layyin1137

Alhamdulillah I have had some articles published by TRTWorld recently. This is a crosspost of the most recent one. Note that this blog contains the hyperlinks for the article, which I hastily neglected to send the editors at the time.

https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/leverage-for-a-long-shot-in-afghanistan-29900

Leverage for a long shot
Ibrahim Moiz
17 September 2019
TRTWorld

There is more to the scuppering of peace talks between the Taliban and the US than just continued fighting between the two sides.
Donald Trump announced the collapse of the talks with the Afghan Taliban insurgency in typical fashion: with a bombastic announcement of dubious merit on his favoured social media platform.
As he told it, he had displayed magnanimity in offering the Taliban a trip to his resort at Camp David, the site of many a historic American diplomatic closer; they, in turn, had dishonestly attempted to strengthen their position by claiming an attack at Kabul, which slew an American soldier and forced Trump, the arch-patriot, to scrap the talks.
As with everything Trump says, this is rather less than the whole truth: a summary of Afghanistan over the past year shows that not only had the Taliban continued fighting, but so had the United States and its client in Kabul.
Rather than any specific malfeasance among a sea of continued provocations on both sides, it was probably the vulnerability of Kabul’s government that prompted the United States to withdraw from a deal in which they never had real interest.
It is unfortunate that America’s political discourse is so self-absorbed, a quality that would be less objectionable were Washington not so deeply embroiled in so many countries abroad.
This same self-absorption saw even political opposition and alternative media – including such celebrity iconoclasts as Mehdi Hasan – attack Trump not for the perennial contradictions and slow-burning myopia of what is now America’s longest war.
Instead it was for the “offensive” temerity of having contemplated ending that war by inviting the “loathsome” Taliban to negotiate in the United States on the eighteenth anniversary of the September 2001 attack to which they had no link.
Such critics needn’t be concerned; the talks, notwithstanding the sincerity of their organisers, were never terribly serious.
A summary look at the record of the past year shows that both the Taliban on one side and the government, quietly but decisively backed by American airpower, on the other, continued to fight long before an American soldier had the misfortune of joining the thousands of Afghans killed.
Bolstered and supplied by the United States and its allies for nearly two decades, the Afghan government had no compunctions about admitting, in its protests against the talks, that they would put its survival in doubt. Such a humiliating admission of dependency even as Afghanistan marks its hundredth anniversary of independence against British suzerainty underscores Kabul’s vulnerability.
Rather than losing his soldier, it is probable that Trump’s mind was made up a few days earlier, when the insurgents breached three provincial capitals – Farah, Kunduz, and Pulli Khumri– at about the same time.

