Britain’s Forgotten Iraq War

Exactly 50 years before what we think of as the “first” Iraq War, during some of the darkest days of the Second World War, Britain fought a now-forgotten war in Iraq.

The map of modern Iraq was drawn largely by none other than Winston Churchill, in his capacity as British Colonial Secretary in the 1920s. Iraq had historically been Mesopotamia, and for the best part of four centuries before the First World War was a colony of the Ottoman -- Turkish -- Empire. It was in this period that Iraq’s minority Sunnis came to dominate the country, through Turkey’s preference for Sunnis in imperial administrative positions. After the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in the First World War, Iraq fell to Britain under a League of Nations mandate.

In 1930, Britain granted Iraq independence and Iraq guaranteed Britain "all aid, including the use of railways, rivers, ports and airfields," in case of war, which proved to be only a decade away.

By 1941, a militant anti-British and anti-Jewish nationalism had seized Iraq and the Mid East, fomented by a Nazi-allied Palestinian mufti exiled in Baghdad and by Axis grants and propaganda. In April, with Britain reeling across the Mediterranean, a group of fascist Iraqi military officers led by General Rashid Ali al-Gailani and called “the Golden Square” staged a coup, wrenching Iraq from the British sphere. The Rashid Ali regime, like later Iraqi dictatorships, was Sunni. And one of the four “corners” of this “Golden Square” was an uncle and later also father-in-law of then four year-old Saddam Hussein.

The coup had been urged by the radical cleric granted asylum in Baghdad, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini. Al-Husseini was the Osama bin Laden of his day and a Nazi ally. He had led Nazi-financed pogroms in Palestine, armed Muslim radicals, and advocated fascist revolution throughout the Muslim world. For most of the Second World War, he lived in Berlin as a guest of Adolf Hitler, a Nazi radio propagandist for the Middle East, and a recruiter for Balkan Muslim Holocaust units.

As opportunities to assassinate bin Laden in the 1990s were declined by the United States, so it is believed a proposed Jewish assassination of al-Husseini in 1940 was rejected by the British Foreign Office. Today bin Laden is “wanted dead or alive” by the President himself, and later in 1940 an order for al-Husseini’s assassination was approved by Churchill himself. In the event, al-Husseini died of old age in 1974, mentor and uncle of Yassir Arafat.

Rashid Ali, now Prime Minister of Iraq, had attempted to organize anti-British action in Egypt, home to the largest Royal Navy base in the Mid East. He had been in contact with Axis forces in Libya and Greece and with the Nazi-collaborationist Vichy French forces in Syria and Lebanon. He had promised Britain’s bases in Iraq to the Axis. And of course Rashid Ali would redirect to the Axis the Iraqi oil that would help fuel the Allied war effort. Prime Minister Churchill planned an Iraq war.

Churchill’s Mid Eastern Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Archibald Wavell, was hostile to the idea of opening an additional front and not ‘letting sleeping dogs lie’ in Iraq, echoing the more cautious critics of 2003. Wavell and his forces were already occupied in Greece, Crete, and East Africa, but Churchill was Prime Minister and ordered an invasion. Like 2003 and unlike 1991, the object would be regime change.

If the 2003 Iraq War is thought of as effectively unilateral despite the 16-nation invasion force and 49-nation diplomatic coalition, the 1941 war was unilateral in a more literal way. In May of 1941, America would not enter the Second World War directly for another seven months. France was then part-enemy, with Vichy French forces in Syria and Lebanon collaborating actively with the Axis. And the Soviet Union would not be an ally until the German invasion of Russia the following month. Turkey offered to mediate between the new Iraqi regime and Britain, but Churchill understood Rashid Ali to be an inveterate fascist and declared, “There can be no question of negotiation….” Britain would invade Iraq alone, with some Indian and Arab Imperial reinforcements and Iraqi levies and militiamen.

The war itself, as in 1991 and 2003, lasted about a month.

By May 2, over 9,000 Iraqi troops occupied a plateau beside the British airbase at Habbaniya. The British decided to preempt their would-be besiegers, plus the 60-plane Iraqi Air Force outside Baghdad, and launched an air assault at sunrise. As in 1991 and 2003, air power would be decisive. In five days, the British airmen at Habbaniya flew 584 sorties with their 78 outdated biplanes, 8 Wellington bombers, and a couple of Hurricane fighters, and by May 7 the Iraqi Air Force lay in ruins and the besiegers had abandoned Habbaniya. As today, some of the more die-hard Iraqi fighters fell back to Fallujah, but were ultimately flushed out by British forces by May 19.

Fending off Iraqi attackers along the Euphrates River and German and Italian air force contingents dispatched to Iraq, British forces advanced on Baghdad, surrounding it on May 28. The British fed Rashid Ali false intelligence of overwhelming British strength which spurred him to flee, and on June 1 re-established the previous pro-British regime of Nuri as-Said.

On June 2, anti-Jewish riots erupted with all the attendant looting, etc. Unlike 2003, the British adopted a particularly draconian curfew policy, 187 curfew-breakers were killed on sight, and the riots ended, but not before hundreds of Iraqi Jews were slaughtered and thousands injured by Iraqis inflamed by Nazi and jihadist propaganda.

As today, Syria and Iran figured heavily in events in neighboring Iraq. Days after Britain’s victory in Iraq, British and Free French forces attacked the Vichy French colonial government of Syria and Lebanon, and in July established British rule for the duration of the war, to preclude those nations becoming an Axis foothold in the region. In August, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran and by September replaced the Nazi-sympathizing Shah with an Ally-supporter, guaranteeing Iran’s oil to the Allies and ensuring a physical link between British assets and the Soviet Union.

While the ultimate objective in 1941 was “to get a friendly Government set up in Baghdad,” today the mission is the sweeping democratic reformation of the country, in the hope that this will be a more permanent “fix”, the first of further “democratic dominoes” in the Middle East, and the final English-speaking military intervention in Iraq.

Andrew W. Smith, Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia and Tulsa, Oklahoma

Published in The Halifax Chronicle-Herald