Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁'s Iraq Campaign: Kazima to Hira

When Khalid ﵁ received the orders to push through to the northeast, he was still reorganizing in al-Yamamah. Abu Bakr ﵁ had written to him that al-Muthanna ibn Haritha ash-Shaybani ﵁ had for months been conducting skirmishes along the Sasanian border, and that a coordinated campaign was needed. Khalid ﵁ was to join al-Muthanna ﵁ with his main force, thrust into southern Iraq, and threaten the Lakhmid capital of Hira.

The geography was new to the Arabs of the peninsula. The Euphrates delta, the salt marshes around Basra, the irrigation canals that crossed like a woven fabric, the palm groves that offered shade to the horizon. Khalid ﵁ chose a swift approach from the desert. He assembled eighteen thousand men on the edge of the Nafud, and he sent a letter ahead to Hormuz, the Sasanian marzban of the southern front at Kazima.

The letter was short. “Accept Islam, and you shall have safety. Refuse, and pay the jizyah. Refuse that too, and hold yourself ready for men who love death more than you love life.”

Hormuz laughed. He was a military governor appointed by the shah, a man with a golden headdress, his own palatine guard, and a Sasanian conception of war that saw the Arab bedouin as disorderly raiders. He gathered his troops at Kazima, on the Persian Gulf, and he had chains locked around the ankles and wrists of his elite infantry. The chains, in groups of ten, meant that the first rank could not flee. Whoever stood firm held the whole row standing. Whoever fled dragged nine others with him.

Khalid ﵁ arrived in the early morning. He deployed his cavalry on both flanks and his infantry in the center. Hormuz, in keeping with Sasanian custom, called for a mubaraza, a duel between the two commanders before the main battle began. Khalid ﵁ rode forward. Hormuz rode forward. The Sasanian commanders made a tradition of poisoned daggers used at the last moment in a mubaraza. One of his officers stood ready to attack Khalid ﵁ from behind during the duel.

The duel lasted less than a minute. Khalid ﵁ seized Hormuz in a wrestling grip, flung him aside, and killed him with a single blow to the throat. At that same moment al-Qaʿqaʿ ibn ʿAmr ﵁, Khalid ﵁'s bodyguard, sprang forward and killed the officer who had meant to strike treacherously from behind.

With Hormuz dead and his chained infantry powerless to give way, the Sasanian line broke. The flight became a rout. The chained units could not flee and were cut down where they stood. Khalid ﵁ had the remaining chains sent to Medina as a trophy. Abu Bakr ﵁ awarded the golden headdress of Hormuz, according to tradition, to Khalid ﵁ as his personal share, and thereby gave the campaign his blessing.

Kazima fell within a day. Khalid ﵁ rested two days, tended the wounded, and set course north, up the Euphrates, where new Sasanian forces were gathering to stop him.

After Kazima, Khalid ﵁ marched north along the eastern edge of the desert, parallel to the Euphrates and the lower course of the Tigris. The Sasanians, despite the loss of Hormuz, had had time to raise a new army. It was led by Qarin ibn Qaryana, an experienced marzban sent directly south by the court administration of Madaʾin Kisra to close the breach that had been struck at Kazima. Together with the Lakhmid allies Qubadh and Anushjan, Qarin assembled his force at al-Madhar, in the marshes east of the river, about thirty farsakh from Kazima.

The Battle of al-Madhar fell in April 633. Khalid ﵁ knew of the Sasanian muster through scouts of the Banu Bakr tribe, who knew the region like the palm of their hand. The Banu Bakr chiefs had received Khalid ﵁ at Kazima after the victory there and had joined his vanguard. They pointed out to him the marsh causeways that served as the only passages through the salt marshes, and they brought him in silence to within a day’s march of Qarin’s camp.

Khalid ﵁ again chose speed. He allowed his infantry less rest than a Sasanian commander would reasonably reckon, and arrived at al-Madhar before the Lakhmid reinforcements under Anushjan had linked up with Qarin’s main line. The Sasanian deployment was conventional. Heavy infantry in the center, cavalry on both flanks, archers behind the line. The marshy ground made a large-scale cavalry charge difficult and forced the battle into an infantry affair.

At al-Madhar a mubaraza was again called for. Qarin, who had known Hormuz and wanted revenge, rode forward between the lines and called out the Muslim officers. One of the Sahabah ﵁ challenged Qarin to single combat and killed him in the saddle with a single aimed thrust through the throat. The Sasanian vanguard saw its field commander fall before the main battle had begun. Then Qubadh and Anushjan came forward in a double duel against al-Qaʿqaʿ ibn ʿAmr ﵁ and ʿAsim ibn ʿAmr ﵁. Both fell under the blows of the Muslim officers. The Sasanian vanguard lost three commanders in a single hour.

