Now in control of much of the Middle East, the British occupied the land with little thought of the future. “The Secretary of State for India had asked her opinion on which way the political winds were blowing among the various constituencies: the educated Sunnis in town, the Shiite majority in the provinces, the large Jewish community in Baghdad, the Christians in Mosul.” The British did not know how they would govern the territory and requested the advice of their experts. Arnold Wilson recalled, “As explained in Chapter 1, we had to replace, over the whole of this area, every working part of the former civil administration, which had disappeared, with almost all its records, leaving practically no officials even of the humblest rank behind.” Bell set out into the desert once again to weave Mesopotamia’s destiny.
This episode was written by Michael Gabbe-Gross
Michael Gabbe-Gross is a graduate student of history at the California State University, Sacramento with an emphasis in military history. He is in the final stages of completing his thesis on the “Phoenix Program,” a counterinsurgency operation during the Vietnam War.
The Formation of Iraq Part 2: Gertrude Bell
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