Baghdad's history of foreign invaders
( 2003-03-27 09:18 ) (7 )

First came the Mongols, then the Ottomans and Persians.

Finally, in modern times, the British took Baghdad, sacrificing thousands of lives to wrest it from the Turks during World War I.

Over centuries, the city in the cradle of civilization has fallen to a succession of foreign armies. U.S. and allied forces are positioning themselves to be the next.

"It's a rather vulnerable city," said Arthur Goldschmidt, a professor emeritus of Middle Eastern history at Pennsylvania State University.

Today Baghdad is a sprawling industrial metropolis crisscrossed by highways. Under the Abbasid caliphs who made it their capital in A.D. 762, it was a walled center of culture and learning.

When Europe was mired in the chaos and backwardness of the Dark Ages, Muslim scholars in Baghdad translated ancient Greek texts into Arabic, invented algebra and created literary masterworks.

That golden age was already waning when the Mongols first sacked Baghdad in 1258 under Hulegu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan.

Hulegu's force of 200,000 easily overwhelmed the 20,000 horsemen who rode out to meet him. After a weeklong siege, Baghdad surrendered and the Mongols swarmed in.

The invaders sacked libraries, burned mosques, smashed and looted precious art objects; they killed hundreds of thousands.

To ensure that Baghdad would not recover, the Mongols destroyed the canals that watered the city's agricultural hinterlands. Rich farmland turned to desert. The canals were not fully rebuilt until the 20th century.

By the 1500s, the Mongols having retreated to their ancestral home in Central Asia, Baghdad became a pawn in the rivalry between the Turkish Ottomans and the Sefavids, a Shiite Muslim empire based in Persia.

The Sefavids struck first, capturing Baghdad in 1509. Suleyman the Magnificent took the city for the Ottomans 16 years later, but a century after that Baghdad was again in Persian hands. In 1638, Ottoman Sultan Murad IV took Baghdad back for good.

By then, the city of culture, power and wealth was a memory.

Baghdad persisted under Ottoman rule until World War I, when the Turks aligned themselves with Germany. The British launched an invasion. Just as coalition troops are doing today, they fought their way up the fertile crescent toward Baghdad.

"They had a terrible time of it," Goldschmidt said.

The campaign began smoothly enough. Major-General Sir Charles Townshend easily took the southern city of Basra in November 1914, and began advancing upriver.

Then his luck ran out. In November 1915, 15 miles outside Baghdad, Townshend and his 11,000 men found themselves outnumbered and beyond the reach of their stretched supply lines.

After sustaining 40 percent casualties, the British forces crumbled and retreated downriver to the city of Kut. Besieged there for almost five months, they surrendered only after four failed rescue attempts cost 23,000 more lives.

The British regrouped, resupplied and appointed a new commander, Lieutenant-General Stanley Maude. In March 1917, Baghdadis cheered the arrival of a British force four times the size of the one Townshend had led.

But like many before them, the British enjoyed limited hospitality in Iraq. They didn't plunder and slaughter like the Mongols, but they strafed from airplanes as a means of controlling fractious tribesmen. The British and their American allies also helped themselves to a healthy share of Iraqi oil until long after the country became independent in 1932.

When American forces roll in, they, too, can expect joyous greetings to conceal deep misgivings, said Middle East historian Phebe Marr, a former senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies and member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"It is a country, particularly where you get into Baghdad ... that has a very strong tradition of nationalism," Marr said. "They don't like foreign occupation."