The main battle, when it finally began, was short. The Sasanian infantry, without its field commanders and without clear orders, broke before the Muslim cavalry that rode in on the flanks over the drier edges of the marshes. The survivors fled north over the marsh causeways, toward Walaja, where they heard that a second Sasanian force under Andarzaghar was forming. The spoils of weapons and pack animals were divided according to the customary rules of distribution, and Khalid ﵁ sent the khums to Medina with a courier.

Khalid ﵁ granted his men a single day of rest and then set course to the northwest, along the bank of the Euphrates. Walaja lay a four days’ march away. By now it had become clear to him that the Sasanian court administration had not one but a series of armies on the move, and that speed was the only way to defeat them one by one before they could unite.

Walaja lay on an open plain south of Hira, where the marshes gave way to a line of wadis. The terrain, unlike al-Madhar, was suited to heavy cavalry. Andarzaghar, a high Sasanian nobleman with a direct connection to the court of Madaʾin Kisra, had drawn up his lines here in open field, his flanks protected by horsemen, his center reinforced with Sasanian elite infantry. His army was considerably larger than Khalid ﵁'s, possibly by a factor of two or more, with reinforcements from Madaʾin Kisra sent south in haste.

Khalid ﵁ developed, for the first time in this campaign, a tactic he had not applied in quite this way before. He divided his cavalry into two hidden detachments, one under Busr ibn Abi Artat ﵁ and one under Saʿid ibn Murra ﵁, and placed them by night in two wadis to the left and right behind the position where the Sasanian line was expected to deploy the next morning. The men were ordered to stay out of sight, to light no fires, and to move only at the signal of Khalid ﵁'s horn. He then drew up his main force head-on against Andarzaghar, in the center of the plain.

The battle began straightforwardly. Khalid ﵁ let his center give way first, feigning that his line was buckling under the Sasanian pressure. He ordered a slow withdrawal, step by step, without breaking formation. Andarzaghar pressed forward. What he saw was an Arab army that had finally met its match and was on the verge of falling apart. His elite infantry quickened its advance. The Sasanian cavalry on the flanks followed, in an attempt to encircle the Muslims.

At the moment the Sasanian vanguard had detached itself too far from its reserve lines, Khalid ﵁ blew his horn. The two hidden cavalry units came out of the wadis simultaneously and struck the Sasanian rear. Busr ﵁ from the north, Saʿid ﵁ from the south, and at that same moment Khalid ﵁'s center turned its feigned retreat into a counterattack.

The encirclement was perfect. Andarzaghar’s army was crushed on the battlefield between three forces. The Sasanian infantry could not give way, for it was now enclosed on all sides. The cavalry tried to break out toward the flanks, but was pulled from its horses by Busr ﵁ and Saʿid ﵁. By midday the battle was over. Andarzaghar’s army was utterly destroyed. Andarzaghar himself fled at dusk with a few bodyguards toward the desert west of Hira and died, according to tradition, later of thirst in a wadi where the Banu Bakr scouts found his body only days afterward.

The pincer movement of Walaja would become one of the most studied maneuvers in the Arab military tradition. Later chroniclers compared it to Hannibal’s maneuver at Cannae, although Khalid ﵁ himself, in later traditions, denied ever having heard of Hannibal. He had seen it, he said, in a dream before the battle, and he added that it was only one of many ways to defeat a larger army, and that the real lesson had not been the maneuver but the discipline of his men.

The river plains south of Hira now lay open. The Sasanian defense of the southern Euphrates corridor was broken. But one army still stood between Khalid ﵁ and Hira, and it was at that very moment assembling at Ullais.

After Walaja the Sasanians regrouped one more time. Christian Arab tribes, above all from the Banu Bakr ibn Wail and the Banu Taghlib, together with Sasanian reserve lines under Jaban, formed a last line of defense at Ullais, not far from where the Khaseef tributary flows into the Euphrates. For many of those Christian Arabs it was the first time they fought alongside Sasanians, and they carried personal vengeance against the Muslim force for kinsmen who had fallen in earlier skirmishes.

As Khalid ﵁ approached Ullais, he intercepted a reconnaissance detachment of the Banu Bakr and heard from their own mouths which tribes stood against him. A number of the Banu Bakr commanders were men whose fathers had murdered zakat collectors in Bahrain a year before. He turned to his officers and spoke a word that all the later chronicles have preserved. “O Allah, if You grant me victory over them, I swear that I shall leave no man of them alive as long as I can fight, and that I shall make the river of Ullais run with their blood.”

