The Iraqi coup d’état

At the turn of March and April 1941 four colonels of the Iraqi army, known as the “Golden Square”, seized power in Baghdad. They forced the prime minister, Taha al-Hashimi, to resign, while the regent, Abd al-Ilah – who ruled on behalf of the not yet six-year-old King Faisal II and kept faithfully to the alliance with Britain – fled the capital in disguise and then left the country. At the head of a “Government of National Defence” the officers placed the former prime minister Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, a nationalist who had for months been seeking an understanding with Germany and Italy. On 3 April Baghdad radio announced that he was taking responsibility for the state, and a week later parliament deposed the regent and handed the regency to a distant relative of the king. In a country that carried the overland route from the Persian Gulf to Palestine and held the oilfields of Kirkuk, power had passed to a government openly hostile to Britain – and this in the very weeks when the British army was falling back in Cyrenaica and the Germans were preparing to strike at Yugoslavia and Greece.

Popular war chronologies record that on 1 April Rashid Ali and the Golden Square overthrew the regent, and that on 3 April “a pro-Axis government was installed in Iraq”. Both dates have support in the sources, but they describe two stages of the same coup: first the military seizure of power and the regent’s flight, then the public proclamation of the new government.

A country between London and Berlin

Iraq had been formally independent since 1932, but its independence rested on an alliance with its former mandatory power. The treaty signed on 30 June 1930, which followed on from the agreement of December 1927, obliged Iraq to come to Britain’s aid as an ally in the event of war and to place its railways, rivers, ports and airfields at Britain’s disposal. The British retained two air bases, at Shaibah near Basra and at Habbaniya on the Euphrates, together with the right of transit for their troops. From 1937 there were no British ground troops in Iraq apart from the local levies guarding the bases, recruited mainly from among the Assyrians, and a company of RAF armoured cars.

Real power, however, lay in Baghdad neither with parliament nor with the palace. Since General Bakr Sidqi’s coup of 1936 it had been the army that decided who governed, and within the army a group of pan-Arab officers who had been formed in the Ottoman army and in the forces of Faisal I. The most influential were four colonels: Salah al-Din al-Sabbagh, commander of the 3rd Division; Kamil Shabib, commander of the 1st Division; Fahmi Said, commander of the independent mechanised brigade; and Mahmud Salman, commander of the air force. They were called the Golden Square. They dreamed of uniting the Arabs around Iraq, loathed British domination and admired Germany, and many of them had been in touch with the German minister, Fritz Grobba, before Iraq broke off relations with the Reich in September 1939.

In October 1939 the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, leader of the suppressed Arab revolt in Palestine, arrived in Baghdad. He was received as a hero. Around him grew up a secret Arab Committee, made up of Iraqi politicians, colonels and exiles from Syria and Palestine, which in time became a centre of decision-making more important than the government itself.

On 31 March 1940 the regent asked Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, until then chief of the royal court, to form a government. His cabinet was meant to be a national coalition, with the pro-British Nuri al-Said as foreign minister, but it soon began to go its own way. When Italy declared war on Britain and France on 10 June 1940, the government in Baghdad rejected the British demand to break off relations with Rome and proclaimed a policy of “absolute neutrality”. The Italian legation in Baghdad, headed by Luigi Gabrielli, became the main centre of Axis propaganda in the region, even though Italian bombers from Rhodes were at that time attacking Haifa, the terminal of the pipeline from Kirkuk. At the turn of June and July 1940 the justice minister, Naji Shawkat, sent on an official mission to Turkey, met the German ambassador in Ankara, Franz von Papen, in secret, handed him a letter of introduction from the Mufti and assured him that Iraq would side with Germany when the time was right. In the summer the Mufti’s secretary, Uthman Kamal Haddad, travelled to Berlin. These talks produced a joint German–Italian declaration of sympathy for Arab aspirations to independence, broadcast in Arabic by the Berlin and Rome radio stations on 23 October 1940. It was vague, because the Reich did not want to provoke Italy, which had appetites of its own in the Middle East, but in Baghdad it was greeted with enthusiasm.

