Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood

Illustrations

1. Detail from an Abbasid Koran by the great calligrapher and illuminator Ibn al Bawab, Baghdad, c. 1000. During its Abbasid heyday Baghdad became the unrivalled centre of Arabic calligraphy. Ibn al Bawab, one of the most illustrious Arab calligraphers, perfected a number of elegant cursive scripts. His school of calligraphy lasted until Baghdad was sacked by the Mongols in 1258.

2. ‘Sit at dinner tables as long as you can and converse to your hearts’ desire, for these are the boon times of your lives,’ wrote the tenth-century cookery writer Ibn Sayyar al Warrak. A ninth-century Abbasid blue and white dish with fish design and leafy spray.

3. A tenth-century astrolabe, made in Baghdad by Ahmad ibn Khalaf, epitomising the sophistication and beauty of Abbasid science. Among its many uses was determining the precise direction of Mecca, towards which the faithful would direct their prayers. In the Abbasid Empire during the ninth and tenth centuries more discoveries were made in astronomy, mathematics and medicine than in any previous period of history.

4. The striking tomb of Zumurrud Khatun, wife of the caliph Al Mustadi (reigned 1170–80) and mother of the caliph Al Nasir (reigned 1180–1225). Small holes cut into the dome produce a glowing light inside the vault.

5. An anatomical drawing of the human eye by Hunayn ibn Ishak (808–73), doyen of Abbasid scientists and chief translator in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom.

6. The gracious inner courtyard of Mustansiriya University, founded in 1233 by the penultimate Abbasid caliph Al Mustansir (reigned 1226–42), and one of the few remaining Abbasid monuments in Baghdad. Because most Abbasid buildings were constructed from sun-baked and kiln-fired mud bricks rather than stone, any that survive, including this one, have been heavily restored.

7. Soldiers file before the Turkic warlord Tamerlane (1336–1405), presenting him with the severed heads of Baghdadis. According to the chronicles, Tamerlane had his army build 120 towers containing 90,000 skulls after taking Baghdad in 1401. From a sixteenth-century edition of Sharaf al Din Ali Yazdi’s Zafarnama (Book of Victory).

8. The Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, the Lawgiver, Sultan of Sultans, Khan of Khans, Commander of the Faithful and Successor of the Prophet of the Lord of the Universe. Suleyman rode into Baghdad at the head of his army on 4 December 1534, ushering in nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule that lasted, with a brief Persian interregnum (1623–38), until 1917.

9. A genealogy depicting the Prophet Mohammed and the Rashidun, the four ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’ (as Sunnis refer to the first four caliphs), produced for Ottoman Turkish patrons in sixteenth-century Baghdad. Mohammed, his face veiled, is surrounded by the Rashidun, beneath his grandfather Abd al Mutalib. To the left is the pre-Islamic Persian king Anushirvan (reigned 531–579).

10. A leaf from a 1224 Arabic translation of the first-century De Materia Medica (The Pharmacy) of Dioscorides. A wealth of medical, scientific and philosophical texts from the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds were translated into Arabic in Baghdad at the apogee of the Abbasid Empire.

11. The eighth-century caliph Harun al Rashid, one of the central figures in The Arabian Nights, with his barber. Persian miniature from a fifteenth-century manuscript of Nizami’s Khamsa (Five Poems). In 1184 the Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr was told there were 2,000 public baths in Baghdad. In 1327 the great Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta remarked approvingly on the city’s ‘numerous and excellently constructed’ baths.

12. The Mongol conqueror Hulagu (1218–65), grandson of Genghis Khan, forces the last Abbasid caliph Al Mustasim to eat gold. This thirteenth-century illustration from Rustichello da Pisa’s Books of the Marvels of the World is based on Marco Polo’s colourful story of Mustasim’s execution.

13. Hulagu’s scorched-earth sacking of Baghdad in 1258, the most shattering blow the Muslim world had ever suffered, brought five centuries of Abbasid rule to a bloody end. The Tigris was said to flow black from the ink of all the books hurled into the river.

14. A fifteenth-century Persian miniature of the Tigris. Flooding, invariably followed by plague, was a regular and destructive feature of life in Baghdad, killing untold numbers of Baghdadis over the centuries. It was only brought under control with the construction of bunds and other flood defences in the first half of the twentieth century.