The battle at Ullais was the bloodiest Khalid ﵁ had ever led in purely human terms. The Christian Arabs fought with the fury of men who had nowhere else to go. The Sasanian reserve under Jaban stayed cool and organized. The Muslim force had to grind on for three hours before the line on the far side began to waver.

When it broke, it broke catastrophically. Khalid ﵁ sent his cavalry driving on across the tributary. He ordered, unprecedented in this campaign, that no prisoners be taken until sunset. The river turned literally red. Tradition relates that the water remained red for three more days, and that in later accounts al-Qaʿqaʿ ﵁ told ʿUmar ﵁ that once, years later, he drank water from that river for the last time and was overtaken by memories of that moment.

In the evening came the order to spare the prisoners who still remained. Khalid ﵁ had not meant to fulfill his oath literally, but symbolically. His officers convinced him that the blood that had made the river flow was enough to honor the oath, and that killing more defenseless men was not in keeping with the adab of the Prophet ﷺ. Khalid ﵁ accepted the reasoning. From that day onward, in every later geographical compendium, the river bore the byname Nahr ad-Damm, the River of Blood.

The Sasanian reserve under Jaban was scattered. Jaban himself was captured and later set free after an Arab officer, failing at first to recognize him, had given him amaan. Khalid ﵁ honored the amaan. Jaban was granted free passage back to Madaʾin Kisra. There he later served as a witness at the court of the shah on the way this new enemy fought, and his report contributed to the panic that was beginning to grip the Sasanian elite.

With Ullais the road to Hira lay open. No Sasanian army stood any longer between Khalid ﵁ and the Lakhmid capital. The river of blood had been his last obstacle, and he had crossed it.

After Ullais the southern Euphrates corridor lay open. Khalid ﵁ let his men rest for one night on the bank of the Khaseef, tended the wounded, and then set course northwest along the bank of the Euphrates toward Hira. The distance was short, no more than a few days’ march, but the terrain was new. Palm groves and irrigation canals replaced the desert fringes on which his cavalry had fought before. The Banu Bakr scouts, who knew the region, rode ahead of the main force and pointed out the narrow paths between the watercourses.

The news of Ullais raced ahead of the army. The river that still ran red, the thousands of bodies carried down the Khaseef — these were images borne north by couriers, refugees, and traders before Khalid ﵁ himself had the gates of Hira in sight. The Sasanian garrisons scattered along the Euphrates, in smaller forts and way stations, each made a different decision. Some burned their stores and fled; others left their weapons in the mud and offered the first scouts who reached them submission in exchange for their lives. Not one of those smaller posts offered any resistance.

In Hira itself, the Lakhmid capital for two centuries, panic broke out. Azadhbeh, the Sasanian garrison commander appointed by the shah, had been ordered to protect Madaʾin Kisra against any further breakthrough. He read the report of Ullais, weighed his chances, and chose what he would later justify as a strategic withdrawal. With his cavalry and the Sasanian officials he left Hira toward the northeast, along the bank of the Tigris, making for Ctesiphon. The city was left behind without a Sasanian garrison, with only its own Arab civic guard and the palace guards of the Lakhmid nobles.

The Lakhmid nobility, Christian Arabs of the Banu Lakhm who had ruled for generations as vassals of the shah, met in council in the four palace citadels of the city. Al-Khawarnaq, as-Sadeer, al-Qasr al-Abyad, and the fourth citadel beside the main church — all of white-plastered stone, all fully armed, but without the Persian backing that had always lent them their military weight. The leaders who met on those evenings were Iyas ibn Qabisah, the official chieftain confirmed by the shah, and the aged ʿAbd al-Masih ibn ʿAmr ibn Buqayla, a wise man whose voice carried great weight in the council even though he held no official title.

The council debated for days. Three options lay on the table. To fight without the Sasanians, which after the news of Ullais everyone regarded as suicide. To flee north after Azadhbeh, which would leave their lands, their palm groves, and their churches in the hands of the victor. Or to negotiate, an unprecedented step for the Lakhmid nobility, who had always let their weapons speak on the shah’s behalf. Iyas ibn Qabisah at first insisted that the honor of his house demanded a fight. ʿAbd al-Masih spoke against him. “A man who sacrifices his villages for his honor has lost both,” he said, as tradition relates. The council slowly leaned toward his view.

