Enemy on the Euphrates

Enemy on the Euphrates reconstructs Britain’s invasion and occupation of Ottoman Mesopotamia from the landing at Fao in 1914 through the campaigns that captured Baghdad and Mosul, and into the nationwide Iraqi revolt of 1920. Drawing on official records and personal accounts, Ian Rutledge follows military operations along the Tigris and Euphrates while examining the oil interests, administrative rivalries and imperial assumptions that shaped British policy. The revolt emerges not as a minor disturbance but as a mass anti-colonial war involving tribal forces, urban nationalists, Shia clerics and former Ottoman officers.

The narrative brings figures including Arnold Wilson, Gertrude Bell, T. E. Lawrence, Mark Sykes and Winston Churchill into the same political story, showing how direct occupation gave way to a British-backed Iraqi monarchy. Rutledge also traces the use of Indian troops, aircraft, armoured trains and river gunboats against the insurgency and explains how the settlement imposed after the First World War influenced the later Iraqi state. The book was first published in 2014 as Enemy on the Euphrates: The British Occupation of Iraq and the Great Arab Revolt, 1914–1921; later paperback editions use the subtitle The Battle for Iraq, 1914–1921.