Marozzi - Baghdad: city of peace, city of blood--a history in thirteen centuries

Baghdad

Copyright 2014 by Justin Marozzi

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ISBN: 978-0-306-82399-2 (e-book)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014949549

First Da Capo Press edition 2014

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To my dear friend Manaf al Damluji

The story of the City of Peace is largely the story of continuous war; where there is not war, there is pestilence, famine and civil disturbance.

Richard Coke, Baghdad: The City of Peace, 1927

Contents

INTEGRATED ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATES

Every effort has been made to contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be happy to make good in future editions any errors or omissions brought to their attention.

Baghdad is not the easiest place in the world in which to live, work or conduct historical research. For much of the past decade, from my first footsteps in the Iraqi capital in the summer of 2004 until the present, the City of Peace has been a slaughterhouse, an inferno of killing. Sunni, Shia, Jews, Christians, foreigners all have been targeted in the waves of violence that flooded across Iraq in the aftermath of the 2003 war. This, as I show in this book, is only the latest iteration of a pattern of bloodshed that can be traced across the centuries, sometimes almost indistinct and beneath the surface, frequently all too vivid, right back to the reign of the Sunni Abbasid caliph Mansur, who founded the city in 762 and left a crypt full of Shia corpses men, women and children at the time of his death. Strife and instability on a grand scale are inseparable from the history of Baghdad, the capital of a country that is the fulcrum of the SunniShia divide, and the place where the sectarian split currently convulsing the Middle East took root after the Battle of Kerbala in 680.

With that note of long-standing insecurity in mind, I owe thanks first of all to Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer OBE for giving me the opportunity to live and work in Baghdad for much of the past decade, establishing a foundation to fund small health and education projects across Iraq. Brigadier James Ellery CBE, the late Brigadier Tony Hunter-Choat, Colonel the Hon. Alastair Campbell, Colonel Andrew Joscelyne, Catriona Laing and many other colleagues were also stalwart friends in difficult times. Lieutenant General Sir John Kiszely, MC, Deputy Commanding General Multinational Force Iraq (20045), The Hon. Sir Dominic Asquith, British Ambassador in Baghdad 20067, and Jon Wilks, Deputy Head of Mission 200910, maintained Britains long tradition of sending its finest soldiers and Arabists to Baghdad. I thank them for their friendship and for the support of the British Embassy. My former colleague and dear friend Dr Thair Ali of Baghdad University risked his life repeatedly in the line of duty by facilitating all sorts of research in the city. He went far beyond it to help me visit some of Baghdads most important historical sites at a time when even simple expeditions could be a matter of life and death. I am deeply grateful to him. Thank you above all to my many unnamed colleagues who kept me out of harms way during my time in Iraq. Too many of them lost their lives over the past decade.