Strengthening position
Trump was correct that such attacks marked Taliban attempts to strengthen their position, but the argument goes both ways. No less than the Taliban attacks, the Afghan government has continued to fight and American assistance has been of paramount importance – in particular, since their original mission ended in 2014, American airpowerAmerican airpowerAmerican airpower. Here there is a historical echo: much as the Soviet Union’s withdrawal twenty-five years earlier did not preclude a ferocious bombardment to bolster its Afghan client against the insurgency of the period, so American airpower has been decisive in shoring up the current Afghan regime.
Just as the Taliban have continued to fight on the ground even after the talks, so have the Americans continued to pound them from the air. This without counting the supporting role of mercenaries such as the twenty-thousand troops of Trump’s friend Erik Prince, whose role, being private soldiers, remains shrouded in secret.
It has additionally been suggested that the Taliban are split: that their negotiators abroad have little connection and thus control with field commanders on the ground.
This again is very questionable; while such splits have often occurred in insurgent groups, it has largely been offset in this case by the fact that the Taliban negotiators were mostly top-level military leaders.
They include Abdul-Ghani Baradar Abdul-Ghani Baradar Abdul-Ghani Baradar and the top-level Taliban prisoners released by the United States in 2014 – others – such as emirate-period military commander Fazil MazlumyarFazil MazlumyarFazil Mazlumyar – retained their influence in the field despite not having participated in the insurgency.
Even strictly diplomatic Taliban officials, such as the negotiation teams’ leader Abdul-Salam Hanafi, were only recently involved in coordinating events on the field. The diplomatic-military fissures that have often crippled insurgent groups do not appear to apply here; there appears to be overwhelming coordination between the Taliban’s field command and their representatives abroad.
The Taliban’s preferred powerplay since 2014 has been the quick takeover of provincial capitals, much like the assault that preceded Trump’s withdrawal in early September. Since 2015-16, when Taliban commander Abdul-Salam Baryalai occupied Kunduz twice in as many years, American airpower was key to stopping these powerplays; on both occasions it played the major role in evicting Abdul-Salam, killing him shortly thereafter.
Since then, the Taliban preferred to only briefly breach capitals, withdrawing after having made their point. This happened in the runup to the 2018 talks, when Farah and Ghazni’s eponymous capitals were briefly occupied, and resumed a year later to end the talks.
Again, however, escalation cuts both ways: even as the talks were underway, government forces backed by often destructive American airpower mounted repeated sweeps in the countryside, whose victims were rather less easily identified than the insurgents’ victims in Kabul.
Pitfalls of the military option
The most recent sweep coincided with the Taliban assault, when government forces ploughed into Badakhshan Province, fighting their way to the long-held Taliban base in Warduj and claiming to have killed its commander, Qari Fasihuddin.
Northwest Afghanistan has similarly been a perennial battleground, remote from the rest of Afghanistan and hence only rarely noticed abroad; one rare exception occurred in spring, when a Taliban attack captained by Maulavi Abdul-Karim drove government troops across the border into Turkmenistan.
The other method of increasing bargaining strength, assassination, has similarly been employed by both sides, with the United States again playing a key role in the government side.
Just prior to the talks, a Taliban suicide attack spectacularly wiped out the government’s southern command: militia commanders Abdul-Raziq Khan of Kandahar and Abdul-Jabbar Qahraman of Helmand, as well as the region’s respective commanders for the army and intelligence, Zalmay Wesa and Abdul-Mumin Hasankhail.
Not only were assassinations of the conventional sort attempted since – killing the Taliban’s Pakistani patriarch, preacher-cum-politician Samiul-Haq Akaurwi, and narrowly missing Taliban emir Hibatullah Akhundzada – but so were airstrikes.
In the year since, the experienced Taliban command in the region has also been eliminated by airstrike: this includes Abdul-Mannan Abdul-Rahim for Helmand, Fazalur-Rahman Mashar for Farah, and Taliban military commander Ibrahim Sadar.
Several more Taliban commanders at provincial or above level have been claimed killed with American assistance in this period, though the frequency with which claims are wrongly made – Abdul-Rahim was claimed killed some dozen times before he was finally nabbed – means these cannot be confirmed.
In short, not only has the government mirrored the Taliban attacks but the United States, ostensibly the honest negotiator to the Taliban’s tricksters, has played a key role.

The apparent insincerity with which the talks have been pursued begs the question as to why they occurred in the first place. The answer is fairly self-evident for the Taliban, whose main hurdle to power since the 1990s was their lack of international recognition.
Drawing the United States to the negotiations table could potentially undermine its support for a Kabul regime the insurgents see as foreign-installed at their expense and thus illegitimate; the point of the talks was to weaken the government, against whom the harder military option was simultaneously pursued.
For Washington the answer appears to lie in the geopolitics of its initial intervention – talk of terrorism and selectively remembered human rights aside, the war on terror gave the United States not only a foothold but the lead in a securitised Central Asian collaboration involving most regional countries.

Russian and US interests

It is worth noting that both the coalition that the United States helped to power in Afghanistan during 2001, as well as the accompanying post-Soviet dictatorships in Central Asia, were the same actors supported by Russia in the 1990s and 2000s.
Much as Russia’s 2015 campaign in Syria was calculated to displace the United States as the regional powerbroker, so the American campaign in Afghanistan had been designed to place America at the centre of the post-Soviet Central Asia.
This worked amicably for years given Russia’s similar security concerns about regional “radical Islam” – back in the days of Vladimir Putin’s bonhomie with George Bush – but the growing rift between the powers transformed their Central Asian collaboration into a competition.
It is no coincidence that Zalmay Khalilzad first proceeded to meet the Taliban only days after Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov set the ball rolling; it is similarly to play off this angle that the Taliban, whose enmity with Russia predates its enmity with the United States, nonetheless responded to the talks’ collapse with a trip to Moscow.
For Washington, the talks appear to have been more an exercise in limiting Russian brokerage than a sincere settlement. The most recent Taliban attacks are as good a pretext as any to put this time-buying charade to bed.

