In 1922, Turkish President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk dispatched his foreign minister, Mustafa Ismet Pasha, to Lausanne to save the fledgling Turkish republic from the jaws of voracious European colonialists. Two years earlier, the Treaty of Sevres had dismembered the Ottoman Empire, ceding big chunks of territory to the leading Allied powers along with the Greeks, Armenians and Kurds. Deeply traumatized, Turkey — under the nationalist command of Ataturk — was determined to return to the negotiating table, not as supplicant but as Europe's equal, to re-carve its post-colonial boundaries in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. Though the country regained control of Anatolia and the strategic straits through the deal, Turkey left some critical unfinished business at Lausanne: the former Ottoman vilayet of Mosul.
The Turks demanded that the British, represented by Foreign Secretary Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, return the expansive territory, which stretched from Anatolia beyond the mountains of upper Kurdistan. From there, it followed the Tigris southeast from the Sinjar Mountains near the Syrian border, across the Nineveh plain through Mosul to Arbil and Kirkuk before butting up against the Zagros Mountains along the Iranian border. Ismet Pasha insisted that this swath of land was the natural dividing line between Anatolia and Mesopotamia, a strategic frontier where most inhabitants were intricately bound with Turkey by trade, tongue and culture. "Mosul has become more closely connected … with the ports of the Mediterranean than with those of the Persian Gulf," he argued. The region's oil wealth, in no small part, influenced the Turks' interest in Mosul. At the same time, they were also trying to extend the strategic depth of their new republic as far as possible, knowing that an array of adversaries could pit ethnic minorities in the Turkish periphery against the newborn state.
Lord Curzon, armed with his own demographic and ethnographic studies, struck down the Turkish argument at every turn. London could not afford to let the threat of Turkey's expansionism thwart its own goal of establishing a strategic foothold in Mesopotamia and monopolizing the region's energy resources. Looking at the region demographically, Lord Curzon saw the Mosul vilayet as a land full of Arabs and ethnic minorities who were more willing to fight the Turks than to assimilate with them. "Why should Mosul city be handed back to the Turks? It is an Arab town built by Arabs. During centuries of Turkish occupation it has never lost its Arab character," he maintained. He also insisted that the Turkish argument for a natural mountainous buffer along the Sinjar-Mosul-Arbil-Kirkuk line was disingenuous:
"Ismet Pasha has suggested that the Jebel Hamrin will make a good defensive boundary. But it is well known that this is not a great range of mountains, but merely a series of rolling downs. Is it not obvious that a Turkish army placed at Mosul would have Baghdad at its mercy, and could cut off the wheat supply almost at a moment's notice? It could practically reduce Bagdad by starvation."
Ismet Pasha, known for driving Lord Curzon mad with his penchant for wearing earplugs while his British counterpart spoke, responded with utmost innocence:
"Turkey, which has now ceased to be an Empire and become a national State, cannot think of attacking and conquering a country whose population belongs to a different race… [T]he Turkish and Arab people who have lived together like brothers for centuries would obviously never think of attacking each other when left to themselves."
London and Ankara sparred for another three years over the Mosul Question, as it was called. The League of Nations finally put the matter to rest in 1926, and Turkey begrudgingly ceded rights to the Mosul vilayet to the British Mandate in Iraq in exchange for a few economic concessions. But Turkey's obsession with Mosul and its surroundings never ceased.
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