15. Harun al Rashid receives envoys from Charlemagne in Baghdad, 786. The 1864 painting by the German artist Julius Köckert (1827–1918) is a classic example of European Orientalism, emphasizing the perceived exoticism and sensuousness of the Middle East.

16. A Baghdadi woman wearing a black face veil, from the late eighteenth-century Zenanname (Book of Women).

17. Baghdadi women playing the popular Middle Eastern game mankala, a watercolour from François-Marie Rosset’s Costumes Orientaux, published in 1790.

18. A nineteenth-century drawing of Baghdad from the Tigris by Lieutenant James Fitzjames of the Royal Navy, a member of Captain Francis Rawdon Chesney’s Euphrates Expedition of 1835–37.

19. A portrait by Henry Pickersgill of the British traveller James Silk Buckingham and his wife in Arab costume. When Buckingham reached Baghdad in 1816 he reckoned the British Resident, Claudius Rich, was ‘the most powerful man’ in the city after the Ottoman pasha.

20. Map of Baghdad drawn up by William Collingwood in 1853–54. The young midshipman was forced to resort to ‘all kinds of subterfuges’, including scribbling down bearings, measurements and paces on his shirt cuffs and tails, ‘to lull [Turkish] suspicion’.

21. A pontoon bridge over the Tigris, 1914. For almost 1,200 years, until the first fixed structure was commissioned by the British in 1932, pontoon bridges and boats were the only means of crossing between the east and west banks of the river.

22. The British Residency in Baghdad, 1917. The prime riverside location and the monumental size of the embassy made a striking architectural statement of Britain’s position and influence in Iraq. Britain’s Iraq Mandate lasted from 1920 to 1932.

23. Baghdadis paddling across the Tigris in a guffa, the traditional round vessel made from plaited reeds and waterproofed with bitumen. Viewed en masse on the river, they were likened by one writer in 1914 to ‘a thousand huge inverted tar bubbles’. In the background is a European steamship.

24. British troops of the 4th Hampshire Regiment enter Baghdad through the Bab al Muadham Gate on 11 March 1917, ending four centuries of Turkish rule. ‘We shall, I trust, make it a great centre for Arab civilization and prosperity,’ wrote Gertrude Bell.

25. The coronation of Iraq’s first monarch, King Faisal I, in Baghdad’s Saray al Kushla, Palace of the Military Barracks, 23 August 1921. Sir Percy Cox, British High Commissioner, is at extreme left, next to Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the king’s advisor. General Sir Aylmer Haldane, the British Commanding Officer, stands to Faisal’s left. Behind the throne is Faisal’s ADC, Tawfik al Damluji, and on the far right is Mahmud al Gailani, the Prime Minister’s son.

26. King Faisal I sitting next to Sir Sassoon Eskell (centre, with white beard and fez), the Iraqi Jewish statesman and financier in Baghdad, 1920s. In 1909 Eskell was one of six parliamentarians representing Baghdad in Istanbul and a decade later was one of the architects of the Iraqi state. In 1904, Baghdad’s Jews numbered around 40,000, a third of the city’s population.

27. The Alliance Israélite Universelle set up its first Jewish school in Baghdad in 1865. The Laura Kedourie School for Girls, pictured here, another Alliance project, opened its doors in 1911 and soon established itself as the leading school for Jewish girls in the city, under the direction of its formidable principal Madame Bassan.

28. Gertrude Bell in the British High Commission in Baghdad in 1924, surrounded by British colleagues and Iraqi ministers. Oriental secretary, Arabist, explorer, kingmaker, co-architect of modern Iraq, Bell was a formidable figure. ‘I know every Tribal Chief of any importance throughout the whole length and breadth of Iraq.’

29. Iraqi bishops celebrate Iraq joining the League of Nations and the end of the British Mandate at a reception hosted by King Faisal I in the royal palace on 6 October 1932. Christians, like Jews, long predated Muslims in the ancient land of Mesopotamia.

