The Lonely Vigil of Major Saiyid Askari

The Iraqi city of Karbala, a sacred place of pilgrimage for Shia Muslims, lies a few miles north-west of Hillah, south of Al Fallujah and east of Lake Razazza.

It is part of the ancient and historically important clutch of Shia Muslim cities south of the Iraqi capital Baghdad which between them are home to a wealth of mosques, shrines and tombs. These sites together mark and celebrate some of the very foundations of Shia Islam, the branch of the Muslim faith which believes that the line of descent from the Prophet Muhammad passed through his son-in -law Ali.

Between two of these holy places within central Karbala, the shrine of Al Mukhayam immediately to the east and that of Abu Fadhl Al Abbas directly to the west, lies one of the most sacred devotional sites of all those in Iraq’s central belt, the Holy Shrine of Imam Hussein himself.

Hussein, son of Ali and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was the third Imam in Shia Islam, a totemic figure who fought and sacrificed his life at the Battle of Karbala in 680 AD. Here, together with a small army of followers, he engaged in an unequal struggle with the greater forces of the Sunni Caliph Yazid for the future leadership of Islam.

At Karbala he lost the battle but, in its aftermath, attained a glorious martyrdom and posthumous purpose. 

Such is the religious and dynastic significance of this place that it seems all the more extraordinary that situated in its courtyard is the smallest designated British war cemetery in the entirety of Iraq. To describe it simply as small would mislead, as the cemetery holds just one grave. It is referred to by those whose job is to register and maintain such historical anomalies as ‘Karbala’s Isolated Grave’.

Marked by a standard issue Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) headstone, Major Saiyid Wasihl Hasan Askari lies in anonymous isolation, occupier of a tomb which, unvisited and largely forgotten, represents nonetheless one small stepping stone in the passage of Britain’s Iraq wars that span the 20th century and bleed into the 21st.    

Though long silent, the melancholy reproach of Major Askari’s presence resonates across the generations of British and Commonwealth servicemen who fought and died in this ancient land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, far from home, usually unsung and often in the most abject of circumstances.

They did so for reasons that over time and distance have multiplied in complexity to become vexatious and divisive, uncomfortably semi-detached from Britain’s carefully nurtured mainstream narrative of national sacrifice and remembrance. This mode of collective reflection, a singular melding of gratitude and grief, is the signature expression of the way Britain memorialises its wars and those who died fighting them.    

The case of Askari, Service Number MZ/8318, is surely as emblematic of the diversity of empire as any. A major in the Indian Army Medical Corps, Askari qualified as a doctor in Liverpool and Edinburgh and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (FRCS),  holder of diplomas in both tropical medicine and hygiene.

He was a Muslim by faith, son of Syed Hasan Askari, of Jaghan, Janpur, India and husband to Begum Ale Sughra Askari, of Karachi, Pakistan. Askari was killed whilst on unstated business across the Iranian border at Kermanshah, Western Iran on 21st October 1943.

What this 40-year-old, highly qualified surgeon in the Indian Army Medical Corps was doing at the time is not recorded, but he may have been a participant in the murky Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran. Askari, though, became generally categorised as one more victim of the Anglo-Iraqi War, fought by the British Empire and the German sympathising Iraqi government of Rashid Ali in 1941, part of the Second World War in the Middle East.

This Muslim Indian, serving with the Indian Army fighting for the British, in a country under military occupation yet allied to the Germans and seeking to end decades of British dominance, surely typifies better than most the conundrums and contradictions at the heart of what remains a largely unreported war.  

Set barely within the margins of national memory, his grave is noteworthy for more than its solitary status. Major Askari’s resting place is just one piece in a much bigger, more intricate  jigsaw that when fully reassembled reveals the footprint, scale of conflict and human cost of Britain’s century of wars in Iraq.

It provides a pathway into an inaccessible and neglected network of memorials to the war dead and missing that have become for modern Iraq an awkward and unwanted reminder of Britain’s long colonial and military past in the country.

