WHEN Iraq, the cradle of human civilization, was a province of the Persian Empire ruled by Kisras, it was the first to fall before the rag-tag army of the Arabs on its march to victory outside Arabia proper in 635 A.D.
The battle between the Arab mujahideen and the imperial army of the mighty Persian (or Sassanid) empire, that acted as a countervailing force against the mightier Roman empire, was fought at Qadisiya, a place south of modern Najaf. The Persian army was led personally by Emperor Yezdgard, fated to be the last monarch of the dynasty founded by Darius, that had held supreme power in that part of the world for about a millennium. It was the annexation of Iraq that paved the way for the speedy Arab conquest of all the territories held by the Romans in Byzantium, the present Middle East, and also in Maghreb, or North Africa up to the Atlantic coast.
The decisive victory in Iraq against a contemporary superpower’s elite battalions commanded by Rustam, the legendary Generalissimo of the Persians, was such a morale booster for the Arabs that it took hardly 40 years for them to liquidate the military juggernaut of the day — the Roman empire. In four decades, three Arab commanders, Khalid bin Waleed, Amr bin Al-Aaas and Uqba bin Nafi, overran all the Roman possessions in the Near East and North Africa, and by 675 A.D., Uqba bin Nafi had wrested from the Romans Tunisia and Morocco, and had led his horse, chest deep, in the turbulent waters of the Atlantic Ocean.
The armed revolt against Hazrat Usman, the third Caliph, the first of its nature that set the precedent for such unfortunate incidents in future, originated in Iraq, wherefrom it spread to Egypt and gained enough strength to embolden the rebels to lay siege to the Khalifa’s residence and assassinate him. Similarly, the Battle of the Camel and the Battle of Siffin, involving the fourth Caliph, Hazrat Ali, and his opponents, took place on the fields of Iraq. It was in Iraq that his martyrdom occurred and his mausoleum stands to this day at Najaf, not far from Qadisiya.
It was in Iraq, at Karbala, on the bank of the Euphrates, that Islamic history’s most tragic and heart-rending blood letting happened, that is mourned even to this day. It was in Iraq that the seeds of sectarian cleavage in the uniform monolith of Islam’s faith were sown. It was in Iraq that the Abbassi Caliphs chose to build from scratch a new capital city of Baghdad for the Arab empire, which suffered most during the ‘Mongol Tempest’ of early 13th century that shook the Muslim world.
Ghenghis Khan had already devastated the glorious centres of Islamic civilization in Central Asia and the Near East — Samarkand, Bokhara, Balkh, Kashghar, Khotan, Nishapur, Khorasan. He had, however, left for his equally savage son, Halaku, to destroy and plunder Baghdad who bombarded the city’s defensive walls during a 40-day siege in 1258 A.D., and put to the sword more than a million civilians in four days of bloodshed after the city’s capitulation.
When World War I ended in 1918, and the Turks abolished the sacred institution of Khilafat, as they ascribed their defeat to the Arab uprising against them, it was Iraq that bore the main brunt of the white man’s victory over the Turks. The British ‘protectors’ of Iraq, appointed by the League of Nations, present-day United Nations’ precursor, parcelled out slices of this land, carving out tiny self-governing entities such as Kuwait, Bahrain and the other Gulf Shaikhdoms. They installed a non-Iraqi king of Hashemite descent to rule over them.
Thus, the ground work for future wranglings in Iraq had been cleverly done. And it did not take long for the disturbances and conflict to happen — dethronement and murder of the king followed by internal fighting for power and ascendancy. But the oil factor was not there in those days, otherwise the 1990 invasion of oil-rich Kuwait to reannex it to its parent country would have taken place much earlier.
The event happened, it appears, to provide an excuse to the lone superpower and its trans-Atlantic allies to thrash Iraq to their heart’s content by sending as many as a hundred thousand aerial sorties and hurling ‘Smart’ bombs on the city of Baghdad for 40 days during December 1990-January 1991. Coincidentally, the same number of days which Halaku’s men had at their disposal to pound it with projectiles, masses of rocks and flaming naphtha.
It is anybody’s guess as to what is in store for this war-weary land in the immediate future.
WHEN Iraq, the cradle of human civilization, was a province of the Persian Empire ruled by Kisras, it was the first to fall before the rag-tag army of the Arabs on its march to victory outside Arabia proper in 635 A.D.