30. A Red Crescent fashion show in Baghdad’s Al Amana Hall, early 1950s. ‘Some of my younger friends are rather scandalized by it,’ said Tamara Daghestani, granddaughter of Field Marshal Mohammed Fadhil Pasha al Daghestani, acting governor of Baghdad. Note the absence of hijabs.

31. A twentieth-century (1952) Hollywood take on the caliph and his harem. ‘We hardly recognize her with her clothes on,’ one reviewer wrote of its co-star Gypsy Rose Lee.

32. The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s extraordinary design for central Baghdad, 1957. A 100-metre statue of Harun al Rashid rises from a spiral minaret modelled on Samarra’s ninth-century Great Mosque on the island he named ‘Edena’ (centre), southwest of a million-dollar complex containing an opera house, cultural centre and museums. At top left is Baghdad University and at bottom right a botanical garden.

33. Jubilant crowds take to the streets of Baghdad on 14 July 1958, hours after the bloody military coup that overthrew the Iraqi monarchy and ushered in a new era of republican turbulence. The Baghdad mob has been a potent, unstable and often barbaric force in Iraqi politics since the foundation of the city.

34. Major-General Abd al Karim Kassem, leader of the 1958 coup (bottom right), chairs a public Cabinet meeting shortly after the revolution. Having survived an assassination attempt involving the young Saddam Hussein in 1959, the nationalist Kassem was executed and replaced by his former revolutionary comrade and pan-Arabist Abdul Salam Aref in 1963.

35. A ‘perfect, masterly, cold-blooded, wicked, diabolic’ display ‘to gratify the Baath Party’s lust for power’, wrote the Jewish eyewitness Max Sawdayee of the regime’s hanging of nine Jews in Liberation Square on 27 January 1969. ‘It shakes one to the bones. It shakes even one’s faith in humanity.’

36. Saddam Hussein, President of the Republic of Iraq (1979–2003). Saddam was also Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, General Secretary of the Regional Command of the Arab Baath Socialist Party, Leader-Struggler, Knight of the Arab Nation, Hero of National Liberation, etc.

37. Iraqi soldiers carry a wounded colleague in Baghdad during the Iraq–Iran War, 1981. Though most of the conflict was felt in the south, Baghdad still experienced the terror of rocket attacks and the grinding poverty brought on by the eight-year war. Henry Kissinger famously said of the conflict, ‘A pity they both can’t lose.’

38. American soldiers of the 3rd Infantry Division enter the Crossed Swords parade grounds during the battle for Baghdad, April 2003. The ‘Victory Arch’ was formally opened to the public in 1989 by Saddam, the ‘Hero of Peace’, to commemorate Iraq’s ‘defeat’ of Iran. The dissident Kanan Makiya called it ‘Nuremberg and Las Vegas rolled into one.’

39. U.S. Marine Corps Assaultman Kirk Dalrymple watches as a six-metre statue of Saddam Hussein is toppled in Firdus Square, central Baghdad, 9 April 2003. A British journalist described the event as ‘the most staged photo-opportunity since Iwo Jima’.

40. ‘Christians that remained have been tortured, killed and kidnapped.’ Canon Andrew White, the Anglican ‘Vicar of Baghdad’, ministers to a mixed Chaldean, Assyrian, Orthodox and Armenian Catholic flock that has been savagely reduced by the raging violence of recent years. They speak Aramaic and Syriac, the most ancient of Christian languages.

41. Emad Levy, the last Rabbi in Baghdad, 28 September 2003. Dating back to the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century bc, the Jewish population of Iraq, one of the oldest and most significant Jewish communities in the world, has been hounded almost into extinction.

42. ‘This is one of the greatest catastrophes in the history of Baghdad. It’s a crime against the heritage of mankind.’ The late Dr Donny George, director of Baghdad’s Iraq Museum, originally founded by Gertrude Bell, surveys the wreckage of the Assyrian Gallery in the aftermath of the looting of 8–12 April 2003.

43. Baghdad municipal workers remove the statue of the Abbasid caliph Al Mansur, founder of Baghdad, after it was hit by a bomb in October 2005.

44. Life continues: Baghdadis relax at the zoo in Al Zawra’s grand park, one of the city’s most popular places to visit at the weekend, 3 May 2008.

