The Doctrine of Palestine in history would never have amounted to anything more than an intellectual musing had it not been for the huge ambitions of Hussein Ibn Ali 1853-1931 appointed emir or grand sharif of Mecca by Sultan Abdul Hamid II in 1908.1

When Hussein proposed to the British that he rise against his Ottoman master; he styled himself champion of “the whole of the Arab nation without any exception”-an incredible claim given at that point he represented little more than himself, yet to Muslim eyes the grand sharif of Mecca probably ranked second only to the caliph as a holy and reverend figure.

After 1919 the history of the Grand Sharifate was one long tale of intrigue. But of that intrigue Hussein in 1914 was a master. That Hussein succeeded in becoming grand sharif in 1908, when all his male relatives and their Dwahi Zeid rivals wanted the position too, suggests qualities his biographer failed to mention: tact, for one, which is to say the ability to mask his true thoughts, which is to say political cunning. Also, he was lucky.

The Hejaz of which Hussein became emir was among the most desolate regions of the Arab Peninsula, that vast expanse of sparsely settled rock and sand roamed by constantly warring untameable nomadic tribes.

There were few villages or even hamlets. In Midian, in northern Hejaz, such tiny statements did exist solely of mud huts, according to William Yale, an American engineer who worked as an agent for the State Department in the Middle East during World War I. And Median as a whole Yale judged “a miserable country.” As for the Bedouins, they were, according to Hogarth, “of exceptionally predatory character, low morale and disunited organization.”

Chief among Mecca’s houses was the grand Sharif palace, called the Imaret. Made of five stories massive “as mountains,” according to one who saw it for the first time, it contained one hundred rooms some of them exceedingly grand. A second palace, even more sumptuously furnished, contained the sheriff’s sleeping quarters and was the domicile of his wife.

When CUP directives encroached upon his prerogatives, ore gave the appearance of acquiescing, while considering future options. Above all he opposed the extension of a railway from Medina to Mecca, as it would give the Turks a direct line from Damascus into his stronghold and it would deprive Hejazis of their lucrative trade guiding and supplying the pilgrims traveling on foot or by hired camel. He opposed even the extension of the telegraph to Mecca and he opposed the abolition of slavery. 

Workers laying tracks for the Hejaz Railway near Tabuk, 1906

The fall of the Ottoman Empire, which ended at a stroke thirteen hundred years of imperialism in the Middle East, was not a necessary, let alone an inevitable, consequence of World War I. It was a self-inflicted disaster by a shortsighted leadership blinded by imperialist ambitions. Had the Ottomans heeded the Entente’s repeated pleas for neutrality, their empire would most likely have weathered the storm. However, they did not, and this blunder led to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire by the British army and the creation of the new Middle Eastern state system on its ruins. Even this momentous development was not inevitable, and its main impetus came not from the great powers but from a local imperial aspirant: Hussein ibn Ali of the Hashemite family.

Following the Ottoman declaration of war, the Caliphate in Constantinople duly declared jihad on 14 November 1914, invoking believers throughout the Muslim world to fight Britain, France, Russia, Serbia, and Montenegro as enemies of Islam.

It was the British who felt most vulnerable. A hundred million out of the world’s 270 million Muslims lived in the British Empire and the threat from a pan ­islamic movement was one of those simple and emotive ideas which touched a raw nerve of imperial insecurity.

The British needed help. Their advance north of Basra had recently been repulsed, the Gallipoli campaign was in trouble, while reports suggested that German plans for a jihad might be making serious headway. For some time there was the thought that the Hashemite Sharif Hussein of Mecca might be a potentially biddable proxy for the spread of British influence in the Middle East.

The Sharif exemplified the complexity among Arabs. Before the war, Hussein had been detained in Istanbul under the caliph, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who hastily conferred to him the title of emir of Mecca and Medina in the Hejaz to prevent the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) from appointing its crony. In 1909 the sultan was overthrown, and Istanbul’s relationship with the Sharif deteriorated. The revolutionary triumvirate was eager to assert political control over the Hejaz and extend the rail links into the Emirate, largely to be able to deploy troops more rapidly there if required. The Sharif opposed the changes, ostensible to protect the incomes of camel rovers who carried the pilgrims to the holy places, but his motives were revealed in a secret meeting in the spring of 1914 between his son, Abdullah, and the British Consul General of Egypt, Lord Kitchener and his secretary, Ronald Storrs. The sheriff and his sons, while eager to resist Istanbul, by force if necessary, needed British intervention in an internal matter of the Ottoman Empire, although Abdullah knew the British had arranged to become a protector of the Emirate of Kuwait in 1899, had asserted their influence over the Gulf States in 1903 with a series of high-profile diplomatic overtures, and, ultimately, had made the military intervention against Egypt in 1882 which had led to the long-term occupation of what was still, ostensible, an Ottoman domain.

