Word: gailani
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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 the British last week notified Iraq of their intention to land reinforcements, Rashid El-Gailani objected on the grounds that it would be contrary to the treaty until the first 1,200 had passed through and out of Iraq. The British disagreed, charged that El-Gailani himself had violated the treaty by not granting full use of communications and airfields. The British were confined to two 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...
...Gailani's answer to the British was to send a concentration of Iraqi troops to the heights threatening Habbania airport, with an ultimatum to the British to cease all operations there. British Ambassador Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, a six-foot-four, big-boned, two-fisted runner, boxer and marksman who has had 35 years' experience in the Near East, replied that the continued presence of the Iraqi concentration at Habbania "might lead to an unfortunate incident...
...Kinahan and other British diplomats had no idea what an understatement "unfortunate incident" was. El-Gailani's reply to Sir Kinahan's warning was to send more troops to the 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...
There is probably nothing Adolf Hitler would like so much as to be called in to be the savior of Islam. Last week he got his first bid. According to Rome reports, Seyid Rashid Ali El-Gailani asked him, through the mediation of Italian Minister Luigi Gabbrielli, to come and save Iraq. In a desperate effort to stave off the Near East crisis, Turkey offered to mediate the undeclared war, but Turkey was fast being pulled out of its pro-British orientation, and the British, mistrusting Moslem mediation of a Moslem vexation, turned the offer down. If the Iraq Incident...