Word: gailani
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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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...
When Super-Nationalist Seyid Rashid El-Gailani this month took the Iraqi Premiership by coup d'état (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...
...British-Iraqi Treaty such an action is perfectly permissible "in the event of the imminent threat of war," and Premier El-Gailani, who had officially come out for the treaty (perhaps without thinking the British could spare the troops), knew it. Best move he could think of was to send a pro-British staff officer hastily to welcome the British commander...
Prompt was Couper El-Gailani's reply...
...week's end all was desperately tense along the Tigris and Euphrates. In Trans-Jordan's capital city of Amman, Prince Abdul Illah sulked, conferred with General Nuri Es-Said. In Bagdad, El-Gailani played a close-to-the-chest hand of international poker, King Feisal played in the palace gardens beside the Tigris, Sherif Sharaf read the Koran. In London a weary Foreign Office profanely hoped that, since Britain could spare none of her armed forces to police Iraq, a diplomatic miracle might come to pass in the able brain of Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, the new Ambassador...