When the war with the Ottomans was imminent that autumn in 1914, Storrs and Kitchener advocated restarting the negotiations, asking the sheriff to declare any Ottoman fatwa of jihad against the Entente to be illegitimate. At the same time, the Ottomans sought the sheriff’s endorsement for their declaration of holy war. Sharif Hussein hesitated: he gave his endorsement for their declaration of holy war but avoided public declaration because it would invite aggression by the Entente powers against Muslims. The disappointing response prompted the government in Istanbul to claim the sheriff had approved of the call to jihad anyway, but they also sought ways to neutralize the sheriff and his Hashemite family.

Meanwhile, Storrs offered an alliance with the sheriff if he would promise to support the British war effort. In return Kitchener, as newly appointed Secretary of State for War, was prepared to offer ‘independence’ to the Arabs in the Hejaz. While ensuring their safety and freedom from the Ottomans, what Kitchener had in mind was a caliphate that was spiritual, not political. 

Hussein delayed, knowing that he could not yet guarantee that many would follow him and also that the Ottoman forces in the region would follow him, and that the Ottoman forces in the region were strong enough to crush any premature revolt. Moreover, his ambitions were initially unclear. Only later, once the British had begun to secure their position in Palestine, Hussein began to consider a role as leader.

Far from being a proto-nationalist struggle for the sake of Arabism, this was a bid for dynastic security and an opportunity to replace the secularists in Istanbul with a caliphate of his own.

Concurrently with Sharif Hussein’s planning was the conspiracy of Al Fatat a Syrian secret society founded one year before the war. Al-Fatat was the civilian equivalent of the military­ dominated al-Ahd (the Covenant). This group’s membership was limited largely to army officers. It advocated the establishment of autonomous entities for all ethnic groups within the empire; each group was to be permitted to use its native language, although Turkish would re­main as a lingua franca. AI-Ahd maintained a central office in Damascus. After the outbreak of war, the two movements would merge.

Al-Fatat approached Hussein to enquire whether he would lead the movement against the CUP government in Istanbul. Hussein again hesitated, but the discovery in February 1915 of Ottoman plans to have him arrested and executed compelled the sheriff to act. He sent his son Faisal to gather intelligence about the groups in question.

Meeting the conspirators, Faisal discovered that the nationalists were concerned that, if the Ottomans were defeated, the French would make a bid to take over Syria. Yet, they were reassured by news of secret talks between Faisal’s brothers, Abdullah and Kitchener.

Al-Fatat thus drew up their plans, defined in the Damascus Protocol. They desired an alliance with Great Britain, to provide military and naval protection, and accepted the principle of economic preference for the British Empire. In June 1915, these plans and the Ottoman demands were considered by Hussein and his sons, before being presented as terms for cooperation with the British at Cairo. In exchange for letters, the Hashemites claimed to represent the ‘Arab nation’.

The British reaction was to dismiss this extensive claim to represent the Arab ’nation’, but there was some sympathy for a Sharifian revolt that might potentially tie down thousands of Ottoman troops.

Britain And The Collapse Of The Ottoman Empire In The Middle East

On the eve of the war with the Ottoman Empire, the Foreign Office was convinced that because it lacked the necessary expertise, it had to defer to the India Office and the Government of India when it came to exploiting existing Arab discontent with their Turkish masters. The India Office and the Foreign Office were agreed that it would be greatly advantageous to induce the Arabs to side with Great Britain, but the Government of India was very much against any policy initiative that might give the Muslim population of India the impression that Britain actively tried to set Muslims against Muslims. The Foreign Office, moreover, was very keen not to offend French susceptibilities on Syria, which France considered her domain reservé. Despite the Arabs’ great potential to weaken the Ottoman Empire’s war effort, Indian Muslim anxieties and French–Syrian ambitions dictated a very cautious response to Arab nationalist overtures to gain Britain’s support for their schemes to revolt against Turkey.

