HABANIYAH (Iraq): Lying at the edge of this vast military base, the quiet cemetery of 300 tombstones is a crumbling vestige of the British Empire. Once a Royal Air Force hub, the base now serves US forces.
To historians, the base at Habaniyah, 50 miles west of Baghdad, represents one of many parallels between past and present.
Older Iraqis remember the British base as a symbol of foreign domination that stoked the country’s nationalist movement. Today, Habaniyah’s American occupants face similar hostility as they struggle to stabilise Iraq.
“Habaniyah was the focus of the most intense Iraqi resentment toward the Brits,” said Professor Rashid Khalidi, a professor of Arab studies at Columbia University and a critic of the US-led invasion. “If you thought (Iraqis) weren’t going to resist — when they spent a good part of the 20th century trying to get the British out of there — you’re out of your mind.”
Neil Turnbull, who served in Habaniyah as a corporal and left on the second-to-last plane out of the base, remembers nearby Fallujah as particularly hostile.
Fallujah was “very anti-British the whole time. They would throw stones at buses and wagons that would pass”, said Turnbull, now 69.
Arriving in Iraq after the First World War the British quickly ran into resistance. In 1920, in Fallujah, an Iraqi assassinated a senior British commander, Gerald Leachman, sparking a violent uprising against British rule. RAF warplanes crushed the uprising, but Fallujah remained the capital of anti-British resistance.
Britain had not come intending to make Iraq a full-blown colony in its vast empire. It wanted access to its oil and its port at Basra to protect its interests in India and Palestine. In 1932 Iraq became an independent monarchy, but then came the Second World War and the British military dug in, worried that the Arabs were allying with Germany.
In 1941, pro-German Iraqi rebels besieged the Habaniyah base for several days. The British eventually broke through and marched on Baghdad to crush the uprising, but not before encountering stiff resistance in Fallujah.
“Habaniyah has such memories for Iraqis of a former generation. It was infamous in the same way that Abu Ghraib is today,” said Hala Fattah, director of the American Academic Research Institute in Iraq.
There’s another echo of the past in the bridge across the Euphrates River at Fallujah, from which a mob hung the charred torsos of two US contractors in March 2004. The bridge was built by the British in the 1920s to move troops more quickly to Baghdad and became a point of frequent conflict.
Complicating matters for the British in the heyday of their empire, and for the Americans today, are Iraqi society’s complex allegiances and tribal connections. Historians say many in Anbar have strong cultural, religious and family ties to Syria and Saudi Arabia.
Christopher Morris was a 10-year-old living on the Habaniyah base when his father was stationed here in 1955.
At one point it was the RAF’s largest overseas base, with dozens of planes and up to 3,000 Britons, he said. It had an Olympic-size swimming pool, soccer fields, tennis courts, theatre, horse racing track, three churches and gardens of roses and hibiscus. Morris was a choirboy in a base church and listened to children’s radio programmes, including one transmitted from London.
Habaniyah, he said, ‘was a jewel in the desert’.
Christians and Kurds serving as Britain’s proxy soldiers lived in a separate part of the base — an arrangement similar to the present one in which Iraqi and American soldiers live separated by barbed wire.
The British era ended when rebels executed Iraq’s royal family and closed in on Habaniyah’s base. The next year, the British military withdrew entirely, leaving the bases to the new Iraqi government.
“On the day of the revolution, they just took over the camp, took over the armoury, the transport,” said Turnbull, the ex-corporal, who remembers being pushed into one corner of the camp as rebels took over most of Habaniyah. “They weren’t shooting us, but they were hostile.”
The abrupt takeover was a shock.
“We thought we were going to be there permanently,” Turnbull said. “Everything seemed fine and normal and then the revolution came out of the blue.”
Saddam came to power in 1979, and in the spring of 2003, Habaniyah was taken by coalition forces. It is now a sprawling logistics hub supplying US Marines.
British forces are also in Iraq, though not at Habaniyah. This time they serve in the south.
Today, the swimming pool holds murky rainwater. Only one of the churches still stands.
The headstones on most of the British graves lie in the dead grass. But at the request of British relatives of the dead, US soldiers have cleaned up the cemetery and laid wreaths.—AP