Like the conquering Greeks, Parthians, Abbasid Arabs, Mongols, Ottoman Turks, Americans and other invaders over the centuries, the British Army is chiefly remembered for its destructive, contested passage through the country, arriving variously by river in flat-bottomed steamers, on horseback, in marching columns with pack mules, on trucks and by rail, in aircraft and latterly in armoured personnel carriers, tanks and helicopters, carving out a bloody passage in pursuit of territory, oil and strategic power in the region.     

More British and Commonwealth Forces personnel are buried in Iraq than anywhere in the world apart from France and Belgium. Some 54,000 war graves in 19 separate cemeteries across the country mark the passing of the many men who paid the ultimate price for Britain’s military campaigns and interventions here. 

Major Askari’s may be the smallest, but this network of capacious military burial grounds straddles many of Iraq’s major cities and towns, including evocative names that still trigger the trauma of collective memory. Basra, Karbala and Amara to the south; Baghdad, Habbaniya and Kut Al Amara in the central belt; and Mosul in the north are just some of those unbidden and accidental hosts to the fallen and missing.

 Apart from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, responsible for the upkeep and maintenance of all British and related military war graves across the world, the cemeteries of Iraq have remained largely unrecognised and unseen other than through the eyes of the occasional journalist, military historian, family detective seeking a loved one or assiduous Iraqi caretaker still dedicated, despite the outgoing tide of public opinion, to their upkeep.

In recent years, following the withdrawal of British forces in 2011, the US military in the same year, the general defeat of ISIS in Iraq in 2014 and the return to a more demilitarised civilian life, conditions have improved. Iraqi sub-contractors working for the Commission have started the process of reclaiming some of these cemeteries and restoring them to something like their original state, clearing ground, repairing memorials, re-erecting or replacing headstones, rebuilding walls and generally recreating the sense of order and uniformity that once characterised their solemn design and appearance.   

The graves and memorials they contain mark the last resting places of a melting pot of British, Indian and other Allied soldiers – Christian, Hindu and Muslim - killed or missing during the Mesopotamia campaign of the First World War, the Iraq Revolt in 1920 and the Anglo-Iraqi conflict of the Second World War in the Middle East.

The now ruined and neglected cemetery of the southern city of Amara, a major base for the British army in the 1914-18 war, is the final resting place of three holders of the Victoria Cross, the highest battle honour that Britain can bestow on its soldiers. Their names, too, are long forgotten. Together, the cemeteries outline the  shape of the passage of British forces up the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in 1915 and again in 1917 as they fought and defeated Ottoman Turkish forces to finally occupy Baghdad before continuing on to Mosul and Kirkuk.

They offer a reminder of the Anglo-Iraqi war of 1941 when Britain and its Assyrian and Kurdish Levies fought Iraqi nationalists and their German allies from the Shatt Al Arab in the south to Mosul in the north. The bodies of the 179 British servicemen and women killed in Operation TELIC in southern Iraq between 2003 and 2009 were all flown home for burial rather than be left to share the fate of prior generations in these isolated, precarious and often physically degraded sites.     

Though they may not occupy a space at the forefront of Britain’s wars of empire, the killing fields of Mesopotamia and Iraq are deadly enough and have proved so time and time again for those enlisted to fight their way across its treacherous terrain. In their more austere, sometimes barren or urban landscapes the cemeteries and memorials here mirror those that lie dotted across farmland or hidden in the folds of the hills and plains of Flanders and Normandy, and further southwards along the Western Front towards the Somme, the Ancre valley, Verdun and the slopes of Alsace.

Built of the same pale Portland stone or granite, in a uniform style and colour with a consistent typography and wording, they provide an instantly recognisable iconography and signature of memorial and remembrance, a universal language of national sacrifice.

 But alongside the mere fact of their being, these increasingly incongruous cemeteries continue to provoke reflection and, along with it, some residual unease. They raise  awkward questions about Britain’s military interventions in Iraq, not least why so many of the servicemen who fought there died in such dismal, often predictable and thus avoidable circumstances. Why, for example, were the same strategic and tactical errors in successive campaigns persistently repeated when the lessons they offered were clearly set out for those who followed?

With the benefit of distance, how does Britain now rationalise some of its darkest practices in subduing the population of Iraq? The failed strategy of aerial policing adopted in the 1920s and 1930s when indiscriminate bombing of civilians was judged to be an acceptable tactic remains an indelible stain.     