45. ‘Cairo writes, Beirut prints and Baghdad reads,’ runs the Arab saying. On Fridays Baghdad’s bookworms head for Mutanabbi Street, named after the great tenth-century poet, with more than 200 metres of bookshops and stalls.

46. The magnificent shrine of Imam Musa al Kadhim, one of Shia Islam’s twelve imams, and his grandson, Mohammed al Jawad, in the heart of Kadhimiya, the northwestern district of Baghdad. From its origin in the mid ninth century until the present day, the Kadhimain shrine has often been the flashpoint of riots pitting Sunni against Shia, the traditional sectarian faultline that has long bedeviled Iraq.

47. Baghdadis gather to celebrate the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed at the shrine of Abu Hanifa, founder in the eighth century of the Hanafi school of Islamic law, the largest of the four principal Sunni schools, and a leading figure in the construction of Baghdad. Situated in the northeastern district of Adhamiya across the Tigris, it is the Sunni counterpart to the Kadhimain shrine.

List of Illustrations

INTEGRATED ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure 1. Reconstruction of Baghdad’s gates and city walls by the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld, reprinted from Jacob Lassner, The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages, p. 210.

Figure 2. Julnar of the Sea, frontispiece illustration by David Coster from Antoine Galland, Les mille et une nuits: contes arabes, Vol. 7, 1707–14. (Reproduced by permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge (G.24.52))

Figure 3. ‘The British flag over Bagdad’, from War Illustrated, 24 March 1917.

COLOUR PLATES

2. Earthenware glazed dish, Iraq, ninth century. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. (Photograph: Bridgeman Art Library)

3. Copper astrolabe, by Ahmad ibn Khalaf, Baghdad, ninth century. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

4. Tomb of Zumurrud Khatun, Baghdad, photographed in 1930s. (Photograph: Getty Images)

5. Anatomical drawing of the eye, from Hunayn ibn Ishak, Ten Treaties on the Eye, copy made in Syria in 1197, after c. 860 original. National Library, Cairo. (Photograph: De Agostini Picture Library/G. Dagli Orti/The Bridgeman Art Library)

6. Mustansiriya University, Baghdad. (Photograph: Agefotostock)

7. Tamerlane’s troops present him with severed heads, miniature from a sixteenth-century manuscript of the Zafarnama. The British Library, London. (Photograph: Robana/Getty Images)

8. Suleyman the Magnificent as a young man, illustration from Nakkas Osman, Semailname, 1579. Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

10. Illustration of a pharmacy, from an Arabic translation of Dioscorides, De Materia Medica, Baghdad, 1224. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. (Cora Timken Burnett Collection of Persian Miniatures and Other Persian Art Objects, Bequest of Cora Timken Burnett, 1956 (57.51.21). Photograph: Scala, Florence)

11. Harun al-Rashid and his barber, miniature from Nizami, Khamsa, late fifteenth century. The British Library, London. (Photograph: Robana/Getty Images)

12. Hulagu forces Mustasim to eat gold, illustration from ‘Books of the Marvels of the World’, by Rustichello da Pisa, Italian school, thirteenth century. Private collection. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

13. The siege of Baghdad by the Mongol army of Hulagu in 1258, illustration from Rashid al-Din, Jami al Tawarikh, Persia, c. 1430s. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

14. View of the River Tigris, illustration to a text by Nasir Bukhara ’i, from a fifteenth-century anthology of poetry by various authors, Northern Iran, 1468. The British Library, London. (Photograph: Robana/Getty Images)

15. Julius Köckert, Harun al-Rashid Receiving Envoys from Charlemagne, 786, oil painting, 1864. Maximilianeum Collection, Munich. (Photograph: akg-images)

16. A woman of Baghdad, illustration from Zenanname, 1776–7. The British Library, London. (Photograph: Robana/Getty Images)

17. ‘Women of Baghdad playing a Game Called Mankala’, watercolour by Rosset from Costumes orientaux, 1790. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. (OD–19–FOL, f.46)

18. ‘Bagdad and Bridge’, drawing by Captain James Fitzjames, RN, from Narratives of the Euphrates Expedition, 1868. Bodleian Library, University of Oxford. (203.e.131 plate LX, p.309)

