"العراق والخليج الفارسي" [و‎‎٣‎٣‎٣] (٨٦٢/٦٦٨)

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I ■
PORTS AND INLAND TOWNS
Umm Qasr
A small military port was built as a supplement to Basra at this
village (population 1,000) in the War of 1914-1918. In 1942 the
scheme was renewed. Timber wharves were built allowing for a
maximum of 6 deep-water berths. The greater part of the scheme
was apparently completed by January 1943, when 8 light portal
cranes (3-5 tons) and one 15-ton crane were due to be installed. The
estimated capacity on completion was 10,000 tons a month. There
are railway sidings connected to the metre-gauge Basra-Baghdad
railway at Shuaiba junction. No further details are available for
publication.
Mosul. 36° 20'N., 43°o 8 / E. ; alt. c. 730 feet. Pop. 100,000 (est.
1940). Liwa cap.; H.Q. Northern Command. Meteorological
Station (R.I.A.F.).
Mosul lies on the western bank of the Tigris, which undercuts its
walls. The country west of the town rises in gentle down-like
undulations to the low ranges of the Jabal Nuwaigit and Jabal Atshan
(1,000-1,600 ft.). The town owes its importance to its position
opposite the fertile north Assyrian plain, for which it is the market, as
it is also for the Kurdish mountains, the northern Jazira of Iraq, and
the Jabal Sinjar. The population is of mixed origin, the preponderat
ing influence and language being Arabic. There are many Kurds,
some 6,500 Jews in a separate quarter, and about 25,000 Christians,
who are mostly Syriac-speaking Nestorians, Chaldeans, Syrian Catho
lics, and Jacobites, with a few Latins and Armenians.
History
The two great mounds covering the ruins of Nineveh, the capital
of the Assyrian Empire, are on the left bank of the Tigris opposite
Mosul (photo. 36). Afterits destruction by theMedes in6i2 b.c. there
appears to have been no considerable city in the immediate neighbour
hood until the Sassanid period, when the existence of the town of
Budh Ardashir is recorded, near which the Sassanid monarch
Chosroes II was defeated by the Byzantine emperor Heraclius in
a.d. 627 (p. 237). Mosul, meaning the ‘confluence’—of the Wadi
Khosar and Tigris—first appears in a.d. 636, as the name of the town
on the right bank which became the capital of the Jazira province
of the Omayyad Empire under Marwan II. It grew to be a great
city in the Abbasid period, a centre of commerce and industry,