By occupying in late 1914 the Ottoman "vilayet" (province) of Basra (now in southern Iraq), the British had achieved their strategic purpose of preventing the Ottomans from launching any offensive into the Khuzestan Province where all of the British-owned Persian oil fields were located. There was hence no real strategic need for the British to advance up the Tigris to take Baghdad, but both Nixon and Townshend were all for it for reasons of prestige. Townshend, especially, hoped that such a glorious achievement would lead to his being removed from the backwater of Mesopotamia and given command of a corps on the Western Front. Historian Geoffrey Regan notes that "mythical" Western conceptions made the city attractive as a target. Contemporary "Orientalist" literature, most notably "One Thousand and One Nights", depicted Baghdad as a center of exoticism and romance, building on folk memories of its term as capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. The Baghdad of Townshend's time was actually a run-down, impoverished provincial city in the Ottoman Empire.