The government of Taha al-Hashimi

In the autumn of 1940 London concluded that Rashid Ali’s government had to go. The Chiefs of Staff, together with the Commander-in-Chief Middle East, General Archibald Wavell, recommended diplomatic and economic pressure, since there were no troops available for an intervention, and the regent was given to understand that London would not work with the present prime minister. In January 1941 Abd al-Ilah pointedly left Baghdad for Diwaniya, where the 4th Division was stationed, and refused to sign the decree dissolving parliament that Rashid Ali wanted. The colonels did not dare to take on the divisions loyal to the regent, and on 31 January Rashid Ali resigned, in a letter accusing the regent of yielding to “foreign interests”.

The colonels laid down a condition: the new prime minister was to be General Taha al-Hashimi, a former chief of the general staff and minister of defence whom they trusted. Taha took office on 1 February. The regent expected him to remove the four colonels from their commands, but the new prime minister believed he could reconcile them with the court. When the foreign minister, Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, returned in March from talks with Anthony Eden in Cairo and pressed for a break with Italy, the Mufti’s Arab Committee branded Taha’s government a traitor to the national cause and resolved that, unless it changed course, it must give way to Rashid Ali. On 26 March Taha, urged on by the regent, signed an order transferring Kamil Shabib from the 1st Division in Baghdad to the 4th Division at Diwaniya. The colonels made him agree not to carry it out, but took it as proof that the regent was preparing to deal with them. Their fears were heightened by the coup in Belgrade, where on 27 March air force officers overthrew the government that had joined the Tripartite Pact, and by the news from Africa, where on 31 March Rommel took Mersa Brega and pushed on into Cyrenaica. The British, who as recently as February had been routing the Italians at Beda Fomm, seemed weak once again.

The night of the coup

The parliamentary session ended on 31 March. According to the British official history, it was on that day that the regent learned of a plot to arrest him and fled Baghdad. The Iraqi historian Majid Khadduri, who later spoke to most of those involved, including the regent, Taha and Rashid Ali, describes the course of events somewhat differently. On the evening of 1 April Rashid Ali, the acting chief of the general staff General Amin Zaki and the four colonels met at the Al-Rashid military camp outside Baghdad. They decided to put the army on alert and, if the government did not step down, to rise in revolt. Amin Zaki and Fahmi Said drove to Taha’s house and an hour before midnight presented him with the army’s demand. The prime minister refused to work with Rashid Ali but, under threat, wrote a letter of resignation. Meanwhile troops entered the capital, occupied key points and surrounded the regent’s palace.

The next day, 2 April, the conspirators tried once more to persuade Taha and his ministers to cooperate, but to no avail. On the same day the new British ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, who had spent twenty years as an adviser to Faisal I, arrived in Baghdad. That evening the colonels and Rashid Ali decided that since the regent had fled and the old government would not step down of its own accord, they would have to take power themselves.

Some accounts and most chronologies attach all these events to 1 April; the British official history places the actual seizure of power on 3 April; according to Khadduri, the decisive moment was the night of 1–2 April. The discrepancies arise because the coup was not a single blow but stretched over three days.

The regent’s flight

Abd al-Ilah managed to slip out of the surrounded palace in disguise and spent the night with relatives; in the morning he crossed the Tigris and, with the help of the American legation headed by Paul Knabenshue, made his way to the British base at Habbaniya, some 80 kilometres west of Baghdad. From there an RAF aircraft flew him to Basra. The regent hoped to rally loyal supporters in the south with the help of the governor of Basra, Salih Jabr, and to set up a rival government, but Rashid Ali sent orders for Jabr’s arrest, and the military commanders in the south did not back the regent. Abd al-Ilah then took refuge aboard the British gunboat HMS Cockchafer on the Shatt al-Arab, and later travelled via Palestine to Transjordan, where he was the guest of his uncle, Emir Abdullah. Nuri al-Said and other politicians regarded as friends of the British also made their way to Amman. The boy king Faisal II and his mother remained in Iraq; the officers did not dare to abolish the monarchy, which was the only source of legitimacy for their own rule.

