86
main commodity was tyres, stolen with great audacity from both civilian
and military vehicles by highly organized criminal gangs. Thefts of British
military property had become so bad that DSO regarded them as acts of
sabotage. They had even caught some members of the Basrawi port police
red-handed, smuggling stolen army tyres across the Shatt al-Arab
into Persia.^56
From 1943 to 1945, apart from unrest caused by occasional extreme
responses to communism and Zionism, the main disturbances of the
restored peace were caused by Mustafa al-Barzani (1903–1979), a former
supporter of Sheikh Mahmud and commander of significant numbers of
Kurdish peshmerga forces in Iraq and Persia. However, as Mulla Mustafa’s
campaigns against the Iraqi government were restricted to the Kurdish
north, they had no direct effect on Iraqis in the rest of the country. As a
threat to internal security, CICI generally perceived the evolving Barzani
situation as one that had to be dealt with by the Iraqi government, police,
and military authorities without British assistance. Consequently, CICI
adopted a hands-off security policy towards Kurdistan, though British and
Indian forces (e.g. RAF armoured-car units) were used in at least one
instance for escort and perimeter duties to reinforce Iraqi police posts in
Assyrian villages deemed vulnerable.^57 While the Iraqi government failed to
inflict any decisive military defeat on the peshmerga, they did succeed in
bribing other Kurdish chieftains to drive the Mulla out of Iraq and across
the Persian border. To Kurdish nationalists, however, the international
frontier in the far northeast was always a porous irrelevance and never a real
barrier. Mulla Mustafa and his irregulars were always able to regroup in
Soviet-occupied Persian Kurdistan, to return to Iraqi Kurdistan in force,
and to renew their struggle against the regime. In the long term, the lack of
resolution in Kurdistan became a source of strategic concern for the British.
By the end of the war, as an ominous precursor of Cold War conflict, many
Kurds, while blaming their leaders for bringing misery upon them, started
to regard Britain’s inactivity as a symptom of British hostility rather than
impartiality, and they began looking to the Soviet Union for help.^58
Notes
- CICI Weekly Intelligence Summary and Précis of Information No. 18, 14
June 1941, AIR 29/2504, The National Archives, Kew, Surrey [TNA];
Stark, Dust in the Lion’s Paw, 113; Charles Tripp, History of Iraq
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 108–9.