Baghdad surrenders

At four in the morning of 31 May 1941 an Iraqi delegation carrying a white flag halted on the bridge over the Washash canal on the western outskirts of Baghdad. It was accompanied by a representative of the British embassy, in which the ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, and several hundred British civilians had been shut up for four weeks, cut off from the world. On the other side waited Major General George Clark, commander of the column that had crossed the desert from Palestine, and Air Vice-Marshal John D’Albiac, the RAF commander in Iraq. That same day, in the ambassador’s presence, the terms of an armistice were signed. The Anglo-Iraqi War, which had begun on 2 May with the strike by the airmen of Habbaniya, was over. Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and the officers of the “Golden Square” were by then already in Iran.

Many chronologies state that on 31 May “the mayor of Baghdad surrendered the city to the British”. That is a simplification. The mayor, Arshad al-Umari, headed the committee that took over power in the capital after the government fled and asked for an armistice, but no one formally surrendered the city, and British troops did not enter it at the time. On the Iraqi side the document was signed by army officers, and its terms were so mild that the Chiefs of Staff in London considered them too lenient.

The last stage of the war

After the capture of Fallujah on 19 May and the repulse of an Iraqi counter-attack three days later, the road to Baghdad lay open – but only on the map. The spring floods of the Euphrates had turned the surrounding country into a swamp, the Iraqis had breached the dykes and blown the bridges over the irrigation canals, and every lorry had to be ferried across the river on makeshift ferries under attack from German aircraft from Mosul. The British forces, moreover, were very small. According to British studies, Habforce – General Clark’s column – and the Habbaniya garrison could send some 1,450 soldiers against the capital, while there were at least 20,000 Iraqi troops around Baghdad. Clark nevertheless decided not to wait. He counted on the Iraqis not knowing how weak the forces facing them were, and air superiority already belonged to the RAF.

From the south, from Basra, help could not arrive quickly. Units of the 10th Indian Division, commanded since mid-May by Major General William Slim, set off northwards only on 27 May: one brigade up the Euphrates, another by boat up the Tigris towards Kut. The war was thus to be decided by a handful of men from the west.

Nor was it clear that the Germans would not yet manage to reinforce the Iraqis. Fliegerführer Irak, under Oberst Werner Junck, was attacking Habbaniya and the British columns; on 27 May twelve Italian Fiat CR.42 fighters reached Mosul; and Hitler’s Directive No. 30 of 23 May promised support for the “Arab freedom movement”. In reality Axis help was already running out. The German air force in Iraq was short of fuel, bombs and spare parts, and it was losing aircraft faster than new ones arrived.

Two columns on Baghdad

Clark did not want to attack from the south, because the route would have led through Karbala, one of the holiest cities of Shia Islam, where the passage of foreign troops would have caused unrest. He decided to strike with two columns. The main one, under Brigadier James Kingstone – after whose name the force that had come from Palestine was called Kingcol – was to advance along the main road from Fallujah through Khan Nuqta straight on the capital. It comprised two companies of the 1st Battalion of the Essex Regiment, RAF armoured cars and a battery of 25-pounder guns. The second, northern column, under Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Ferguson, with the Household Cavalry regiment, was to go round the city to the north and cut the road and railway to Mosul, so that Rashid Ali could not move his government there. This column was guided by soldiers of the Arab Legion from Transjordan under John Bagot Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha, who had already reconnoitred the ground as far as the Tigris and cut the Baghdad–Mosul railway.

Before setting out, Clark tried once more to induce the strong Iraqi garrison at Ramadi, which would remain in his rear, to surrender. Leaflets, bombing and artillery fire achieved nothing; the Iraqis left Ramadi only under the terms of the armistice.

During the night of 27–28 May Ferguson’s column crossed the Euphrates at Sin adh-Dhibban and disappeared into the desert. On 28 May it met weak resistance at Taji and halted some fifteen kilometres north-west of Baghdad. After beating off a night attack it moved on, but at Kadhimiya, a suburb with the tombs of two Shia imams, it was stopped by Iraqi artillery and infantry fire. The holy city could not be bombed, so it was hard to suppress the defence. In the meantime the Arab Legion captured the fortified railway station at Mushahida on the line to Mosul.

