GOLDEN SQUARE

Name given to the four ex-sharifian, pan-Arab Iraqi army officers whose anti-British, pro-Axis politics led to the Rashid Ali coup of 1941 and the war with Britain that followed.

The original "Four" included the leader, Salah alDin al-Sabbagh, and Kamil Shabib, Fahmi Saʿid, and Mahmud Salman. They organized after the 1936 Bakr Sidqi coup and then joined with three other officers, Aziz Yamulki, Husayn Fawzi, and Amin al-Umari, to form a military opposition bloc to the government. Jamil al-Midfaʿi's government in 1938 tried to transfer the officers out of Baghdad, but succeeded only in making them more politically active.

The officers supported the goals of the Jerusalem mufti (chief Muslim jurist), Hajj Amin alHusayni, who arrived in Baghdad and solicited Germany's help to achieve total Iraqi independence from Britain and the pan-Arab goal of Arab unity of the Fertile Crescent. They opposed Prime Minister Nuri al-Saʿid's severance of relations with Germany in 1939. In 1940 and 1941, the officers and the mufti were in contact with the Japanese and the Italians through their missions in Baghdad and supported Rashid Ali al-Kaylani's government (31 March 1940 to 31 January 1941) as the British pressured Iraq to declare war on Germany. When Rashid Ali resigned, the pro-British regent, Abd al-Ilah, asked General Taha al-Hashimi, who had worked with the Four, to form a government, thinking that he could control the generals. But Taha's weakness and the attempt by the regent to transfer Kamil Shabib out of the capital led them, in collusion with the mufti, to take control of the government in April 1941, with Rashid Ali again as the prime minister.

At the end of the abortive war against Britain in May 1941, the Four fled but were later caught and executed.

See also abd al-ilah ibn ali; fertile crescent; hashimi, taha al-; kaylani, rashid ali al-; midfaʿi, jamil al-; sabbagh, salah al-din al-.

Bibliography

Tarbush, Mohammad A. The Role of the Military in Politics: A Case Study of Iraq to 1941. London and Boston: Kegan Paul, 1982.

reeva s. simon