Many a conflict in Afghanistan, and a sanctions round

Bism Allah

Copyright Ibrahim Moiz
13 November 2018

It is strange that the western third of Afghanistan, whose territory is both strategic and historic – see the great cities Herat and Zaranj and the timeworn Badghis plain – is almost studiously ignored or neglected in most literature on the country. The neglect is partly understandable – the west borders Turkmenistan and Iran, which has in recent decades been rather less accessible to outsiders than Afghanistan’s other neighbours, and nor does it really feature the sorts of fashionable radicals – Al-Qaeda and their fellow travelers – as does the east. Nonetheless the west has been an epicenter of momentous goings-on for years, and in particular the revamped Taliban insurgency has especially laid down stronger roots here than may have been originally expected by those who considered it a peculiarly Pashtun phenomenon. At the start of November 2018, a United States missive slapping sanctions on seven mostly important Taliban commanders brought the west back into focus. Together with these commanders, who shall be further discussed below, the sanction – which was backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – targeted the Iranian paramilitary officers Ebrahim Ouhadi and Esmail Razavi, who were described as liaisons in a growing nexus with the Taliban insurgency[i]. This article will examine the history and substance of such accusations. It focuses on three intertwined factors – Tehran’s role in Afghanistan; Taliban dispute; and the politicization that should caution against committing too strongly to such claims.

Tehran and the Taliban: A troubled timeline

It is somewhat ironic that today Tehran stands accused of collaboration with the Taliban insurgency by Riyadh and Abu Dhabi: historically, quite the opposite was true. In the 1990s Tehran was a major opponent of the Taliban emirate, funding, arming, and whipping together combination after combination of militia commanders [ii] in an attempt to thwart a movement it claimed – as would the United States and the NATO-installed regime in Kabul soon enough – was simply a puppet of Pakistani military intelligence. Along with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were the only governments that recognized an internationally beleaguered emirate whose prowess on the ground was stymied by its diplomatic isolation. Indeed, while Riyadh and Abu Dhabi soon withdrew their recognition during the United States’ 2001 invasion, Tehran went further: its praetorian commander Rahim Safavi actually helped oust the emirate from Herat in November 2001, his forces to all purposes fighting alongside the same Great Satan that he was so fond of verbally lashing. Nor was this dissonance limited to Safavi: Iranian generalissimo Ghassem Soleimany, soon to be known as the architect of Iranian expansionism in the region, spearled collaboration with the United States[iii]. Afghan militias and leaders who built relations with Washington – most famously their Shia coreligionists in the Hazara Wahdat group, but also the largely Tajik commanders who coopted Afghan security and military portfolios in the immediate aftermath of the 2001 conquest – were already close to Iran and had been since at least 1995.

Iran’s overall role in Afghanistan is worth remembering. As with most Muslim governments, Tehran backed the mujahidin in the 1980s, but several factors – its debilitating and costly war with Iraq foremost – prevented it from committing the same levels of support as did Pakistan. Moreover, the main liaison with the mujahidin, Hossein Montazeri, was purged in 1988-89, and it is unclear that his policy was continued. Tehran did persuade several Hazara factions, with whom it inevitably had the warmest if not closest relations, into forming the Wahdat faction in 1989, yet sect was not necessarily a determinist in its relations: most Hazara factions were ensconced in mountainous central Afghanistan, a considerable distance from Iran. And indeed in 1992-95 Tehran abstained from supporting Wahdat’s revolt against the stopgap Afghan “ruler”, Burhanuddin Rabbani, a revolt that was backed by a former client-turned-opponent of Tehran, Hizb emir Gulbadin Hikmatyar. The Sunni leader Hikmatyar had in the early 1980s successfully persuaded Tehran to expel a Shia leader seen as pro-West, Asif Muhsini; yet by the middle 1990s the tables had turned, as Iran backed Rabbani, and Muhsini, against the Wahdat-Hizb revolt. It was not until both Wahdat and Hizb joined the Northern Alliance against the Taliban emirate that they were returned to Iran’s favour – yet when Hikmatyar opposed the 2001 invasion, he was unceremoniously expelled from Iran.

