Enemy on the Euphrates Read Online Free Page B

along his route. Between journeys Sykes had begun to study Arabic in a desultory way, tutored for a time by one of Britain’s foremost experts on both Persian and Arabic, Professor E.G. Browne of Cambridge University; but Sykes never mastered the Arabic script and what little he learned was transliterated into the Roman alphabet. 5
    Although well received at the time, Sykes’s scholarly accomplishments in this area were rather meagre. They were confined to a travel book,
Through Five Turkish Provinces
, published in 1900, and another in 1904 entitled
Dar-ul-Islam: A Record of a Journey through Ten of the Asiatic Provinces of Turkey
. Sykes’s writing had a keen eye for the picaresque and exotic with flashes of real humour; but it also displayed a darker side where Sykes gave voice to his prejudices against Jews, Armenians and urban Arabs. The latter were denigrated as ‘cowardly’ as well as being ‘insolent and despicable’ and ‘vicious as far as their feeble bodies will admit’. 6 Turks and Kurds, on the other hand, who from time to time massacred their wretched Armenian neighbours, Sykes regarded as ‘good, rugged fighters’. Nevertheless, in the company of his friends he was not averse to posing as an experienced orientalist, smoking a hubble-bubble and sitting cross-legged on the floor.
    So, when Ambassador O’Conor informed Sykes of the Foreign Office’s unenthusiastic response to the intelligence on potential Iraqi oil resources which he had gathered, Sykes must have been equally irritated; but he probably shrugged off the slight, his imagination already moving on to new enthusiasms – more horseback journeys to distant locations; more friendly encounters with cheerful bandoliered cut-throats; more amusing after-dinner anecdotes for his rich friends.
    Nevertheless, ten years later, with the strategic importance of oil better understood, Sykes’s attention would be drawn once again to the petroleum potential of Iraq, and by then, he himself would be occupyinga far more influential position in the machinery of state. On the other hand he was never to see the day – 14 October 1927 – when the top of the number 1 well at Baba Gurgur, that ‘richest and most workable’ deposit cited in his report, blew out and the first major discovery of oil in Iraq was made.

3
‘Protect the oil refineries’
    Many years after the end of the First World War, Lieutenant Wilson – by then, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Arnold Wilson MP – reflected on the events which had tumbled Britain into a major war in the Middle East at the beginning of November 1914. When ‘the little war cloud first arose in the West, no bigger than a man’s hand’, he mused, ‘it occurred to no one in Turkish Arabia that it would overshadow them within a few months bringing terror and doom to pygmy man.’ 1 Neither could he, nor anyone else, ever have imagined that within six years nearly 30,000 British and Indian soldiers and an equal number of Turks and Arabs would perish – as Wilson put it – ‘in the flower of their youth in the country of the two rivers and the rocky wastes of Kurdistan’.
    Unlike the other major powers bound by those toxic international treaties, there was nothing inevitable about the outbreak of hostilities between the two empires – Ottoman and British. Although the latter’s long-standing diplomatic support for the former was beginning to weaken somewhat, 2 the British government had shown little concern when a revolutionary organisation, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), overthrew the government of the paranoid and despotic Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908, and had maintained a studied neutrality in the 1912 Balkan War which had driven Turkey from most of its European possessions. True, by 1914 there was a powerful pro-German faction within the Ottoman government, notably in the person of its virtual dictator, the dapper, thirty-three-year-old Enver Pasha; but there were also elements within the ruling