File 756/1917 Pt 2-3 ‘ARAB BULLETIN Nos 66-114’ [‎136r] (280/834)

115 —
MESOPOTAMIA.
Affairs in Nejef,
. population ol Nejef, apart from the Ulema and their
train of students and dependents, is divided into two tribal
factions, the Zuqurt and the Shumurt, the leaders of which
played an important part in the ejection of the ’Ottoman
Government during the first year of the war. The tribal
sheikhs, Seyyid Mahdi ibn Seyyid Salman, Haji Atiyah, Abu
Qulal and Kadhim Subbi of the Zuqurt, together with Haji Saad
ibn Haji Radhi, of the Shumurt, took over the administration
of the town after the troubles with the Turks in May 1915, and
a few months later entered into correspondence with us.
Of these four men, Seyyid Mahdi alone can be described as
coming of a respectable stock ; his father before him was a
recognised leader of the Zuqurt.
Haji Atiyah had pursued, before the war, with varying
success, the career of smuggler and highwayman ; Kadhim Subbi
had risen to his present position from that of coffee maker in
Atiyah’s house, and Haji Saad had begun life as a butcher.
Incessant friction has always marked the relations of the
factions of the four sheikhs and of the quarters of the town
controlled by them. As figure-heads of the town in its
resistance to the Turks, the sheikhs acquired, as at Kerbela, an
importance which they had not previously enjoyed, but their
sudden rise to power was not a subject for unmitigated
satisfaction to other elements.
The sheikhs carried out their task with more profit to
themselves than benefit to Nejef, except in so far as they
prevented any effective re-establishment of Turkish authority.
The Mujtahids, first among whom is Seyyid Mohammed
Kadhim Yazdi, probably the most influential Shiah Divine now
living, and such families as that of the Kiliddar, men of wealth
and education, accepted the domination of the tribal sheikhs only
because the alternative was the still more distasteful domination
of the Turks ; the merchant class suffered from their exactions
and from the unchecked lawlessness of their followers.
Their rapacity may be guaged from the fact that Haji
Atiyah, who immediately before the war was a man of no means,
had, by the spring of 1917, amassed very considerable wealth
from municipal exactions, assisted no doubt, latterly, by judicious
trading with the sums which from time to time he, in common
with other leading sheikhs, were receiving from us for the main
tenance of the resistance of Nejef to the control of the Turks.
Immediately after the conquest of Baghdad, the town sheikhs
came in to see Sir Percy Cox, but we were not then in A position
to substitute any other authority for that which they exercised.
In August 1917, a Government Agent was sent to Kejef in
the person of Hamid Khan, a relative of the Agha Khan, but he
was unable to do more than hold a watching brief. His chief