19. Henry Pickersgill, James Silk Buckingham and his wife, 1816. Royal Geographical Society, London. (Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library)

20. ‘Ground plan of the enciente of Baghdad, the capital of Irak-Mesopotamia, etc’, 1853–4, from Cmr Felix Jones and Lt. William Collingwood, Memoir on the Province of Baghdad, 1857. (Copyright © The British Library Board, India Office Map Collection (IOR/V/23/225 Sel 43e(i)))

21. Pontoon bridge over the Tigris, Baghdad, 1914. (Photograph: Underwood & Underwood/National Geographic Creative)

23. Kufa with a European steamer, Baghdad, undated. (Photograph: Underwood & Underwood/National Geographic Creative)

24. General Maude’s troops entering Baghdad, 11 March 1917. Private collection. (Photograph: Leemage/The Bridgeman Art Library)

25. The coronation of King Faisal, 1921. (Photograph: St Anthony’s College, Oxford, Middle East Archive)

26. King Faisal I with Sir Sassoon Eskell on an official tour of duty in Baghdad, 1920s. (Photograph: Private collection)

27. Girls of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, Baghdad, c. 1890. (Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images)

28. Gertrude Bell with colleagues and Arab ministers at the High Commission, Baghdad, c. 1923–4. (Gertrude Bell Photographic Archive, Newcastle University (Pers/B/22/O))

29. Guests at the King’s reception on the occasion of Iraq becoming a member of the League of Nations, 6 October 1932. (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC)

30. Red Crescent fashion show, Baghdad, early 1950s. (Photograph by courtesy of Tamara Daghestani)

31. Poster for Babes in Bagdad, 1952.

32. Frank Lloyd Wright, Design for Central Baghdad, 1957. (The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives (The Museum of Modern Art/Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University, New York) copyright © ARS, NY and DACS, London 2014)

33. Baghdad a few hours after the coup, 14 July 1958. (Photograph: PA Photos)

35. The bodies of Jews hanged in Liberation Square, 27 January 1969. (Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis)

36. Saddam Hussein, 1982. (Photograph: Rex Features)

37. Iraqi soldiers carrying a victim during the Iran–Iraq War, Baghdad, 1981. (Photograph: PA Photos)

40. Canon Andrew White. (Photograph: Dawood Andrews)

41. Emad Levy, 2003. (Photograph: Laurent van der Stockt/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images)

43. Removal of a 1970s statue of al-Mansur, hit by a bomb explosion, Baghdad, October 2005. (Photograph: Reuters/Corbis)

45. Booksellers on Mutanabbi Street, 2013. (Photograph: Justin Marozzi)

46. Aerial view of the shrine of Imam Musa al Kadhim, 2012. (Photograph: Reuters/Corbis)

47. People gather at the shrine of Abu Hanifa to mark the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed, 2009. (Photograph: Reuters/Corbis)

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

Acknowledgements

Baghdad is not the easiest place in the world in which to live, work or conduct historical research. For much of the past decade, from my first footsteps in the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2004 until the present, the City of Peace has been a slaughterhouse, an inferno of killing. Sunni, Shia, Jews, Christians, foreigners – all have been targeted in the waves of violence that flooded across Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 war. This, as I show in this book, is only the latest iteration of a pattern of bloodshed that can be traced across the centuries, sometimes almost indistinct and beneath the surface, frequently all too vivid, right back to the reign of the Sunni Abbasid caliph Mansur, who founded the city in 762 and left a crypt full of Shia corpses – men, women and children – at the time of his death. Strife and instability on a grand scale are inseparable from the history of Baghdad, the capital of a country that is the fulcrum of the Sunni–Shia divide, and the place where the sectarian split currently convulsing the Middle East took root after the Battle of Kerbala in 680.

