Word: basra
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...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...
...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...
This month Regent Prince Abdul Illah went on vacation to Basra after the Parliament recessed. Hardly had he left Bagdad when things began...
Fulminating in Basra, Prince Abdul IIlah's first thought was to appeal to the benevolently watchful British Government. To all Iraq, and most particularly London and Cairo, the Regent broadcast word that El-Gailani and a small group of Army officers had been seduced by Axis fifth columnists,* were trying to separate Britain from 4,000,000 tons of oil per annum and the all-important friendship of the Arab world...
...despair, Prince Abdul Illah tried the last shot in his locker, a counter-coup which was promptly squelched by the Basra garrison, then lit out for the sanctuary of Trans-Jordan in an R.A.F. plane...