This topsy-turvy history indicates Iran’s tactical, rather than strategic, moves on a national level in Afghanistan, where even shared Shia sect is not a given clincher. At a regional level, it tended to back what can be tentatively described as “centrifugal” actors in western and central Afghanistan. The earliest Hazara mujahidin shura in central Afghanistan faced several challenges from Khomeneist opponents, while in western Afghanistan Iran simply hedged its bets. The best bet among these was the largely autonomous mujahidin commander Ismail Khan, an army defector formally linked with Rabbani’s Jamiat faction who became the preeminent regional commander in the late 1980s and the self-styled emir of a practical city-state in Herat during the middle 1990s. The main factor appears to have been Ismail’s control over Herat, a city linked economically and culturally to Iran, and the trade routes in western Afghanistan. Despite early cordiality, he had been ousted in 1995 after a major campaign against the Taliban emirate and captured in 1997, languishing in prison until a spectacular jailbreak in 2000. Ismail returned at the helm of a loose coalition of commanders in 2001 and promptly reassumed his old position.

This time, however, Ismail faced major challenges. His jealous autonomy caused alarm in the Nato-backed Afghan state, as did his social conservatism – not too different to the ousted Taliban emirate – which was doubly condemned in this period, and his systemic autocratic rule. He was also perceived, not entirely correctly, as Iran’s man, by his rivals in Kabul – among them the finance minister Ashraf Ghani, who opposed the fact that Ismail continued to collect funds in the west on his own behalf rather than Kabul’s. In 2003-04, this culminated in a major conflict between Ismail and various pro-Kabul competitors that eventually resulted in the Herat emir’s ouster. What is relevant to this article is that one such competitor was the Shindand-based Nurzai Pashtun chieftain Amanullah Khan, who Ismail claimed was backed by Hamid Karzai’s Nurzai lieutenant in the tribal affairs ministry, Muhammad Arif[iv]. Amanullah’s enmity with Ismail did not pay off, for he was mysteriously killed at about the same time as the Herat emir was ousted from power in autumn 2004. His son, Javaid Nangialai, soon joined the Taliban insurgency – though he was always autonomous from actual Taliban control, operating more as a vassal during a period when the Taliban insurgency had not yet set up strong roots in the west.

Panjpai competition in the Taliban insurgency

The Nurzai clan in western Afghanistan had always been a relatively influential and independent actor. The Taliban emirate had been careful to promote Nurzai commanders in Herat[v], and the western insurgency, which came into its own by 2007, featured several Nurzai commanders – among them Abdul-Mannan Niazi, an emirate-period governor, and Bazmuhammad Harith, a major commander in Farah Province, as well as Nangialai – who were largely independent of the Taliban command structure. In summer 2011, Harith imprisoned the Taliban military second-in-command, Qari Ismail Andar, who had tried to implement central control over the western Nurzai. But the Taliban military commander, Abdul-Qayum Zakir, declined to act – possibly because his close collaborator, Taliban spymaster Hafiz Abdul-Majeed, came from the Nurzai (albeit a different section)[vi]; in 2012, Zakir and Abdul-Majeed had Ismail executed for allegedly negotiating with Kabul without permission[vii]. The Nurzai were hardly a homogenous force – a leader such as Abdul-Majeed, from the Spin Boldak border with Pakistan far to the east, was much closer to the Taliban central command than his western counterparts – but they were not a factor to be ignored.