Britain’s military endeavours in Iraq were once seen through a lens of imperial adventurism, a kind of latter-day crusading which presented the invasion and suppression of Muslim Arab countries as essential to preserving colonial order, both safeguarding trade routes and oil supply, and expediting the European superpower mandate to supress the flame of Arab self-determination after World War One.

This adventurist approach is itself associated with a wider tendency within British culture to celebrate amateurism and improvisation at the expense of rigorous planning and resourcing, the principal ingredients for a national dish of glorious failure. Harsher post-colonial judgment has become both more honest and critical of these tendencies. The British and Indian campaign in Mesopotamia, predecessor to modern Iraq, in time became known as the ‘neglected’ or ‘forgotten’ war (even the ‘bastard’ war) , when it became clear that it’s unfortunate participants had been deprived of proper kit, food, logistics and medical care, and subsequently proved by Parliamentary Commission in 1917 to have been victim to lack of leadership and disastrous, sometimes even negligent planning and decision making. Many of the thousands of Indian servicemen who died fighting between Basra and Baghdad in the service of the British have yet to be even publicly named. 

Britain’s response to the subsequent Iraq Revolt in 1920 was unnecessarily violent and bloody, driven by the existential angst of giving up its shaky, financially straitened post-war regional hegemony. Between the two world wars,  colonial secretary Winston Churchill’s policy of population management by air control, first tested in the vast open killing grounds of Sudan, courted entirely preventable disaster and ended within a whisker of outright  defeat and humiliation at the siege of RAF Habbaniya west of Baghdad in 1941.

 Britain infamously invaded Iraq in 2003 with the approval of a misinformed Parliament but without the popular backing of the nation, to participate in a potentially illegal war with no end game beyond regime change. Thus the era defining ‘Iraq War’ of the 21st century, now recognised as a catastrophic, multilayered blunder with shattering implications for the region, ended up mired in similar controversy to its predecessors. However, unlike them, this latest Iraq war never looked likely to end well even before a shot had been fired. Its funding, resourcing, strategic direction and tactical implementation have since become the subject of thousands of pages of retrospective official scrutiny and analysis, leading to general criticism, accusations of political dishonesty, lack of military judgement and irreparable reputational damage around the world.

The Iraq War still carries a badge of humiliation and national shame. Worst of all, the official verdict on an exercise that was probably doomed from the start was in its way a sinister facsimile of independent Parliamentary judgement nearly a century before.  

Thus two disasters of striking similarity in all but scale provide book ends to a century of soldiering in this most challenging of lands. Nonetheless British endeavour in the former Mesopotamia and modern Iraq can be apportioned its fair share of virtues associated with the traditional victories of empire. Men survived shattering and strength sapping engagements that exposed in their course extraordinary bravery, skill, endurance and organisational management, often made more remarkable for the testing demands of a brutal climate, hostile terrain, a determined enemy and effective, persistent local insurgency. But these triumphs have consistently had to be weighed alongside a more equivocal backdrop of hubris, miscalculation, mismanagement, attrition and bitterness.

Successive generations of Iraqi civilians randomly caught up in conflicts not of their choosing have become collateral damage in these wars, scythed down and ground to a pulp in the remorseless military gears of foreign armies, often harvested on an epic, nation-defining scale.   

There is nothing now that Major Saiyid Askari can tell us about his mission, the nature of his demise or what his thoughts were about dying in a cause not his own and so far from family and home. But his lonely and isolated resting place in Karbala remains both poignant and  symbolic, a modest but enduring warning for all who would contemplate going to war in Iraq.

Askari’s story, though, is just one amongst 54,000 personal stories, men whose lives and deeds were memorialised and preserved amidst these haunting and desolate places in the cradle of civilisation, home to the mythical hanging gardens of Babylon, the great Sassanian arch of Ctesiphon and the biblical Garden of Eden where the great Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet at Qurna before draining into the sea.

Never mourned properly in their own time, they have since remained Nobody’s Children, unclaimed, beyond reach and mostly out of view. These spectral, lingering casualties of past imperial struggles are perhaps the true orphans of war, the sound of their marching footsteps now a faint echo heard only in the rustle and sigh of dead leaves across a deserted parade ground.