From Berlin to Baghdad on the Ruins of a WWI Railway

South of Mosul, Saleh stood in front of a ruined station with his son. Along the tracks, train cars lie wrecked, pocked with bullet holes. A pair of skinny cats looked out from the doorway of the former ticket hall. “My father was the stationmaster here,” he said. “But he died in 2003 and I took over. That was also the year the trains stopped running on time. After ISIS, they stopped running at all.” He doesn’t know when they will begin again.

“My happiest memory as a child was laying my head on the tracks and listening for the trains coming,” he told me. “We knew these tracks went all the way to Turkey and onwards to Europe. ‘I’ll take us all on a trip there one day,’ my father said.”

I was at Saleh’s ruined station as I retraced the route of the never-completed Berlin-Baghdad railway. Started in 1903, it was an audacious attempt by the German and Ottoman empires to bypass the Suez Canal and create a fast, overland route to the Persian Gulf.

For the Germans, it was a way to cement their alliance with the Ottomans and put pressure on Britain’s empire in India. Suspicions of oil in Mesopotamia only sweetened the prize.

For the Ottomans, who had seen the heart of their empire in the Balkans fragment and break away, the railway was an effort to make sure their Asian provinces didn’t go the same way. As Eugene Rogan, author of The Fall of the Ottomans, told me, “Railways were a way for the Ottomans to extend their effective reach into an area where they really had a very poor record of direct rule. To keep the Kurds close, keep the Arabs close, keep the Armenians close. Try to keep the disparate peoples of the empire bound to Istanbul’s rule.”