaign and the invasion of Iran. In January 1943 Iraq declared war on the Axis powers. The bases and transit rights over which London had bargained in 1927–1930 thus decided in 1941 that Iraq, its oil and the overland route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean remained in Allied hands.