From today’s New York Times:

“Expecting a warm tribal welcome when they marched into Iraq to toss out the Ottomans, the British instead were met with hostility from the [local] tribes, which united to massacre tens of thousands of British soldiers.”

I’m no expert on Britain’s World War One campaign in Mesopotamia (roughly today’s Iraq), but, hard fought though it was, to talk of the “massacre” of tens of thousands of British troops is, I suspect, a wild exaggeration. The worst massacre was in the aftermath of the fall of Kut, a disaster that saw the capture of 12,000 British and Indian troops. They were sent north to Anatolia by the Turks on a Bataan-style death march in which 1,750 British and 2,500 Indians perished.

When it came to fighting the Brits, it was the Turks who showed the most enthusiasm. The attitude of the local Arabs (today’s Iraqis) towards defending their Ottoman overlords was more ambivalent.

As to the response to the inhabitants of Baghdad when the British finally arrived, one British historian (AJ Barker) writing in the 1960s described the scene as follows:

“It was a bewildering reception. Persians dressed like Joseph in long silken coats of many colours; red-fezzed oriental Jews in misfit European clothing; handsome Armenian refugees who had spent the night huddled in Christian churches, fearful of their fate if any of the fleeing Turks learned of their existence; lordly turbaned Muslims in black flowing robes – all turned out to cheer them as [the British] tramped through the Southern Gate. It was a gala display, a fiesta…”

Of course, assuming that the welcome would be like that this time would be to invite overconfidence and thus disaster, but, let’s just say that the historical precedents are not as bleak as that article might suggest.

Re-read too that description of that wonderful polyglot, multi-faith Baghdad and mourn its loss.