With that note of long-standing insecurity in mind, I owe thanks first of all to Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer OBE for giving me the opportunity to live and work in Baghdad for much of the past decade, establishing a foundation to fund small health and education projects across Iraq. Brigadier James Ellery CBE, the late Brigadier Tony Hunter-Choat, Colonel the Hon. Alastair Campbell, Colonel Andrew Joscelyne, Catriona Laing and many other colleagues were also stalwart friends in difficult times. Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely, MC, Deputy Commanding General Multinational Force Iraq (2004–5), The Hon. Sir Dominic Asquith, British Ambassador in Baghdad 2006–7, and Jon Wilks, Deputy Head of Mission 2009–10, maintained Britain’s long tradition of sending its finest soldiers and Arabists to Baghdad. I thank them for their friendship and for the support of the British Embassy. My former colleague and dear friend Dr Thair Ali of Baghdad University risked his life repeatedly in the line of duty by facilitating all sorts of research in the city. He went far beyond it to help me visit some of Baghdad’s most important historical sites at a time when even simple expeditions could be a matter of life and death. I am deeply grateful to him. Thank you above all to my many unnamed colleagues who kept me out of harm’s way during my time in Iraq. Too many of them lost their lives over the past decade.

Iraq is not just a violent corner of the Middle East: it is also the cradle of civilization. From Sumerian times in the sixth millennium BC through the Babylonian, Assyrian, Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman and Sassanid periods, successive civilizations have flourished in Mesopotamia, the fertile, irrigated land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. For most of the five centuries of Abbasid rule in Baghdad from 762 to 1258, the city represented the pinnacle of intellectual, artistic, scientific and technological achievement on earth, attracting scholars and immigrants from across the world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic. Iraqis are rightly proud of this legacy. I have been lucky to meet so many civilized and generous men and women who have helped with this book in different and important ways. Some provided critical insights into the history, culture, religion and politics of Iraq, others shared childhood memories of Baghdad in more peaceful times. Many returned from opposition in exile to help rebuild Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. A number of them became friends.

For numerous interviews and conversations my thanks to former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, former Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, Samir Sumaidaie, Iraq’s Ambassador to Washington 2006–11, Mowaffak al Rubaie, National Security Advisor 2004–9, who will be better remembered by history as the man who hanged Saddam, Defence Minister Saadoun al Dulaimi, Fareed Yasseen, Iraq’s Ambassador to France, Saad Yusef, an advisor to Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki, Dr Abdul Aziz Hamid, former chairman of the State Board of Antiquities, General Nabil Said, Professor Eyad Shamseldeen, Sarmad Allawi and Hadi Allawi. I have benefited from conversations with the controversial Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, who is less well known as an enthusiastic historian of Iraq, and his daughter Tamara Chalabi, author of the spirited memoir Late for Tea at the Deer Palace: The Lost Dreams of My Iraqi Family. Tamara Daghestani provided wistful memories of happier times in Baghdad. Her extensive photographic archive on Facebook is a powerful antidote for those who fear the worst for Iraq. Fatima Fleifel was a delightful and long-suffering teacher who helped me to brush up my Arabic.

In the academic world I am especially grateful to the Abbasid historians Professor Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), and Dr Amira Bennison, senior lecturer in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at Cambridge University, who have provided guidance in person and through their works listed in the Bibliography. Thanks also to the renowned historians of Iraq Professor Charles Tripp at SOAS and Dr Toby Dodge at the London School of Economics, Khaled Al Rouayheb, Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History at Harvard University’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Professor Amélie Kuhrt FBA of University College London, and Dr Lamia al Gailani and Joan Porter MacIver, both of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. For shedding much-needed light on the sometimes murky Ottoman period in Baghdad, my thanks to Professor Norman Stone of Bilkent University in Ankara, Dr Rhoads Murphey at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham, the writers and Ottoman historians Dr Ebubekir Ceylan, Caroline Finkel and Jason Goodwin and Sibel Yildiz. I am extremely grateful to Ali Erken for his assistance in the Ottoman archives in Istanbul. The historian and orientalist Dr Robert Irwin, Middle East editor of the Times Literary Supplement, very kindly read my text at a late stage and saved me from a number of errors. Any which remain are, of course, entirely my own. My thanks to His Grace the Duke of Wellington for allowing me access to his private war journal and for a fascinating interview about his experiences in Iraq in 1940. Zaab Sethna and Bartle Bull have been regular companions and astute guides to events and people in Baghdad since I first travelled there. Inspiration, encouragement and knowledge poured from the writers and journalists Con Coughlin, Jon Lee Anderson and Harry Mount, Kwasi Kwarteng MP, Rory Stewart MP, Sarah Hildersley of the British Embassy in Amman, Colonel Robert Bateman, a military historian in the US Army, Peter Francis of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the publisher Barnaby Rogerson and the Dutch journalist Aernout van Lynden, who witnessed the first few minutes of the Iraq–Iran War from a Baghdad hotel balcony at dawn on 23 September 1980. The Gertrude Bell Archive at the University of Newcastle and the photographic archives of the Royal Geographical Society and National Geographic were mines of useful information. A good deal of research in London was made possible by the staff of the much-loved Rare Books and Music room of the British Library.

