Mandatory Iraq

Mandatory Iraq was the British-supervised kingdom set up in the former Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra after the First World War. Formally a monarchy under King Faisal I from 1921, it remained under effective British control, exercised through treaties, advisers and air power, until it entered the League of Nations as an independent state on 3 October 1932. It is shown on our maps as Mesopotamia (GB).

Iraq was not a blank slate. Under the Ottoman Empire the provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra were often treated together in official documents as the Iraq region, and as early as the sixteenth century the province of Baghdad covered much of the area later included in the mandate. British forces held the region at the end of World War I, and in the partition of the Ottoman Empire that followed, Britain was to administer it under a League of Nations mandate.

Opposition grew quickly. Secret societies formed in 1918 and 1919, among them the Guardians of Independence in Baghdad, which brought together Shia and Sunni merchants, teachers, clerics and officers. In 1920 the Shia cleric Imam Shirazi of Karbala called for resistance, and by July a rising had spread from the north down the Euphrates valley. The revolt was put down, but it united Sunnis and Shias in a common cause for the first time and is regarded as a watershed in modern Iraqi history.

At the Cairo Conference of March 1921 the British chose Faisal ibn Husayn, a leader of the Arab Revolt whom the French had just driven from Damascus, as king. A carefully managed plebiscite returned 96 per cent in his favour, and he was crowned on 23 August 1921. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922, ratified in 1924, obliged the king to follow British advice on matters touching British interests and placed British advisers in eighteen government departments. Iraq had a constitution, a parliament and elections, but a British dispatch of 1928 described provincial governors drawing up in advance the lists of who would be elected, and in practice the king held more power than parliament.

From 1 October 1922 the Royal Air Force's Iraq Command took charge of security, as the British government judged bombing aircraft a cheaper way to control large territories than ground troops. It helped suppress Kurdish risings led by Sheikh Mahmud and tribal revolts in the south. The new Iraqi army was officered mainly by Sunnis who had served the Ottomans, a pattern that lasted well beyond the mandate. British policy also created a class of tribal sheikhs whose land and influence depended on the government.

Oil shaped the mandate's politics. The British-controlled Turkish Petroleum Company had held rights in Mosul before the war. Iraqi negotiators asked for a 20 per cent share, but in March 1925, fearing that without British support Mosul might be awarded to Turkey, they accepted a 75-year concession that met none of their demands. The company was renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company.

The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930 promised a close alliance and gave Britain air bases near Basra and at Habbaniyah. On that basis Iraq became independent in 1932, though British influence and bases remained. The Hashemite monarchy lasted until 1958, interrupted by coups in 1936 and 1941. Historians disagree over the mandate's record: Kanan Makiya saw its institutions mainly as agents of modernisation, while Elie Kedourie judged the monarchy despotic and wrote that the north had to be coerced by the RAF.

Our 1920 and 1930 maps show the mandate as Mesopotamia (GB), with Turkey to the north and Persia to the east. The 1938 map still draws it under that name, although Iraq had been independent since 1932; the country's later history is on the Iraq page.