The Government of National Defence

On the evening of 3 April Baghdad radio broadcast a proclamation signed by General Amin Zaki but drafted by Rashid Ali’s civilian associates. It accused the regent of breaking the rules governing the regency, of seeking the throne for himself, of trying “to destroy the national army” and of abandoning his duties, so that Prime Minister Taha had been obliged to resign. In this situation, the proclamation declared, the army had entrusted power to a “Government of National Defence” under Rashid Ali, which would govern until the constitutional requirements were met and normality was restored. Rashid Ali himself spoke immediately afterwards. He announced that his government would not expose the country to war, would fulfil its “national mission” and would honour all Iraq’s international obligations, and he ended his address with good wishes for King Faisal II. The new authorities demanded that London refrain from interfering in Iraq’s affairs and sent troops to Basra against the regent’s supporters.

The coup was greeted with enthusiasm in Baghdad, especially among nationalist youth and teachers; thousands of telegrams of support poured into Rashid Ali’s office, some spontaneous, some solicited.

Rashid Ali wanted to give his rule a semblance of legality. As there was no regent to summon parliament, one of the deputy speakers of the Chamber of Deputies did so instead. On 10 April 94 of the 108 deputies, including former supporters of the regent, attended a joint session of both houses. On Rashid Ali’s motion parliament unanimously removed Abd al-Ilah from office and appointed as regent Sharif Sharaf ibn Rajih, an elderly distant relative of the dynasty from the Hejaz. The new regent formally accepted Taha al-Hashimi’s resignation, signed on 1 April, and charged Rashid Ali with forming a government. The cabinet was formed on 12 April. Rashid Ali also kept the interior ministry for himself; Naji Shawkat became minister of defence, Naji al-Suwaidi minister of finance and Musa al-Shabandar foreign minister, while the two most ardent supporters of the coup, Yunis al-Sabawi and Ali Mahmud, took the economy and justice portfolios. The Government of National Defence formally ceased to exist, but power remained with the four colonels.

The new government was not recognised by Britain, nor, following its lead, by the United States, Turkey and Egypt, whose representatives in Baghdad were to act in concert with the British embassy. Ambassador Cornwallis did not present his credentials, so as not to imply recognition. Italy and Japan, on the other hand, sent their congratulations, and King Ibn Saud recognised the new authorities, though he advised them to be cautious towards London.

London’s response

In London nobody doubted that the Axis’s men had taken power in Baghdad. On 9 April the Deputy Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, answering a question in the House of Commons about the situation in Iraq, stated that the government regarded the situation as “entirely unconstitutional”, that its rights under the treaty remained intact, and that Britain would ensure they were fully observed. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, refused from the outset to recognise Rashid Ali’s government.

Troops were the hardest thing to find. The Chiefs of Staff favoured armed intervention, but the commanders in Cairo had their hands full with the German offensive in Cyrenaica, the impending attack on Greece – where a British expeditionary force had been landing since March – and the closing stages of the campaign in East Africa. As early as March Wavell had proposed that India should take on any operations in Iraq, and the Chiefs of Staff had agreed. On 7 April the RAF commander in Iraq, Air Vice-Marshal Harry Smart, was told that he could expect no reinforcements. Habbaniya housed a flying school whose 78 aircraft were, with four exceptions, obsolete or purely training machines.

On 8 April Churchill asked the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, what forces could be sent quickly from India to Basra. The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, and the Commander-in-Chief in India, General Claude Auchinleck, offered an infantry brigade whose first echelon was due to sail from Karachi for Malaya on 10 April, together with an airlift of some 390 British infantrymen to Shaibah. On 10 April the Defence Committee in London accepted the offer gratefully. On the same day Wavell informed the Chiefs of Staff that he could not spare even a single battalion from Palestine and advised a diplomatic solution, backed at most by a show of force in the air. Churchill thought otherwise. In his war memoirs he wrote that the first priority had been to secure Basra, because the Americans were increasingly keen to see a large aircraft assembly base there, to which they could deliver equipment directly. The disagreement between the Prime Minister and the Commander-in-Chief over Iraq became one of the reasons why Churchill recalled Wavell from Cairo at the end of June.

