At dawn on 30 April 1941 the garrison of the British air base at Habbaniya in Iraq, less than two thousand men, was surprised by the deployment of an Iraqi force on the surrounding heights. In all over a thousand men with artillery and armour, which would quickly increase almost tenfold. The culminating phase of what would be the Anglo-Iraqi War of 1941, which effectively began with the coup d'état on April 1st.
Relations between Great Britain and the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq (independent since 1932) had been deteriorating more or less rapidly, above all due to the fervent nationalism of a part of the Iraqi ruling class, fascinated by Nazi-fascist ideology and represented by figures such as the lawyer Rashid Ali El-Gailani (pictured below, right) who was appointed prime minister by the so-called Golden Square, a group of ultranationalist officers who took effective control of the country. Amin al-Husayni, wanted in the Mandate of Palestine for having started the Arab Revolt of 1936 and always committed to ideological support for every anti-British cause, had also taken refuge in Iraq.
German Ambassador Fritz Grobba, a fervent supporter of an alliance between Nazism and Islamic revolutionaries, tried in every way to bring support to the Iraqi putschists.
The British response to the regime change was not immediate, mainly because it lacked military resources and the war between North Africa and the Mediterranean was going badly enough to want to avoid adding a new commitment in the Middle East.
For some weeks relations continued ambiguously, on the basis of the Anglo-Iraqi treaty of 1930, while London and India pressed for action to re-establish the British position and Rashid Ali was mistakenly convinced that in an open clash he would have received immediate and direct German and Italian support.
On 19 April the first Anglo-Indian units landed at Basra meeting little resistance, a move that disoriented the Iraqi regime and left Berlin with the choice of whether to give concrete aid to the Golden Square or abandon it to the English reaction. On April 29, a second landing in Basra definitively put Rashid Ali in crisis, leading him to opt for a demonstrative action against Habbaniya, an RAF base near Baghdad where hundreds of English civilians who had fled the city had found refuge. In his intentions, the threat of a battle, which would have resulted in certain defeat and a probable massacre, would have forced the English to give in without a fight, also because the forces just landed in the south would never have arrived in time to bring relief to the besieged.
This psychological warfare might have worked if the Iraqi soldiers had been aware of the situation they were involved in and prepared to deal with it. On the contrary, many were convinced that it was an exercise or at most, as the government was certain, a show of force that would end with a surrender of the British forced into an indefensible position.
The reaction of the 39 pilots of Habbaniya, many in training (the base was home to the No. 4 Flying Training School transferred from Britain in 1939), and of the few hundred soldiers of the garrison was so brutal and unexpected that it left stunned the ten thousand Iraqis who could have overwhelmed the defenses of the camp, which nevertheless was hit by aircraft and artillery.
The continuous losses of vehicles, and especially of the already few pilots, were at least partially replaced and in the following days the attacks were no longer limited to the Iraqi forces in the vicinity, but struck throughout the region up to Fallujah and Baghdad, increasingly undermining the regime's morale. The airstrip continued to operate without interruption, also allowing the evacuation of civilians and wounded and the sending of ammunition with a precarious airlift from Basra.
After a week of fighting the besieging forces, shocked by the British reaction and left almost without supplies, began to retreat in what was a fatal defeat for Rashid Ali.
During the siege, every effort had been made to organize the sending of aid from Palestine and Transjordan, gathering the very few forces available in a march through the desert also hampered by the attacks of an Italian-German air force that finally arrived, but so reduced as to be of no effect. The reinforcements reached Habbaniya almost two weeks after the siege had failed, forming the nucleus of the British counteroffensive that met a determined, but now belated, Iraqi reaction.
By the end of May, Fallujah and Baghdad fell, with the return of the legitimate regent to the throne; the embassies where European citizens had found refuge were made safe. In the power vacuum between the flight of Rashid Ali's government to Iran and the restoration of the previous institutions, violence and looting devastated the city, especially in the Jewish quarter, with a pogrom that killed or wounded a thousand people. In the first week of June, Kirkuk and Mosul in the north were taken, bringing the entire country back under control.
Following the success in Iraq, the invasion of Vichy French possessions in Syria and Lebanon began almost immediately. Despite fierce Franco-Arab resistance, which inflicted painful losses on the British, Damascus and Beirut fell by the beginning of July, wiping out any remaining organized pro-Nazi presence in the Middle East. Between August and September it was Iran's turn, the last in the Gulf area to maintain a position that was too unbalanced towards Germany, which was occupied in concert with the Soviets who had meanwhile entered the war.
It is difficult to imagine how the Middle Eastern phase of the conflict would have continued if Habbaniya had been surrendered without resistance. This would have dealt a perhaps irreparable blow to British prestige in the region, at a time when Erwin Rommel was advancing unopposed towards Egypt, with unforeseeable consequences.
The government's determination not to concede anything to Rashid Ali, who had believed himself to be in the ideal position to obtain a political compromise, and the tenacity of the garrison soldiers (mostly local recruits of Assyrian origin) prevented Iraq from being handed over to the Axis and laid the foundation for a domino effect in neighboring countries. All the major perpetrators of the coup managed to escape - among those arrested was Khairallah Talfah, Saddam Hussein's uncle who would be appointed governor of Baghdad by his nephew in 1979.
The failed and tragic bluff of the Golden Square to open the heart of the Middle East to the Third Reich It remains one of the least remembered critical moments of the Second World War and demonstrates how a seemingly hopeless situation can be overturned by unyielding resolve..
Photo: web
