The Report
of the Iraq Inquiry
52.
King Feisal
died in 1933. He was succeeded by his son,
twenty-one-year-old
King Ghazi.
Three years later General Bakr Sidqi – a Kurd, a former officer
(like
Nuri Said)
in the Arab Revolt, and a graduate of a British Staff College,
seized power in
Baghdad. In
the course of the coup, Nuri Said’s brother-in-law, the Minister of
Defence,
was killed.
Nuri fled for safety to the British Embassy in Baghdad, and
eventually
reached
Britain.
53.
Nationalists
in the army resented General Sidqi because of his Kurdish
background,
and because
he encouraged Kurds to join the army. The Shia could not forgive
his brutal
suppression
of a Shia revolt in 1936. In 1937 General Sidqi was murdered by a
group of
army
officers.
54.
In 1937, King
Ghazi began publicly advocating that Iraq annex Kuwait,
and
denouncing
British influence in the Middle East, under pressure from German
diplomats
and Nazi
Party representatives in Baghdad. Even the return of Nuri Said at
the end of
1938 from
London – where he had served for a year as Iraq’s Ambassador to
Britain –
could not
curb anti-British propaganda, although, to counter it, at the
recommendation of
the British
Ambassador to Iraq, Sir Archibald Clerk-Kerr, funds were made
available to
the British
Council in Iraq to help cover the cost of Iraqi students talking
examinations
for British
universities, and bursaries for their books.11
55.
In April 1939,
King Ghazi was killed in a car accident. His four-year-old
son,
King Feisal
II, came to the throne, with one of his uncles, Abdul Illah, as
Regent.
In Mosul,
after claims that King Ghazi had been murdered by the British, a
mob
broke into
the British Consulate, dragged out the consul and stoned him to
death.
56.
On the
outbreak of war in September 1939, Nuri Said broke off relations
with
Germany.
For the first eighteen months of the war, while refusing British
requests to
declare war
on Germany and Italy, he ensured that Iraq was an essential
overland and
air link in
Britain’s chain of defence from Egypt to India. On 31 March 1941,
however,
Nuri Said
was forced to resign by a Rashid Ali al-Gaylani. On April 1 the
Regent fled
from
Baghdad, and two days later Rashid Ali became Prime
Minister.
57.
A Sunni whose
family traced their ancestry back to Mohammed, and a lawyer
by
training,
Rashid Ali had been Minister of Justice in 1924 in Iraq’s first
government. In
1930 he had
rejected Nuri Said’s Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, and called for an end to
the British
connection.
He was Prime Minister of Iraq from March to November 1933 and
again
from March
1940 to January 1941, when he was dismissed by the Regent for
refusing
to allow
British troops to transit Iraq, and for entering into negotiations
with Germany.
58.
On becoming
Prime Minister for the third time, Rashid Ali seized control of
all
the main
cities except Basra, restored the amicable relations between Iraq
and
11
Sir
Archibald Clark-Kerr, Baghdad, 27 December 1937: Foreign Office
papers, FO 395/587.
230