Kingstone’s column advanced quickly on 28 May across the hard, stony plain. At Khan Nuqta and a few kilometres further on it met resistance. According to the British official history, a working telephone line to Baghdad was found in a captured Iraqi post, and the column’s interpreter seized the chance to spin tales of the enormous strength of the British; moments later he heard someone at the headquarters of the Iraqi 3rd Division shouting that the presence of British tanks had been confirmed. There were no tanks. In the evening the column was halted some 20 kilometres from Baghdad by Iraqis dug in behind a canal on which they had blown the only bridge. On 29 May the British broke through this defence and formed a bridgehead; on 30 May they built a bridge and moved on, but again came to a halt before the Washash canal, at the very edge of the city.

Chronologies record that within four days the British approached Baghdad from the west and the north. So they did, although Clark himself was not satisfied with the progress. It was slow, he had no reinforcements within reach, the German raids on Habbaniya were intensifying, and the bridges at Fallujah and on the supply road were easy targets. Had the Iraqis decided to defend the city, his fifteen hundred men could not have taken it.

The government flees

The collapse came from within. News of the columns approaching the capital, swollen by rumours of hundreds of tanks, robbed the leaders of the coup of what self-confidence they had left. Even the German representative in Baghdad, the diplomat Gehrke, reported to Berlin on 28 May that the British were advancing with more than a hundred tanks, while Junck had only two serviceable Heinkels, four bombs and not a single fighter. Rashid Ali also knew that the army, whose last reserves were fighting at Kadhimiya, could not hold out for long. Since Mosul was cut off by the northern column and Basra was held by the British, the only escape route led east, to Iran.

On 29 May Rashid Ali, the Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the four colonels of the Golden Square and most of the ministers left Baghdad and crossed the Iranian border via Khanaqin; some of them reached it only on 30 May. The flight is usually associated with 30 May, but according to the Iraqi historian Majid Khadduri, who later spoke with most of those involved, the government left the capital as early as 29 May, and on the evening of 30 May word reached General Clark from Cairo that Rashid Ali and his closest associates were across the border. The German minister, Fritz Grobba, also left Baghdad, and the German military personnel and airmen withdrew via Mosul to Syria.

The Minister of Economics, Yunis al-Sabawi, the most radical of Rashid Ali’s men, remained briefly in the capital and proclaimed himself military governor of Baghdad. He commanded the youth militias he had armed. According to the leaders of the Jewish community, he summoned its president, Rabbi Sasson Khaduri, and advised that Jews should not leave their homes for three days; some historians believe he was preparing a call for a pogrom. He did not have time to issue it: that same day he had to leave the city and also fled to Iran.

The security committee and the armistice

On the afternoon of 29 May the mayor of Baghdad, Arshad al-Umari, an engineer from Mosul who had run the city since 1936, formed a Committee of Internal Security. Its members included the director of police and senior officers who did not want to go on fighting. The committee took over power in the abandoned capital, disarmed al-Sabawi’s militias and made contact with the British embassy. Ambassador Cornwallis, who throughout May had in practice been interned in his own building, sent General Clark on the evening of 30 May his first signal in four weeks: he asked that an Iraqi delegation under a flag of truce be received as soon as possible on the bridge over the Washash canal. Clark set the meeting for four in the morning.

The armistice terms, drawn up by the British, were brief. Hostilities were to cease immediately. The Iraqi army was to keep all its arms, equipment and ammunition, but all its units were to return to their peacetime barracks. British prisoners, military and civilian, were to be released. German and Italian military personnel in Iraq were to be interned and their equipment held by the Iraqi authorities. The Iraqi army was to leave Ramadi by noon on 1 June, and the British were given free passage by rail, road and river. Iraqi prisoners in British hands were to be handed over to the Regent. In the preamble the British declared that they had no intention of infringing Iraq’s independence and that the “regrettable events” had been the work of “a small political party”, not of hostility between the two peoples.

According to the text printed in the British official history, the document, dated 31 May, was signed by General Clark and Air Vice-Marshal D’Albiac and by three Iraqi officers, among them Brigadier Ismail Namik and Staff Lieutenant Colonel Nur ad-Din Mahmud. Khadduri dates Cornwallis’s agreement with the committee to 30 May. The two accounts can be reconciled: the talks with the embassy took place on 30 May, and the signatures were added after the meeting on the bridge early on 31 May.

The Chiefs of Staff in London were uneasy that the armistice said nothing about British occupation of strategic points or about any military safeguards. The commanders in Cairo, and Clark, reasoned differently: what mattered most was a swift handover of power to a friendly government, and the right of passage was in any case granted by the treaty of 1930. For the same reason British troops did not enter Baghdad. Too weak to control a large city full of soldiers who were still armed, they preferred not to reveal how few they were, and the Regent and the British wanted to avoid the impression that lawful government was returning on British bayonets.