The British authorities in Cairo had far fewer scruples about exploiting Arab nationalist sentiment. The appointment of Lord Kitchener, the British agent, and consul-general in Egypt, as secretary of state for war at the beginning of August 1914, provided an excellent opportunity to push their views. Together with Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, Kitchener drew up a telegram informing Cairo that the Arab movement should be encouraged in every way possible. In October 1914 Kitchener also drafted a message, approved by Grey, to Sharif Abdullah, the second son of Hussein the Emir of Mecca, guaranteeing support for the Arabs if they assisted Britain in the war against Turkey. These initiatives bore no fruit, however, and when the India Office and the Government of India found out about them, they strongly protested, stressing their deleterious effects on Indian Muslim feeling and relations with France. The officials at the Foreign Office shared these misgivings. At the beginning of January 1915, the policy of restraint on the Arab Middle East was again in the ascendant. 

What happened next is that one of Sherif Hussein of Mecca ‘s sons, Faisal, went to Istanbul in March 1915 and stopped in Damascus to meet with representatives of the Fatah secret society along with his way. Faisal told them of Kitchener’s above-mentioned letter to his father in October 1914 and stressed that no revolt would be possible without European assistance. On his way back in May 1915, Faisal saw them again – this time ready to accept the possibility of organized revolt. Fatah issued him with the ‘Damascus Protocol’ – a program for Arab independence under Hashemite leadership. The scheme provided for Britain’s recognition of Arab independence along specific boundaries, the abolition of foreign Capitulations, the conclusion of a defensive alliance between Britain and the Arab state, and the granting of economic preference to Great Britain. Faisal handed the Damascus Protocol to his father and recommended that he agree to lead the revolt. Hussein entered negotiations with Britain, but the Syrian soldiers with membership in Fatah and ‘Ahd were sent to the Gallipoli front with the Ottoman Arab divisions after their mutinous plans were discovered by the Ottoman secret service. This delayed the possibility for revolt but left time for British authorities and the Ottoman Sultan to reach terms.2

Hussein had already garnered some popular support for an Arab Caliphate, which came from within the British sphere of influence in Egypt and Sudan. At about the same time in the Spring of 1915, Hussein finally acquired the support of the heterogeneous Arab nationalist movements in Syria and Iraq to lead them in an anti-Ottoman revolt. The issues of the Caliphate and the nationalist revolt are discrete but inseparable. They illuminate how it came to be that Hussein, who had very little connection to Arab nationalists before the war, came to lead them by 1916. It also highlights how the divergent expectations within the Arab movements, and between them and Britain, led to explosive political violence between 1918 and 1920, and even until 1923.

On behalf of ‘the Arab nation’, Abdullah declared that it was in Great Britain’s interest to support the Arabs in their endeavors to gain independence, and that the Arabs, ‘in view of the well-known attitude of the Government of Great Britain’, would gladly accept Britain’s assistance, provided she accepted, within 30 days of the receipt of the note, the following conditions: 

1. Great Britain recognizes the independence of the Arab countries which are bounded: on the north by the line Mersin-Adana to parallel 37° N and thence along the line Birejik–Urfa–Mardin–Midiat–Jazirat (Ibn ‘Umar)–Amadia to the Persian frontier; on the east, by the Persian frontier down to the Persian Gulf; on the south, by the Indian Ocean (with the exclusion of Aden whose status will remain as at present); on the west, by the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea back to Mersin.

2. Great Britain will agree to the proclamation of an Arab caliphate for Islam.3

However familiar these conditions sounded to people like Gilbert Falkingham Clayton and Ronald Storrs, they nevertheless considered them excessive. It was one thing in the battle against ‘Turco–German Jehad propaganda’ to sympathize vaguely with Arab nationalist pretensions, even to encourage them, but it was quite another actually to accept such precisely worded proposals as those of Abdullah. In March, Clayton had already opposed the proclamation favored by Francis Reginald Wingate and George Stewart Symes, not only because such a proclamation laid Great Britain open to a charge of breach of faith, but also because he could not see ‘any practical possibility of the formation of an Arab Empire’. The idea was ‘an attractive one but the necessary elements appear to me to be lacking’.4