Berlin and Rome

The coup was not Germany’s doing, though its authors were counting on Germany. The Reich had had no mission in Iraq since September 1939, and communication with Berlin ran through the Italian legation in Baghdad and through Papen’s embassy in Ankara. At the beginning of 1941 the Mufti’s secretary, Haddad, travelled to Berlin a second time, carrying a letter from al-Husseini to Hitler in which the Mufti promised that Rashid Ali would take up arms against Britain if Germany recognised the independence of Iraq and the other Arab countries. According to Haddad’s memoirs, the reply, delivered at the beginning of April in a secret letter from the State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker, was cautious: the Reich was ready to recognise the independence of the Arab states once they had won it for themselves. Berlin, absorbed in preparations for war in the Balkans and for the invasion of the USSR, did not want a premature clash in Iraq; as early as the autumn of 1940 Joachim von Ribbentrop had warned the Baghdad nationalists against one, while promising help should war break out. On 17 April Rashid Ali asked Germany for military assistance in the event of war with Britain.

Place in the war

The coup in Baghdad opened a new front for Britain at the worst possible moment. In those same weeks the British army was retreating in Libya, the Germans were attacking Yugoslavia and Greece, and the command in Cairo had to choose where to send its scant reserves. London nevertheless decided not to wait. On 16 April Ambassador Cornwallis informed Rashid Ali that Britain was exercising the right of transit provided for in the treaty; the prime minister did not protest. On 17 April transport aircraft brought the first soldiers of a battalion of the King’s Own Royal Regiment to Shaibah, and on 18 April the 20th Indian Infantry Brigade landed at Basra. On 30 April the Iraqi army occupied the plateau overlooking the base at Habbaniya and demanded that flying cease. On 2 May the British struck first, and the Anglo-Iraqi War began.

Axis help came too late and was too meagre: some thirty German and Italian aircraft, which reached Iraq via the airfields of Vichy-controlled Syria with the consent of Admiral François Darlan. By the end of May British and Indian troops and the Arab Legion from Transjordan stood outside Baghdad. On 29 and 30 May Rashid Ali, the Mufti and most of the leaders of the coup fled to Iran; an armistice was signed on 31 May, and on 1 June Abd al-Ilah returned to the capital. In the interregnum of 1 and 2 June Baghdad saw a pogrom of the Jews known as the Farhud. An official Iraqi commission counted some 180 Jews killed; other estimates are several times higher. The help that Vichy had given Germany settled the question of a British invasion of Syria and Lebanon in June 1941, and from Iraq, under British occupation until 1947, troops set out in August to occupy Iran together with the Red Army.

The Golden Square paid for the coup with their lives. Fahmi Said and Mahmud Salman were hanged in May 1942, Kamil Shabib in August 1944, and al-Sabbagh, handed over to the British by Turkey, in October 1945 in front of the gate of the Ministry of Defence in Baghdad. Rashid Ali spent the rest of the war in Berlin, recognised by the Germans as the “Prime Minister of Iraq” in exile and vying with the Mufti for the leadership of Hitler’s Arab allies. Iraq, where Nuri al-Said had returned to power, declared war on the Axis powers in January 1943.

The April coup was the most serious attempt to draw an Arab state into the war on the side of the Axis. Its failure preserved for the Allies Iraqi oil, the overland route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and the bases without which it would have been impossible to occupy Syria and Iran or later to ship equipment to the USSR through Iran. At the same time it showed how fragile British dominance in the Middle East was. In Iraq the memory of 1941 divided the country for a long time: for the nationalists the colonels were martyrs and the British intervention a “second occupation”; for their opponents and for Iraq’s Jews it was the beginning of a tragedy.