9 – He was responsible for massacres of entire villages in Iraq

“I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against the uncivilized tribes… it would spread a lively terror.”

The extent of the influence that Churchill had on the Middle East ranges from individual acts of brutality to organisational terror that lasts right into the present. The question of how much he was responsible for the use of chemical weapons in Mespotamia, now Iraq, is also one that it is debated, with official records claiming that no gas was used, while on the ground reports say that it was. Whether you believe it was or wasn’t, the truth of the matter is that Churchill was heavily in favour of it being used and heartily recommended it, despite that being a direct contravention of the accepted rules of war.

Chemical weapons as we know them today were in their infancy in the First World War, but had proven effective against static trench lines. The British Manual of Military Law, the general outlines for how war should be conducted, strictly forbade using it against “uncivilized” people, which certainly would have included those in Mesopotamia at the time. Churchill certainly thought so: in the quote above, he calls the residents as such in a memo taken from May 1919, which also includes lines such as “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas.” It is fairly unequivocal stuff.

When discussing British imperial military tactics in the colonial period, the myriad reasons why Britain might have been in the countries that they were in are often laid by the wayside. The Empire had been present in the Middle East since the demise of the Ottoman Empire during World War One, roughly splitting up the region with France along lines drawn up in secret by the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. The north of Iraq and Kurdistan, where the chemical weapons were used, did not actually fall into the British sections, which were centred on what is now Palestine, Jordan, Kuwait and southern Iraq, but a later agreement had agreed to hand them over to Britain. Naturally, oil was the major draw and Mosul, in the area intended for France but controlled by Britain, was the major centre of production.

Mesopotamia, as it was then known, was never an official part of the Empire and the locals had no desire to become one. They rose in May 1920 in Baghdad and made a case for independence, which was dismissed out of hand by the British. A fatwa was released that read “It is the duty of the Iraqis to demand their rights. In demanding them they should maintain peace and order. But if the English prevent them obtaining their rights it is permitted to make use of defensive force.” As the revolt spread, Churchill, in his role as Secretary of War, was swift to react.

He despatched two squadrons from the Royal Air Force and bombed the civilian population – the Iraqis, unsurprisingly, had no air force – causing somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 deaths. While historians debate whether gas was used, the point is somewhat moot given the willingness of the British to drop bombs on people’s homes. The revolt was ended and a puppet government installed, ensuring that oil, and more importantly, oil profits, flowed out of the Middle East and into Britain.

The mass bombing of civilians was not invented by Churchill, but the idea of “aerial policing”, the term he coined to describe what the British did in Iraq, was. One of the fighter pilots of 1920, Arthur “Bomber” Harris, wrote

“The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means. Within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.”

He would do his job again in the Second World War, when the idea would be taken to its logical conclusion – at Dresden.