Now it seemed, so Clayton explained to Wingate in a hurried letter on 21 August, that ‘the High Commissioner will have to send a vague reply saying that it is early days to begin negotiating agreements, the first thing being to oust the Turks from Arabia’.5 Storrs shared Clayton’s point of view. The Sharif had ‘received no sort of mandate from other potentates. He knows he is demanding, possibly as a basis for negotiation, far more than he has the right, the hope or the power to expect.’6 19 August Sir Henry agreed with his advisers. On 22 August he telegraphed to London that Hussein:

Has of course at present no mandate beyond Hedjaz. His pretensions are in every way exaggerated, no doubt considerably beyond his hope of acceptance, but it seems very difficult to treat with them in detail without seriously discouraging him.7

McMahon reached the conclusion that it was ‘quite interesting, and it shews the need of great care in our relations with the Sherif’.8

The Foreign Office recognized the danger inherent in promoting an Arab Islamic authority in Mecca to rival the Sultan. It would divide the Muslim world and could threaten a future peace settlement. In April 1915, the Foreign Office cabled Henry McMahon, High Commissioner in Egypt, saying: his Majesty’s Government consider that the question of Caliphate is one which must be decided by Mahommedans themselves, without the interference of non-Mahommedan Powers. Should the former decide for an Arab Caliphate, that decision would therefore naturally be respected by his Majesty’s Government, but the decision is one for Mahommedans to make. Sherif Hussein of Mecca had already garnered some popular support for an Arab Caliphate, which came from within the British sphere of influence in Egypt and Sudan. There had been numerous schemes brought to the attention of British officials in Egypt which envisioned alternative Arab caliphates.

The British policy of restraint on the Middle East was a source of constant concern for the authorities in Cairo and Khartoum. Their anxiety was strengthened by the fact that the Germans and Turks seemed to be very much alive to the vital importance for the progress of the war of definitely estranging the Arabs from the British. It appeared to them that the central powers would not hesitate to use whatever means at their disposal to bring this about, and to their minds the adoption of an active, pro-Arab policy constituted the only adequate answer to these ‘Turco–German machinations.’ However, such a policy could only be initiated if they were able to overcome the existing obstacles of French-Syrian pretensions and Indian worries about Muslim susceptibilities. During the first eight months of 1915, they made several attempts to do so. These were singularly unsuccessful as far as French aspirations were concerned. Sir Edward Grey and his officials were not prepared to jeopardize relations with France to win the support of the Arabs. They did, however, meet with success regarding the objections of the India Office and the Government of India to actively exploiting Arab discontent with Ottoman rule. This had the result that the Foreign Office was prepared to respond favorably to the Emir of Mecca’s overtures at the end of August 1915, India Office protests notwithstanding.

Britain, the Arab movements, and the Hashemites thus became involved in an alliance which bonded them together as long as there was an Ottoman enemy to defeat. These common interests dissolved after October 1918.

The Al-Faruqi Myth

As a sideshow to this topic, there is the often overstated role of Sharif Al-Faruqi. Following this, the Cairo military authorities believed that the desertion of Sharif Al-Faruqi, an Arab officer from the Turkish army at Gallipoli, who claimed to represent an organization of Arab officers in the Turkish army in contact with the Arab chiefs, combined with Sharif Hussein’s reply to Sir Henry McMahon’s letter of 30 August, provided a golden opportunity to spur the home authorities into action regarding the Arab question.

To the surprise of his interrogators, Faruqi informed them that he was part of a wide conspiracy whose ultimate objective was to bring about an uprising of Arab troops in Syria. He was a member of a secret organization of Arab officers within the Ottoman army called al- ‘Ahd, which he had originally joined in Mosul; but after his unit had moved to Syria he had also become a member of another, a somewhat older secret organization of Arab nationalists known as Jam‘iyya al-‘Arabiyya al-Fatat – the Young Arab Society. Al-Fatat had been founded by a small group of civilian Arabs in Paris in 1911 and had recently moved its headquarters from Beirut to Damascus while al-‘Ahd had been established in October 1913 in Istanbul.9 In January 1915, the leaders of both al-Fatat and al-‘Ahd had joined forces in Damascus where they decided to send a message to Sharif Husayn of Mecca stating that they were ready to start a rebellion in Syria under his leadership.