While clan should not be portrayed as a deterministic factor in Taliban spats, competition in the insurgency was often portrayed tactically in clan terms featuring three clans in particular from the so-called “Panjpai” section of the Durrani confederation: the Alizai, Ishaqzai, and Nurzai clans. The Alizai commander Zakir was engaged in a barely concealed power struggle with the Ishaqzai commander Akhtar Mansoor, then the insurgency’s deputy leader and later its emir during 2015-16. This was not a periphery-versus-centre conflict, as both belonged to the Taliban core, but rather competition over that core. Akhtar had promoted to the Taliban financier’s position another Ishaqzai leader, Gulagha Hidayatullah; while this was perhaps related to both Hidayatullah’s administrative skills and the fact that both were lifelong confidantes to the Taliban emir Umar Mujahid, many competitors to these two ambitious leaders began to murmur darkly about Ishaqzai domination. These included Zakir’s former deputy and longtime collaborator, Abdul-Rauf Khadim, who came from the same Helmand Alizai background as Zakir and who indeed broke away from the insurgency outright; he would later join Daaish and try to mount a revolt in southern Afghanistan against both Zakir and Mansoor.[viii]
Khadim was replaced with Sadar Ibrahim, another Alizai commander from Helmand who was nonetheless seen, rightly or wrongly, as Akhtar’s lieutenant insofar as he could pose a challenge to Zakir; this impression was reinforced when in 2014 Akhtar politely but firmly replaced Zakir, for “health reasons”, with Sadar. Sadar had only recently been released from captivity in Pakistan, as had another Akhtar lieutenant, Ishaqzai commander Abdul-Mannan Abdul-Rahim, who quickly reoccupied the Helmand command he had held during the peak of the anti-British campaign in the late 2000s[ix]. An Alizai member of the Quetta shura, Naeem Baraikh – who had commanded southern Helmand against the British and American forces while Abdul-Rahim captained northern Helmand – by contrast reportedly backed Zakir, and possibly facilitated Zakir’s links with Iran – though evidence to this effect is rather sketchy and anecdotal.[x]

 

At any rate Zakir’s expected conflict with Akhtar never really transpired. It took considerable mediation by a “neutral” Nurzai commander, Matiullah Nanai, to reconcile Zakir with Akhtar by 2015[xi], probably partly because both were threatened by Khadim’s budding Daaish revolt. As it happened, this revolt waned quite meekly in 2015 after an airstrike slew Khadim, though Daaish remained a bigger threat in eastern Afghanistan. Zakir’s mood was hardly helped when that summer the Afghan regime leaked that the long-missing emir Umar – to whom Akhtar and Hidayatullah had both enjoyed near-exclusive access – had been deceased for two years and when Akhtar promptly announced and won a snap election, from where Zakir stormed out in pique after the result was confirmed.[xii]

Zakir, and many – perhaps most – senior Taliban leaders resented Akhtar’s election, and briefly backed Umar’s son, Muhammad Yaqub, and brother Abdul-Mannan Umari as possible alternatives. By the end of the summer, however, both Yaqub and Umari confirmed their allegiance to Mansoor in order to preempt conflict, whereupon most dissidents sullenly accepted the status quo or “retired”[xiii]. This was not the case with one senior member of the Quetta shura, however. Rasoul Mujahid was a Nurzai commander who had served as a governor in western Afghanistan during the emirate, and among the few Quetta shura members with strong contacts in the west. He drew a dramatic narrative where the dastardly Akhtar had not only usurped the emir’s position, but secretly murdered Umar. This was hardly a convincing tale, and it is perhaps for this reason that most other dissident leaders stayed away, but it was a good enough pretext for various “centrifugal” fronts in Afghanistan – most notably at Zabul and at Herat – to latch onto Rasoul’s bandwagon. His collaborators included the western Nurzai commanders Abdul-Mannan Niazi, Bazmuhammad Harith, and Javaid Nangialai; from this group, Niazi was secretly backed by Kabul, and would soon enough take a government amnesty.

The Zabul mutiny, crushed in winter 2015 by Taliban loyalists, is beyond the scope of this article, but the Herat mutiny was led by Nangialai against the Taliban provincial second-in-command Abdul-Samad Farouqi. Given Iran’s history of backing centrifugal fronts in the west, Akhtar seems to have feared that they would back the western mutineers, which could potentially open up a vast front ranging from Nimrouz, where Rasoul enjoyed support, and Harith’s stronghold Farah to Herat Province where Niazi and Nangialai were based. In spring 2016, therefore, just days before the campaign commenced, he dispatched Sadar to negotiate with Tehran, building on the theme that the mainstream Taliban shura was a more reliable neighbour than the mutineers, especially with Daaish lurking in the region and looking for affiliates. The central thrust seems to be that Iran should not back the mutiny and should preferably back the Taliban. This argument seems to have persuaded Tehran, and Akhtar’s position was further strengthened by the fact that Pakistan meanwhile arrested Rasoul. Buoyed by this and the fact that Nangialai was taking a sharp battering against Farouqi, Akhtar visited Iran himself[xiv]; when he returned to Pakistan he was slain by a US airstrike, virtually the only one in Pakistan’s Balochistan province.