The Regent returns

‘Abd al-Ilah, overthrown at the beginning of April by the colonels’ coup, had been waiting for this moment at Habbaniya, where he had come from Transjordan together with Nuri al-Said and other politicians loyal to the alliance with Britain. Some two hundred Iraqi prisoners at the base came forward ready to serve him. On 1 June the Regent entered Baghdad, without a British escort, and resumed power in the name of the six-year-old King Faisal II. He entrusted the government to a moderate politician, Jamil al-Midfai, who was to calm the country and not take revenge on the defeated.

Before the new government took control, Baghdad went through two days of lawlessness. They fell on the Jewish festival of Shavuot. According to the findings of an Iraqi commission of inquiry and to British sources, on 1 June a mob attacked a Jewish delegation that was going to greet the Regent, and the violence quickly spread to the Jewish quarters; on 2 June some policemen and soldiers joined the attackers. Order was restored only on the afternoon of 2 June, when the authorities ordered troops to fire on the looters. The pogrom, known as the Farhud, claimed according to the most frequently cited figures some 180 Jewish lives, with several hundred wounded; the Babylonian Jewry Heritage Center in Israel speaks of several hundred more unidentified dead buried in a mass grave, and some other estimates are higher still. Muslims were killed too, both attackers and people who defended their Jewish neighbours. Historians still dispute why the British troops outside the city did not intervene, and to what extent the pogrom was planned by men of the fallen regime and to what extent it broke out spontaneously in a power vacuum. For the Jews of Iraq – a community of some 150,000 at the time, present in Mesopotamia for two and a half thousand years – the Farhud was a shock that marked the beginning of the loosening of their bonds with the country.

The balance of the war

The Anglo-Iraqi War lasted less than a month and cost the British relatively little. According to the British official history, the RAF lost 34 killed and 64 wounded in Iraq in May, as well as 28 aircraft. Iraqi losses are not precisely known; the fighting around Habbaniya alone cost the Iraqi army, by British estimates, between 500 and 1,000 killed and wounded and several hundred prisoners. The Germans lost 14 Messerschmitt Bf 110s and 5 Heinkel He 111s in Iraq – almost all of Junck’s group – and the Italians three CR.42 fighters.

In conversations with the Germans and Italians, Rashid Ali bitterly reproached them for leaving him on his own: the arms sent from Syria were useless, he never received the promised gold, and, as he claimed, even ten tanks would have decided the fate of Habbaniya. The Germans, for their part, explained to the Italians that they had wanted to give effective help but had been prevented by transport difficulties and by the rapid collapse of the Iraqis’ will to resist. In fact the Reich, absorbed by preparations for the invasion of the USSR and by the fighting on Crete, had never intended to send more than token forces to Iraq.

Place in the war

The armistice of 31 May brought to an end the most dangerous attempt, from Britain’s point of view, to spark an anti-British uprising in the Arab world. London kept the Iraqi oil of Kirkuk, the port of Basra, the airfields on the route from Egypt to India, and the overland route from the Persian Gulf to Palestine. The victory came just as the battle lost by the British on Crete was drawing to a close and an attempt to relieve Tobruk in Libya had failed, and it was one of the few pieces of good news that spring. The British official history acknowledges that success was owed to the determination of the government in London, which did not listen to Archibald Wavell; the Commander-in-Chief Middle East had to the end advised negotiation rather than intervention, and in June Winston Churchill removed him from Cairo.

The consequences reached far beyond Iraq. German and Italian aircraft had flown to Mosul via the airfields of Syria, controlled by Vichy France, and this help settled the matter: as early as 8 June British, Australian, Indian and Free French forces entered Syria and Lebanon, and a few weeks later Habforce and Indian units also attacked from the east, from Iraq. In August troops set out from Iraq that, together with the Red Army, occupied Iran, and a huge share of Western supplies for the USSR later flowed through Iraq and Iran. The British remained in Iraq until 1947, and in January 1943 the government of Nuri al-Said declared war on the Axis powers.

Rashid Ali and the Mufti made their way from Iran to Europe and spent the rest of the war in Rome and Berlin as Hitler’s allies. The four colonels of the Golden Square, handed over or captured, were sentenced to death by an Iraqi court and hanged in 1942–1945. In Iraq the memory of May 1941 long divided the country: for the nationalists who overthrew the monarchy in 1958, Rashid Ali’s war was a struggle for independence; for its opponents and for the Jews of Iraq, it was the beginning of a tragedy.