On receiving this dramatic information, Faruqi’s interrogators informed British Intelligence in Cairo, whose chief, Brigadier Gilbert Clayton, immediately issued orders for the Arab lieutenant to be sent to Egypt for further interrogation. He arrived there on 1 September 1915 and the following day was introduced to Na’um Shuqayr, a Lebanese Christian who worked for British Military Intelligence and who was to be his ‘minder’ and translator. Shuqayr lived in a small house in the old al-Qahira district and Faruqi was instructed that, for the time being, he should live with Shuqayr. Each day they walked the two miles from Shuqayr’s home to the HQ of the British Army at the Savoy Hotel, where Faruqi was ordered to begin writing a detailed account of all he knew about the activities and plans of al-‘Ahd. By 12 September Faruqi’s long statement, describing the situation of the ‘Arab movement’ in Syria prior to his desertion, the aims of the movement, and his own role within it, was completed and typed up, ready for analysis. It was immediately passed to Brigadier Clayton and was to be the catalyst that would culminate in a dramatic turn in British policy towards the Arabs and the Middle East. Over the next few days, Clayton read and re-read Faruqi’s statement with a mixture of concern and excitement. Faruqi stated that, having met with the leaders of both al-Fatat and al-‘Ahd in Damascus, he had ‘thought of uniting the two societies in order to gain strength by the union and to avoid mistakes in politics which history teaches us might occur from the military if left alone’, and indeed, it was he himself – so Faruqi claimed – that united the two organizations.10

The newly united body then carried out propaganda among Arab units and his organization agreed that they were prepared to give Britain, in return for its help, ‘all concessions and privileges which do not touch the essential resources of our country and our independence’. The first action of the new Arab organization had been to send an officer to the Sharif of Mecca, after which they discovered that the Sherif was already in communication with the high commissioner in Cairo and that ‘the English have given their consent for the Sharif establishing an Arab Empire, but the limits of his Empire were not de- fined.’ Faruqi then went on to describe the circumstances of his subsequent arrest in Aleppo, his imprisonment during which the Turkish commander Djemal Pasha had tried – but failed – to get him to reveal what he knew about ‘the secrets of our society’. He and the other officers imprisoned with him were then released but ‘sent to Istanbul’. During the journey, he and some of his companions tried to escape to Cyprus and from there to travel to Mecca and join the Sharif, but they failed as ‘we were under close surveillance’. On arrival in Istanbul they again ‘tried to escape but we could not get a chance of doing so’, after which Faruqi ‘was detailed as a commander of an infantry company fighting at Gallipoli’. He deserted at Gallipoli because he did not want to fight ‘my friends’ or do ‘service to my enemies … the Turks – who wish to kill me and my party’.

Some parts of the statement must have sounded rather odd to Clayton. It is then maintained by a number of authors that Clayton began to push these doubts into the back of his mind as Faruqi’s statement became more and more interesting. ‘Ninety percent of the Arab officers in the Ottoman Army’ were ‘members of our society’, he claimed, and not only Arabs but part of the Kurd officers’.11

Al-Faruqi himself would ‘guarantee to go to Mesopotamia and bring over a great number of officers and more especially from the 35th Division at Mosul who all know me’. And as if to emphasize the strength of the Arab movement of which Faruqi was, he claimed, a leading member, Shuqayr recorded that Faruqi had told him that if Britain did not agree to support the Arabs, they would get their independence by themselves.12

Yet Faruqi was certainly not pivotal. His testimony rather was used by Clayton and Maxwell to so-called ‘rub it in’. Faruqi’s claims simply looked like a good excuse to help let London finally make a political decision toward a more active pro-Arabic direction. Thus in a letter sent to Wingate Clayton describes Faruqi as ‘not a bad little man’ (Wingate papers, box 143A/7).

Also Sir Edward Grey was receptive to the promptings from Cairo. At the same time, Grey and the officials at the Foreign Office realized that the boundaries claimed by the Arabs clashed with French ambitions in Syria, as well as those of the Government of India in Mesopotamia. An obvious way out of this problem seemed to them to be to sacrifice Indian interests in Mesopotamia to persuade the French to be more accommodating in Syria. McMahon was authorized to react favorably to Hussein’s territorial claims in as far as Britain was free to act without detriment to the interests of France. For the Foreign Office, the time had now arrived to open negotiations with the French on the extent of their claims in Syria. The Government of India and the India Office strongly protested against the disregard of India’s territorial ambitions in Mesopotamia, but they got nowhere with Sir Edward. The only comfort he could give them was that, given the weakness of the Arabs, nothing would come of these schemes. When the British cabinet decided to evacuate Gallipoli, Kitchener warned that this would prevent the Arabs from siding with the Entente. He strongly advocated a landing at Alexandretta as a countermeasure. The French, however, refused to entertain this proposal, and the project was subsequently dropped. On the eve of the negotiations with the French on the boundaries of the future Arab state, Grey and the officials in the Foreign Office realized that, unless the Entente intervened with military force in the Middle East, there was no prospect of the Arabs rising against the Turks. At the same time, they insisted that French claims on Syria preclude such an intervention from taking place without French permission and active participation.