Baghdad’s Jews, who numbered around 40,000 – one-third of the city’s population – as recently as 1904, had dwindled to just seven when I first arrived in the city exactly 100 years later. Today that figure is smaller still, and one of the world’s oldest Jewish communities, which long predates Iraq’s Muslims, is virtually extinguished. Among the Jewish community I consulted outside Iraq, I would like to thank Cordia Ezekiel, who helped her father Max Sawdayee publish All Waiting to Be Hanged, his chilling memoir of life in Baathist Baghdad in the 1960s. Like many Jewish families living in the Iraq of President Ahmed Hassan al Bakr and Vice-President Saddam Hussein, their options were execution or escape. The Sawdayee family fled Iraq in 1970. Sandra and Edward Graham, Edward Dallal, Dr Eliyah Shahrabani and George Abda were all generous with their time and thoughts. Karen Fredman pointed me in the right direction in the world of Iraqi Jews in London and gave further help to the writing of this book by regularly walking our exuberant dog at short notice.

During the turmoil of recent years Baghdad’s ancient Christian community has also been decimated by violence and driven into exile. The late Dr Donny George, formerly director of the National Museum in Baghdad, gave me a private tour of one of the world’s greatest collections of antiquities, which was then closed to the public. The Aegis Foundation made a donation to help restore the building that houses the museum’s archives. George and his family were later threatened with death and hounded out of Iraq. He was appointed a Visiting Professor at Stony Brook University in the US in 2006, where he died five years later at the age of sixty. Georges Sada, former Air Vice Marshal in the Iraqi Air Force and author of Saddam’s Secrets: How an Iraqi General Defied and Survived Saddam Hussein, was an irrepressible companion, together with Canon Andrew White, the charismatic ‘Vicar of Baghdad’, who has seen so many of his flock cut down in recent years and whose uplifting work on inter-faith reconciliation in Iraq is fraught with danger.

Sincere thanks as ever to my splendid agent, Georgina Capel, a veritable factory of ideas who encouraged this history from the start. The formidable team at Penguin deserve a special tribute: Phillip Birch was the first to commission this book, Stuart Proffitt, Donna Poppy and David Watson were extraordinarily rigorous and sensitive editors, and Cecilia Mackay was tireless in tracking down the most elusive pictures to illustrate this volume so handsomely. Thanks also to Richard Duguid, Isabelle de Cat, Penelope Vogler, Shan Vahidy, Donald Futers and Kathleen McCulloch.

My darling Julia deserves far more than thanks for putting up with her husband living in Baghdad for extended periods, including over a year at the height of the post-war violence, with many more subsequent visits during the following years when the Iraqi capital was anything but the City of Peace. Telephone conversations regularly had to be abandoned as the International Zone siren announced incoming mortars or rockets, a stomach-hollowing prelude to multiple explosions. I thank her and our daughter Clemmie for their love, patience and encouragement.

Finally, this book would not have been possible without the constant support of Manaf al Damluji, a Baghdadi gentleman, diplomat and scholar whose family has suffered, like so many others, from the appalling violence that has afflicted Baghdad in recent years. Manaf has been an erudite and indefatigable guide to so many of the Arabic sources consulted here and a fount of wisdom in all things pertaining to the city he loves. In 2012, after eight years living in Amman as refugees, he and his wife were granted asylum in the US, where they now live together. It is to him that Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood is dedicated.

Justin Marozzi

BAGHDAD

City of Peace, City of Blood

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

THE BEGINNING

Illustrations

List of Illustrations

INTEGRATED ILLUSTRATIONS

COLOUR PLATES

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

A Note on Spelling