Word: basra
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...British were beating the Iraqi. With reinforcements newly arrived at Basra they were breaking up troop concentrations, destroying the Iraq Air Force. But the British had not yet pacified the country-and Iraq's Defense Minister Naci Cevket was in Ankara, waiting to have a word with Franz von Papen...
...days before Germany's Balkan campaign, a pro-German Arab nationalist, Seyid Rashid Ali El-Gailani, overthrew five-year-old Monarch Feisal II's pro-British Regent. Because of the threat implicit in this coup, the British sent 1,200 troops to Basra, Iraq's main port, at the head of the Persian Gulf. El-Gailani acquiesced in the landing and publicly subscribed to the 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty of Alliance which justified it ("The aid of . . . Iraq in the event of war or the imminent menace of war will consist in . . . use of railways, rivers, ports...
...fields where they had been established under the treaty for years: Habbania, on the west bank of the Euphrates, 65 miles from Bagdad, a huge airdrome with cantonments for about 5,000 men, but equipped only with small guns and some 50 antique biplanes; and Shaibah, near Basra, basing a bomber squadron and an armored-car section...
...heights, where they dug trenches, placed artillery and opened fire point-blank on the Habbania field. The British, though badly outnumbered, replied. The Iraqi claimed destroying 26 planes on the ground, but other planes took off and bombed the Iraqi guns. The same day the British in Basra warned the Iraqi troops there to withdraw. They agreed to, but did not. The British seized the Basra airport, dock area and power station. This week the British began a systematic bombing of Iraqi airports, claimed to have destroyed most of the Iraq Air Force...
...TIME, April 21), Britain's great fear was that the new Government would let Axis fifth columnists tamper with the Mosul-Haifa pipeline, through which flows part of Britain's oil. If El-Gailani had had any such ideas, the British moved too fast for him. Into Basra harbor last week unexpectedly steamed a British transport and unloaded British Imperial troops, probably from East Africa...