As Clerk minuted ‘all Arab discussion is futile unless we (and the French) are prepared to give armed support in force’.13 Grey concurred. He minuted on a telegram from McMahon that ‘nothing will move the Arabs in our favor except military action giving them protection against the Turks. Unless we can effect this, negotiations and promises will be useless and embarrassing.14 One of Clayton’s ‘golden opportunities’ again seemed to slip away. Not because the Foreign Office did not realize how important it was to bring the Arabs over to the side of the Entente – thanks to the incessant lobbying by Wingate, Clayton, Storrs, Maxwell, McMahon, and Kitchener, it had become thoroughly aware of that – not because the India Office and the Government of India had been successful in obstructing initiatives in this direction, but because Kitchener and the authorities in Cairo and Khartoum once again faced a far more formidable obstacle: the Foreign Office’s refusal even to think of a Middle East policy not based on a sympathetic attitude towards French ambitions in Syria.

Also, Ian Rutledge writes in “Enemy on the Euphrates: The Battle for Iraq, 1914-1921″(2015) that: ‘Nevertheless, in all other respects Sykes had done it – or so he believed. He had squared the circle. He had made an agreement with Picot which satisfied both Britain and France while at the same time believing that he was broadly respecting the wishes of Sharif Husayn and the ‘Arab movement’ as related to him by their ‘representative’ Lieutenant Faruqi. Needless to say, neither Sharif Husein nor his sons had the slightest idea that their objectives had been so seriously misconstrued by the Power to whom they were about to commit their forces and in whose service they were to risk all.’ This ‘had squared the circle’, should be seen as referring particularly to the Arabs in the sense that he perceived them as weak and divided and thus did not really want to give them as much as they believed they had been promised.

1. Abu Khaldun Sati al-Husri, al-UrubaAwalon (Beirut:Dar al-ilm Li-I-Malain,1955, pp. 11-13; Hearing before the Anglo-American Comimitee of Inquiry, Washington, D.C.jan.11, 1946, Central Zionist Archives (CZA), V/9960’g. pp. 10-11.

2. Eliezer Tauber, The Arab Movements in World War I, 2014, pp 63–65.

3. Note, not dated, encl. in Abdullah to Storrs, 14 July 1915; Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. 414. There were four other conditions, which McMahon summarised as follows: ‘Arab government of Sheriff to guarantee Great Britain economic preference in Arab countries. Conditions of mutual assistance. Great Britain to approve and further abolition of foreign privileges in Arabia. Provisions of renewal of alliance.’ Tel. McMahon to Grey, no. 450, 22 August 1915, FO 371/2486/117236.

4. Gilbert Clayton to Reginald Wingate, private, not dated, presumably March 1915, Wingate Papers, box 134/4. 

5. Clayton to Wingate, private, 21 August 1915, Wingate Papers, box 135/2.

6. Storrs, Note, 19 August 1915, FO 371/2486/125293.

7. Tel. McMahon to Grey, no. 450, 22 August 1915, FO 371/2486/117236.

8. Minute Clerk, 23 August 1915, on Shuckburg to Oliphant, 13 August 1915, FO 371/2486/112369.

9. Quoted in Roger Adelson, London and the Invention of the Middle East: Money, Power, and War, 1902-1922,1995, p. 190.

10. FO/882/13, The National Archive, London, Memorandum on Military, Political Situation in Mesopotamia (Section II), 28 October 1915.

11. Quoted in Adelson, p. 74.

12. Ibid., pp. 107–8.

13. Minute Clerk, 3 December 1915, on Parker to Clerk, 3 December 1915 (underlining in original), FO 371/2486/183416.

14. Minute Grey, not dated, on tel. McMahon to Grey, no. 732, 28 November 1915, Cab 37/138/ 23.