Rashid Ali al-Gaylani

Rashid Ali al-Gaylani was the best-known Iraqi politician to stake everything on a German victory in the Second World War. A lawyer from a Baghdad family of great religious prestige, he belonged for twenty years to the elite of the Kingdom of Iraq, serving as minister, speaker of parliament, chief of the royal court and three times as prime minister. An opponent of the alliance with Britain, which gave the British bases and the right of transit through Iraq, in 1940–1941 he sought an understanding with Rome and Berlin. In April 1941 the officers of the “Golden Square” placed him at the head of a government that led the country into a short war with Britain. He lost it within a month and spent the rest of the war in Berlin as Iraq’s prime minister in exile, recognised as such by Hitler.

Descendant of a saint

He was born in 1892 in Baghdad, then part of the Ottoman Empire, into the Gaylani (Kilani) family, which traced its descent from Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani, the twelfth-century preacher and founder of the Qadiriyya Sufi order, whose tomb in Baghdad is one of the most important shrines of Sunni Islam. Members of the family bore the title of sayyid, reserved for descendants of the Prophet, and for generations had been custodians of the shrine and its endowments. Rashid Ali’s father was Sayyid Abd al-Wahhab al-Gaylani. Rashid Ali studied law – in Istanbul according to some sources, at the Baghdad law school according to others – and after the First World War worked as a lawyer and judge.

A politician of the Kingdom of Iraq

In 1921 the British, who held the mandate over Mesopotamia, placed Faisal I on the throne of the new state. Rashid Ali entered politics in the government of Yasin al-Hashimi, who made him minister of justice in August 1924. Both men were nationalists and belonged to the camp that wanted to curb British influence as quickly as possible. In the years that followed Rashid Ali was speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and several times minister of the interior. When Prime Minister Nuri al-Said signed a new treaty of alliance with Britain on 30 June 1930, Yasin and Rashid Ali founded the National Brotherhood Party (Hizb al-Ikha al-Watani), which declared the treaty non-binding and demanded its revision.

Faisal concluded that the best way to disarm the opposition was to let it into government. He appointed Rashid Ali chief of the royal court and on 20 March 1933 asked him to form a government. As prime minister, however, Rashid Ali had to accept the treaty he had previously condemned. In the summer of 1933 his government faced the Assyrian crisis. The Iraqi army under General Bakr Sidqi moved against the Assyrians, a Christian community in the north of the country, and in August came the Simele massacre, in which anywhere from several hundred to more than three thousand people were killed. Far from punishing those responsible, the government allowed the soldiers to be welcomed in Baghdad as heroes, and anti-Assyrian feeling turned into anti-British feeling, since it was the British who had recruited Assyrians into their auxiliary units. After Faisal’s death in September 1933 Rashid Ali formed a government again, this time for the new king, Ghazi I, but resigned on 28 October when the king refused to dissolve parliament.

In March 1935, after a wave of tribal revolts backed by their supporters, Yasin al-Hashimi became prime minister and Rashid Ali minister of the interior. Their government, harsh towards the opposition and ruthless towards further tribal uprisings in the south, which Bakr Sidqi’s army put down, was ended on 29 October 1936 by the first military coup in the Arab world, carried out by the same general. Yasin and Rashid Ali had to leave the country; Yasin died in exile in 1937. Rashid Ali returned after Bakr Sidqi’s assassination in August 1937 and resumed plotting against successive governments. In December 1938 Prime Minister Jamil al-Midfai had him arrested and banished to the provinces, but after that government fell at the end of December the new prime minister, Nuri al-Said, allowed him to return, and on 29 January 1939 Rashid Ali once again took charge of the royal court.

Wartime prime minister

After King Ghazi was killed in a car accident on 4 April 1939, power passed, on behalf of his four-year-old son Faisal II, to the regent Abd al-Ilah, who was well disposed towards the British. In September 1939 Iraq broke off relations with Germany but did not declare war on it. On 31 March 1940, after a crisis in the army and Nuri’s resignation, the regent asked Rashid Ali to form a government. His cabinet was meant to be a government of national unity, with Nuri as foreign minister, but it soon took a different course. When Italy entered the war, the government refused to break off relations with it, and the Italian legation in Baghdad became a centre of Axis propaganda. Rashid Ali agreed to the passage of British troops through Iraq, provided for in the treaty, only after long disputes and on condition that they would not remain in the country for long.

Behind the backs of the British, the prime minister looked for other protectors. He acted in concert with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who had been living in Baghdad since October 1939, and with the four colonels who made up the Golden Square. In the summer of 1940 his minister of justice, Naji Shawkat, met the Reich’s ambassador Franz von Papen in secret in Turkey, and the Italian minister Luigi Gabrielli, at the prime minister’s request, handed him a written assurance from Galeazzo Ciano that Italy supported the independence of Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. Rashid Ali asked the Italians and the Japanese for arms. London responded with diplomatic and economic pressure. In January 1941 the regent left Baghdad for Diwaniya and refused to dissolve parliament, and the colonels, unwilling to risk civil war, did not come to the prime minister’s defence. On 31 January 1941 Rashid Ali resigned, accusing the regent in a letter of yielding to “foreign interests”.

