Iraq declares war on the Axis

On Saturday 16 January 1943 the Iraqi government announced in Baghdad that from midnight on 16–17 January the country considered itself at war with Germany, Italy and Japan. The same day the Prime Minister, Nuri al-Said, asked President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for help in admitting Iraq to the signatories of the Declaration by United Nations. Iraq became the first independent Arab state formally to enter the war on the Allied side. Militarily the decision changed little, but politically it closed a chapter opened two years earlier by the pro-German coup in Baghdad.

The text of the declaration

The document was signed by the Foreign Minister, Abd al-Ilah Hafiz. The note was passed through British channels to the Iraqi minister in Ankara, who was to deliver it on 16 January to the diplomatic representatives of Germany, Italy and Japan in Turkey. The Americans had learned its content in advance: on the evening of 13 January Nuri al-Said and the Foreign Minister handed it in strict confidence to the American Minister Resident in Baghdad, who forwarded it to Washington.

The grounds for war were entirely a matter of Iraq’s internal affairs. The government accused Germany of having interfered in Iraq’s internal affairs “in every way and in the most open manner”, of inciting open rebellion against the constitutional government, and of continuing hostile activity through radio stations spreading “false rumours” and slanders against the ruling family. Italy was accused of taking part in the same interference, and Japan of violating the principles of neutrality by helping both states and later joining in their provocations. All three charges referred to a single event: the coup d’état of April 1941, which brought Rashid Ali al-Gaylani to power, and the Anglo-Iraqi War that followed, in which the government in Baghdad had counted on Axis help.

From neutrality to war

Under the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of Alliance of 1930, Iraq was obliged in the event of war to give the British every assistance. In September 1939 it broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and interned German nationals, but did not declare war: the Prime Minister at the time – the same Nuri al-Said – announced that the Iraqi army would not be used outside the country’s borders. Successive governments came increasingly under the influence of the pan-Arab officers of the Golden Square, and the Italian legation operated in Baghdad until 1941, serving as one of the centres of Axis propaganda.

In the spring of 1941 the dispute turned into open conflict. Within a month British forces, supported by troops from Transjordan, had broken the resistance of the Iraqi army, despite the arrival of a German air detachment at Mosul and a diplomatic gesture from Moscow, which recognised Rashid Ali’s government. After the armistice outside Baghdad the regent Abd al-Ilah, ruling on behalf of the young King Faisal II, returned to the capital, and in October 1941 Nuri al-Said once again became head of government. The country remained under de facto British control: supply routes ran through Iraq from the port of Basra to Iran and on to the USSR, and oil from Kirkuk flowed by pipeline to the Mediterranean. From August 1942 the British Persia and Iraq Command, created in case of a German breakthrough across the Caucasus, had its headquarters in Baghdad under General Henry Maitland Wilson.

At the beginning of 1942 Nuri’s government purged supporters of Rashid Ali from the army and the administration. On 6 January 1942 a court martial in Baghdad sentenced Rashid Ali himself to death in absentia, and those involved in the coup who had not managed to flee far enough were handed over and hanged. According to American diplomats, the idea of declaring war on the Axis had been in the air in Baghdad since the beginning of 1942. The government, however, held back as long as the outcome of the war remained uncertain, and in the summer of 1942 German troops stood at El Alamein and were on their way to the Caucasus. Only the British victory in Egypt, the Allied landings in North Africa and the encirclement of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad convinced the Iraqi government that choosing a side no longer carried any risk.

Rashid Ali and the Mufti in Berlin

The German and Italian broadcasts mentioned in the declaration had faces. Rashid Ali al-Gaylani flew to Berlin on 20 November 1941, a few weeks after Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, the former Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who in 1941 had called in Baghdad for a holy war against the British. The two competed for the position of leader of the Arab world in the eyes of the Axis. Adolf Hitler received the Mufti on 28 November 1941 and Rashid Ali in the summer of 1942; the Germans recognised the latter as the legitimate Prime Minister of Iraq in exile. Political promises, however, were given to them sparingly: in April 1942 they received only a secret letter from the Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, promising independence for the Arab countries after an Axis victory. Arabic-language broadcasts from Berlin and Rome attacked the regent and Nuri as British puppets, and a small Arab training unit was formed within the Wehrmacht, intended for operations in the Middle East after the expected breakthrough in the Caucasus.

The declaration of war was thus also a response to this “government-in-exile”: it deprived Rashid Ali of the argument that Iraq was merely a country occupied by the British, whose true will was expressed in Berlin.

A war for the future

Nobody in Baghdad pretended that the Iraqi army would go to the front. On 16 January Nuri al-Said set out a simple argument in the Chamber of Deputies: the future interests of Iraq and the other Arab states required accession to the United Nations, a condition of accession was a state of war with the Axis, and Iraq was therefore declaring war in order to secure for itself and for the Arab world a seat at the table after victory. In the days that followed, the government-controlled press denied rumours that troops would be sent abroad or that general mobilisation would be declared, and gave assurances that the country was taking on no new obligations beyond those already arising from the alliance with Britain and membership of the League of Nations.

Behind this calculation lay the Prime Minister’s own plans. Nuri al-Said dreamed of an Arab federation under Iraqi leadership, embracing the whole of the Fertile Crescent – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan and Palestine. At the turn of 1942 and 1943 he presented this project to the British Minister of State Resident in the Middle East, Richard Casey, in a memorandum known as the “Blue Book”. Allied status was to give Iraq leverage in post-war talks on the future of the region, including vis-à-vis Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which were still neutral. Britain welcomed the decision with evident satisfaction, presenting it as the first case in history of an independent Muslim state entering a war as an ally on its own initiative – an example for the whole Arab world.

The formalities in Washington were handled by the Iraqi minister, Ali Jawdat al-Ayyubi. An exchange of notes with the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, on 16 and 22 January confirmed Iraq’s adherence to the Declaration by United Nations, and on 2 February Roosevelt sent Nuri his personal congratulations, welcoming Iraq “into the ranks of the United Nations”.

Place in the war

The practical consequences of the decision were slight. The Iraqi army, weakened by the defeat of 1941 and by the purges, did not fight outside the country’s borders, and Iraq’s role in the war remained what it had been before as a rear base of the British Empire: air bases, oil and a transit route to Iran and the USSR. In the course of 1943 the threat from the north disappeared as the Wehrmacht withdrew from the Caucasus, and Persia and Iraq Command began releasing troops to other fronts. Rashid Ali al-Gaylani spent the rest of the war in Germany, and the Mufti became ever more deeply involved in collaboration with the SS.

The political significance proved more lasting. Iraq was the first of the Arab states to choose the Allied side. Neighbouring Iran declared war on Germany in September 1943, and towards the end of the war Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia followed Iraq’s lead, when a declaration of war on Germany by 1 March 1945 became the condition for an invitation to the founding conference of the United Nations Organisation. Iraq was among its founding members, and Nuri al-Said was one of the architects of the Arab League, established in March 1945, though in a far more modest form than his federation. The calculation of 1943, however, tied the Hashemite monarchy to Britain even more closely. Years later it was this very dependence that was turned against it by the officers who overthrew the monarchy on 14 July 1958; Faisal II, Abd al-Ilah and Nuri al-Said were killed in the revolution.