Word: gailani
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1941-1941
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...provinces and were in hiding. It was reported that the Allies would round them up, send them to India and Siberia. Also allegedly somewhere in Iran was explosion-whiskered Haj Amin El-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who engineered Arab riots in Palestine, helped Seyid Rashid Ali El-Gailani stage his revolt in Iraq. The British had him paged...
Britain and Russia hoped the trickle would soon swell to a torrent and wash away their apprehensions. Prime British fear is of a back stab like the Nazi-inspired revolt in Iraq last spring of Rashid Ali El-Gailani. For at almost every compass point from Teheran, the Shah's capital, the Russo-British positions are potentially vulnerable...
...sadder than Vichy's eclipse in the Levant might have been the fate of all British Middle East defense had not Syria been taken. Beginning with the Iraq revolt last spring when they used Syrian bases to fly aid to Rashid Ali El-Gailani, the Germans had increasingly filtered into the country. If the Axis had got control of Syria the British Middle East Command might as well have folded its tents and gone home...
...which landed in the desert behind the Iraqi, cutting off their retreat to Bagdad. By week's end, with the help of Curtiss P-40 Tomahawks (fighters) and Martin 1675 (bombers), the British had the situation well enough in hand so that pro-Axis Premier Rashid Ali El-Gailani and his Defense Minister were reported to have requested visas to flee to Turkey. Incidentally, in the first dogfight between a Curtiss P-40 and a Messerschmitt, the German was shot down...
...British were not overly sanguine. They thought El-Gailani's troops might withdraw to the north of Iraq, to the area which makes hot and barren Iraq so worthy of a scrap: the oil fields around Mosul. Last week London reported that strong forces of German airborne troops, complemented with bombers and fighters, had made their way across Syria and were well established in the oil-bearing area...