The coup and the war with Britain

He was succeeded by General Taha al-Hashimi, but when, under pressure from the regent, Taha tried to remove the colonels from their commands, they decided to bring Rashid Ali back. At the turn of March and April 1941 the army forced Taha to resign, and the regent fled to Basra and then on to Transjordan. On 3 April the radio announced that power was being assumed by a “Government of National Defence” headed by Rashid Ali. On 10 April parliament deposed Abd al-Ilah and appointed Sharif Sharaf regent, and on 12 April Rashid Ali formed a new cabinet. Britain did not recognise it, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill decided to land troops from India at Basra, invoking the treaty of 1930. An Indian brigade came ashore at Basra on 18 April. Rashid Ali did not protest, but demanded that the troops pass through the country quickly, and when the British announced further shipments, on 30 April he sent troops to surround the British air base at Habbaniya. On 17 April he had asked Germany for military aid.

On 2 May the British struck first. Within a few days the defenders of Habbaniya had driven the Iraqis back, and a relief column was approaching from Palestine and Transjordan in the west. The Germans sent a small air detachment, which reached Mosul via airfields in Syria, then controlled by Vichy France, and the Italians a few fighters. The help was too little and came too late. When British troops reached the outskirts of Baghdad, Rashid Ali, the Mufti and most of the leaders of the coup fled to Iran on 29 and 30 May. An armistice was signed on 31 May, and on 1 June the regent returned to the capital. In the days of the power vacuum, on 1 and 2 June, a pogrom of Jews known as the Farhud broke out in Baghdad, in which around 180 people were killed according to the official commission, and considerably more according to other estimates. It erupted in the climate of anti-Jewish propaganda spread by radio and press during Rashid Ali’s rule.

In Berlin

When British and Soviet troops occupied Iran in August 1941, Rashid Ali made his way to Turkey, which granted him asylum, though it refused it to the Mufti. The Turks, however, were unwilling to let him travel further. On 20 November 1941 he flew to Berlin on a false passport; the Mufti had arrived there on 6 November. On 19 December Joachim von Ribbentrop handed him a letter in which, with Hitler’s approval, he recognised him as head of the legitimate government of Iraq. On 6 January 1942 a court martial in Baghdad sentenced him to death in absentia. In mid-July 1942 Hitler received him officially at his headquarters on the Eastern Front and assured him that Germany had no territorial ambitions in the Arab countries.

Rashid Ali spoke on German radio’s Arabic-language broadcasts and, together with the Mufti, lobbied for a joint German–Italian declaration recognising the independence of the Arab states. Hitler considered it premature until Axis troops stood south of the Caucasus; on 28 April 1942 the two leaders received only a secret letter from Ciano promising, in agreement with Germany, the independence of the Arab countries and the abolition of the Jewish national home in Palestine. From the start Rashid Ali and the Mufti were rivals for the leadership, a rivalry fanned by their German patron, Fritz Grobba, the former minister in Baghdad. In time the Mufti, who had links to Heinrich Himmler, proved the more influential, while Rashid Ali led a relatively quiet life with his family and quarrelled with his own followers. Those members of the Golden Square who had not managed to escape so far were handed over to the Iraqi authorities and hanged between 1942 and 1945.

Exile and return

In the last days of the war Rashid Ali tried to reach Switzerland but was refused entry. In disguise he travelled through Belgium and Paris to Marseilles, from where in the summer of 1945 he sailed on someone else’s passport to Beirut, and then made his way via Damascus and across the desert to Riyadh. On 27 September 1945 he asked King Ibn Saud for asylum and was granted it. The regent Abd al-Ilah never forgave him, and Rashid Ali spent the following years in exile in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

He returned to Iraq only after the revolution of 14 July 1958, in which King Faisal II, Abd al-Ilah and Nuri al-Said were murdered. He was welcomed as a hero but soon came into conflict with the new leader, General Abd al-Karim Qasim. At the end of 1958 he was arrested on charges of preparing a conspiracy with nationalist officers, and a special court sentenced him to death. The sentence was not carried out, and in 1961 Rashid Ali was released. He went to Lebanon and died in Beirut on 28 August 1965. He was buried in Baghdad, in the shrine of his ancestor Abd al-Qadir.

Significance

In the history of the Second World War Rashid Ali stands for the attempt by Germany and Italy to exploit, for their own war aims, Arab resentment of the British and French mandatory powers in the Middle East. His coup, aimed at Britain in its most difficult weeks of 1941, threatened Iraqi oil and the overland route from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean. It collapsed quickly, however, because Berlin, absorbed in preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, could not and would not give him real help, while London, despite the objections of its own commanders in Cairo, reacted at once. Rashid Ali’s defeat opened the way for the British into Syria and Iran, and brought Iraq itself a British occupation that lasted until 1947.

In Iraq opinion of him remains divided. To Arab nationalists he was a fighter for full independence who dared to stand up to an empire; to his opponents, a politician who handed the country over to the military and tied it to Nazi Germany. For the Jews of Iraq, his rule and the Farhud marked the beginning of the end of a community that had lived in Mesopotamia since Babylonian times.