On the day Khalid ﵁ came within sight of the outskirts of Hira with his vanguard, the council’s decision was all but final. He deployed his main force in a half circle around the western side of the city, at a distance that made his intent unmistakable yet threatened no immediate assault. He sent two emissaries ahead to the gates with the standard threefold message he had used in every confrontation of this campaign. Islam, jizyah, or the sword. He requested an answer within one day.

From one of the gates came a delegation under a white flag. At its head walked an old man, supported by two younger nobles, with a face wrinkled like a dried date and an Arabic in a Hira accent that had never been heard in Mecca. It was ʿAbd al-Masih ibn ʿAmr. He asked for an audience with the commander. Khalid ﵁ received him seated on a simple mat. For the first time in this campaign — since Kazima, since Hormuz, since al-Madhar, since Walaja, since Ullais — a Sasanian ally stood before him who had come not to fight but to speak.

The page of history was turning, and the old man and the young commander both knew it.

Hira was not a conquered city in the sense of a siege. When Khalid ﵁ appeared before the walls with his main force in June 633, the Sasanian garrison commander Azadhbeh had already fled to Madaʾin Kisra. The Lakhmid nobles, who had ruled for generations as the shah’s Arab vassals, met in the palace citadels and reached a joint decision. They would negotiate. No open battle, no siege, no further bloodshed.

The city had four citadels of white-plastered stone, each named after a branch of the Lakhmid tribe. The delegation that went out to Khalid ﵁ was led by ʿAbd al-Masih ibn ʿAmr ibn Buqayla, an old Christian Arab who was said, by his own reckoning, to have served at several palaces for more than two hundred Hijri years. Whether that was literally true or not, the man who came to Khalid ﵁'s camp was undoubtedly very old, wrinkled like a dried date, and he spoke Arabic with a Hira accent never before heard in Mecca.

Khalid ﵁ received him seated on a simple mat. He offered him dates. ʿAbd al-Masih took one, chewed, and spat the pit out onto the mat between them. When Khalid ﵁ asked him why he did that, the old man replied that he had lived so long that he automatically spat out the pit of every date he ate, for fear of the tooth he might have lost. Khalid ﵁ laughed. He found the old man refreshing. The negotiations began on a note of mutual respect.

The terms were as follows. Hira would pay an annual jizyah of sixty thousand dirhams. The inhabitants would remain free to practice their own religion — for most of them Christianity — and to keep their own local authorities. The Sasanian administration would disappear, replaced by a direct relationship with the khalifah in Medina. In return, Khalid ﵁ guaranteed safety of life and property and respect for churches and monasteries.

The treaty was drawn up in duplicate, one copy in Arabic and one in Syriac. It was signed by the four heads of the Lakhmid tribal branches and confirmed by Khalid ﵁ on behalf of Abu Bakr ﵁. The sixty thousand dirhams were delivered within three days, partly in gold coin and partly in silver bar. A copy was sent to Medina with the first courier.

When the treaty arrived in Medina, Abu Bakr ﵁ received it in the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ after fajr. He had it read aloud. He turned to the Sahabah ﵃ present and said words to the effect of: “Who among you would have thought, a year ago, that the capital of the Lakhmids would fall into our hands without a fight? Truly, Allah keeps His promises to those who are patient.” The courier was sent back to Khalid ﵁ with a simple instruction. Continue. Anbar in the north was the next objective.

Khalid ﵁ rested for two weeks in the palaces of Hira. He had his officers shown around the city, accepted gifts from the Lakhmid nobles, and held audience with the bishop of the local church. The bishop asked for confirmation that the relics in his church would not be touched. Khalid ﵁ gave the confirmation in writing.

With Hira began the Muslim engagement with inherited imperial structures. The jizyah arrangements first laid down here would within three years become the model for the provinces of Syria, and within twenty years for the whole of the old Sasanian empire. Khalid ﵁ did not know it when he signed the treaty. He knew only that the first leap across the border of the peninsula had been made, and that the road to Madaʾin Kisra, however far, was no longer impassable.

In Medina, Khalid ﵁'s campaign in Iraq would be cut shorter than anyone expected. Abu Bakr ﵁ had decided that the Syrian front, where Byzantine armies were beginning to mass against the Muslim units under Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁, Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁, and Shurahbil ﵁, had to take priority. A new order was sent. Khalid ﵁ was to march with part of his army through the Syrian desert and meet the Byzantines there. Iraq would be handled from then on by al-Muthanna ﵁ alone. The march Khalid ﵁ then made, from Hira to Bosra across the desert of Samawah, is one of the most famous in Arab military history. But that is another story.