Peace in Iraq offers hope for Baghdad's British war graves

For nearly a century they have stood in a parched, sun-baked corner of Baghdad, reminders of a long-forgotten conflict fought by long-forgotten regiments. 

In the city's North Gate Cemetery are the graves of thousands of servicemen from Britain's Mesopotamian Campaign of World War One, who braved heatstroke, cholera and determined Turkish troops to seize Baghdad from the Ottoman Empire. 

Bearing the names of bygone regiments like the South Wales Borderers and the Buffs, today the headstones are bleached and cracked by the same harsh climate that killed many of the men whose lives they commemorate. 

Yet in the decade that has passed since the latest British military campaign in Iraq, the marble slabs have had more than just Iraq's 50C summer heat to deal with. 

Thanks to the violence that has gripped the Iraqi capital since Saddam Hussein's fall, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has been unable to maintain the vast graveyard, causing it to fall into disrepair. 

And like the men who are buried beneath them, the headstones themselves have suffered their fair share of incoming fire. 

"A big car bomb hit an embassy just outside the cemetery in 2009, which knocked many of the stones over or broke them in two," explained the cemetery's Iraqi caretaker as he took The Sunday Telegraph on a tour around the overgrown, litter-strewn plots last month. 

"And since then, there has also been damage from random mortar fire and rockets – this area used to see quite a bit of fighting." 

Now, though, with security in Iraq gradually improving, the commission is finally hopeful of restoring the cemetery to pristine condition again, along with 12 other graveyards and memorials across the country. 

Over the past year at North Gate, a team of Iraqi contractors have begun to replace some 500 damaged headstones, drawing on a stock of ready-engraved replacement slabs that actually arrived in Baghdad just after the First Gulf War in 1990. 

The commission had hoped to lay them at the time, but found it impossible due to the worsening of diplomatic relations between Iraq and Britain. Instead, the replacement slabs were left in metal containers just next to the cemetery, which were finally opened only last year. 

"The stones inside the containers were completely intact and even had the original manifest still with them," said Peter Francis, a spokesman for the commission's offices in Maidenhead, Berks. 

 At North Gate, the gleaming new replacement headstones now stand out amid the cemetery's crumbling, greying rows, commemorating men like 7661 Private J Aitken, of the Cameron Highlanders, who died on Sept 3, 1916, and 56570 Private D Murray, of the Northumberland Fusiliers, who died on May 19, 1918. 

Still awaiting repair is the cemetery's Cross of Sacrifice, which, according to the caretaker, was damaged by the 2009 car bomb. 

It went off outside the embassy of Britain's former foe, Turkey, which overlooks the cemetery. Today the cross stands minus its crossbar on a patch of open ground between the graves, which doubles as a football pitch for local children. 

The Mesopotamian campaign that men like Ptes Murray and Aitken gave their lives for was overshadowed by the epic battles in Europe, yet was every bit as tough. 

It began at the outset of the war in 1914, and like the later conflict of 2003, the invasion took place around the southern port area of Basra. 

However, after initially going in to secure refineries on the Shatt al Arab estuary belonging to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the British forces pressed on north to a military disaster in the city of Kut, where 12,800 of them eventually surrounded after a five-month Turkish siege. 

More than a third then died due to the brutal conditions they suffered as POWs. Having suffering one of its most humiliating military defeats ever, Britain then invaded again with an Anglo-Indian army led by the Boer War veteran, Lieutenant General Sir Stanley Maude, which took Baghdad on March 11, 1917. 

Maude himself then died of cholera just six months later, and has a small mausoleum in the middle of the cemetery. 

Altogether North Gate has commemorates some 4,160 World War One casualties, while in total, the Commonwealth war sites around Iraq honour more than 54,000 servicemen from both World Wars. 

The figures dwarf the casualties of the modern Iraqi campaign, in which 4,487 American and 179 British troops were killed. 

Despite the insurgencies that successive British military actions in Iraq here have provoked, the war graves have seldom been the target of vandalism or sabotage. 

But at North Gate, the caretaker, whose name The Sunday Telegraph is withholding for security reasons, does tell stories of having to occasionally defend the turf from marauders. 

One day, not long after the fall of Saddam, he saw from his house overlooking the cemetery a group of supporters of the former president coming through a hole in the fence. 

"The cemetery was very overgrown at the time, and they were carrying cans of petrol to set it all ablaze," said the caretaker, whose father and grandfather also did the same job. 

"I grabbed a Kalashnikov that I keep at my house and fired several shots in their direction, and they fled. 

They were doing it out of hatred, they did not realise that this is a site with important heritage." 

On other occasions, the cemetery has been used by drunks and tramps, and even by Iraqis practising witchcraft, for whom soil occupied by non-Muslim tombs is said to have special magical properties. 

"One day I caught a woman burying a spell written on a piece of paper that she had wrapped in a piece of her hijab," the caretaker added. "She said she was having trouble conceiving, and that a witch had told her to come here." 

Mr Francis, the CWGC spokesman, said that the continuing security threats in Iraq continued to place "severe limitations" on the restoration work that could be done on the country's war cemeteries, with work in the past limited to occasional maintenance projects via Iraqi contractors. 

But he said that planning was under way for a future "major renovations" programme. "We are working closely with the British Embassy in Baghdad to develop a wider maintenance capacity on the ground via potential working partners," he said. 

"We have not forgotten or abandoned the cemeteries in Iraq. As soon as the situation permits, we will restore them to a standard befitting the sacrifice of those buried and commemorated there." 

By Colin Freeman

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