THE MESOPOTAMIANS

Dominion, Volume 14, Issue 25, 25 October 1920, Page 5

THE MESOPOTAMIANS

A PEOPLE IN A STRANGE STATE u TRIBES IMPELLED BY BLIND FANATICISM By all accounts we seem to nave lost control of the Mesopotamians, wrote Ferdinand Tuohy, in tho London "Daily Mail" a few weeks ago. Colonel Lawrence, our greatest living expert on the Arab, refers ominously in the "Sunday Times" to those whose control and understanding of the local, population might have been more enlightened. Certainly no people emerging from the .war needed more delicate handling than the Mesopotamians." Imagine a million .odd Arabs suddenly jerked from their sensual slumber of the ages into a fevered modern world. That .was what •happened with.our coming to the land of the Twin Rivers. Imagine the steam engine, the ocean liner, the kinoma, the camera, tho telephone, the .motor-car, tho newspaper, wireless, the- aeroplane, the gramophone, electric light—imagine ' all these things, slowly grafted on to us in the West .through several generations, suddenly sprung upon you in the course of a few years, even months! I remember Colonel Leachman, who for ten years had studied the native on the spot, and was recently treacherously shot, fret/uently harping on this aspect of the question in his reports, and emphasising the heotio state of development in which he found many of the tribes along the Tigris and Euphrates. Because we need to .-emembi"- that for two thousand years and more these seople, living where the world began, had been marking time, . living parochially, seeing little further tl.»n the lKHibourine tribe, illiterate without ambition, entirely sensual and self centred, talking only of ,the produce of the soil and of the bargaining of the market place, and thinking only of what new deal they opuld do or of what new wife they could'' buy. ■ . . •Under tho Turk the Mesopotamian saw no light, and merely Jived for gain'. We ■ switched on. the light, -find now our nomad friends are out io "realise^ thennational aspirations." .... , I do not know if that vast political intelligence organisation "The , White Tabs" still exists as composed during .the war, but Intelligence must certainly be the most vital section of the General Staff in Mesopotamia at the present time.'. Unless we. know exactly what is happening in each, of the sixty tribes comprising the native population our farflung garrisons may at any moment be smothered in the sudden descent of several thousand of the fleetest and most savage horsemen in the -world. Unfortunately we armed many Of the more reliable tribes during the war—at least they -were reliable at that time—and we must not envisage any likely shortage of desert arms among the enemy. About half the population are nomads, the rest sedentary. The nomads live in tents and are ever on tho move, now into the desert, now back to the Tigris. They flourish in little self-contained communities of a hundred or so, sowing a crop here, passinsr on, returning to reap it and then passing on once more. All the. time the nomad goes on breeding his live stock, goats, sheep, (camels, cattle, poultry, selling them, once for barter, now fdr gold, and passing on. • The nomads are of stern, stuff, loving a "scrap,'* yet seldom attacking unless assured, by their numbers, of a slashing suwesw.- They are divided into tribes and subtribes, and pay tribute to sheikhs and lesser sheikhs. Often a sheikh may have a following of four or five thousand foot and a thousand horse—the finest horsemen in 'the wide world.

The tribes of Mesopotamia used always to he liorderine on a state of hostilities with one another, chiefly owing to reli-' pious differences. But ono feaTS that today the Mesopotamians are all united under a common banner, and are being impelled forward by that blind fanaticism .known only to Islam. .....