It was fortunate for the insurgency that Akhtar’s succession had been already determined in order to preempt a 2015-style conflict; he was replaced with his Nurzai deputy, Hibatullah Akhundzada, who as an unobtrusive and self-effacing preacher was far more palatable. Soon enough both the senior Taliban dissidents as well as many mutineers, including Harith, had announced their allegiance to Hibatullah; reports that the Helmand-based commanders Sadar and Abdul-Rahim have opposed Hibatullah are largely circular or shakily sourced[xv], and appear to reflect wishful thinking more than anything. With Rasoul, Harith, and Niazi ousted from the picture in different ways, the revolt had shrunk merely to Shindand, where Nangialai continues to fight doggedly to the present day, possibly with covert assistance from Kabul. Its official leader, Abdul-Rauf Arifi, is another Nurzai commander but from Spin Boldak, and with weak roots in the west. It still has nuisance value – the loyalist commander Farouqi was injured in combat against Nangialai in winter 2017 – but it appears now to be more among the burgeoning independent militias in Afghanistan rather than a genuine threat to the Taliban insurgency.

Politicized information

 

The sanctioned Taliban commanders in the November 2018 resolution include, in roughly descending order, military commander Ibrahim Sadar, former security commander Hafiz Abdul-Majeed Nurzai, military second-in-command Daud Muzammil, shura member Naeem Baraikh, Helmand commander Abdul-Mannan Abdul-Rahim, Herat second-in-command Abdul-Samad Farouqi, and one Abdul-Aziz Zamani. With the exception of Muzammil, an Ishaqzai commander who operates in Farah adjacent to Iran, and Zamani, who appears to be a mid-level liaison, we have encountered each commander in this tale, sometimes on different sides in inter-Taliban disputes.

This should reinforce the fact that while the reports that these commanders liaised with Iran are not baseless, they appear to be tactical and have been exaggerated for political purposes. Put bluntly, the West likes its villains in one camp, and its clients are quite aware of this and prone to exaggerate links between said villains. Much as every setback against the insurgency was once blamed on Pakistan, it is now commonplace to hear Afghan officials and government sources speak of an Iranian tryst with the Taliban, sometimes even tossing Russia into the mix – since after 2014 Russia is widely confirmed to be in competition with the West.

Yet both Iran and Russia have a long history of antipathy, or at best guarded hostility, with the Taliban group. To be sure, Russia has recently invited a regional delegation including Taliban emissaries to a conference, but this is more reflective of its desire to seize the momentum in prevailing trends than indicative of a tryst; the same can safely be said of Iran. In contrast to the Taliban link with Pakistan, which is deeply rooted and strategic, however, these links appear to have been purely tactical if not incidental. Had Sadar not visited Iran, for instance, it is perfectly plausible that Iran would have backed mutineers against the Taliban insurgency – much as they were (similarly anecdotally) rumoured to have attempted with Abdul-Qayum Zakir in 2015. Had Daaish not reared up in Afghanistan – a threat that Iran and Russia, like the West, are always happy to exaggerate – it is quite possible that Taliban diplomacy with Iran would not have worked.

Moreover Russian wariness of Sunni militancy towards its south, which has led it to pursue such merciless destruction in Syria, is hardly diminished. Much as Turkey has, building on shared suspicions of the West, tried to placate Russian forces in Syria and steer them away from outright destroying the Syrian mujahidin in Idlib, so has Pakistan energetically tried to reconcile Russia to the Taliban – but there is no concrete evidence as yet that this has worked or will work in the long run. Nor does it indicate strong pre-existing links (indeed the Taliban political department have fairly cordial diplomatic links with at least one major Syrian faction, Ahrarul-Sham, that Russia until very recently considered beyond the pale.) There is certainly greater evidence of Iran collaboration with the Taliban insurgency since 2016, but nothing to indicate that this is anything more, as with so many Iranian experiments in Afghanistan, than a tactical move.
Nonetheless, the Iranian claims – shaky though they are – have been seized upon by a Riyadh increasingly fearful of Iranian hegemony in the region, and an Abu Dhabi that is quite happy to enable its neighbour. It is also an attractive option because Riyadh’s links with the United States’ rightwing regime, as well as increasingly with Israel, are largely built on exaggerating Iranian influence. To be sure, Iranian influence – often very destructive, as in Iraq and Syria – is a threat to Saudi Arabia; and to be sure, exaggerated conspiracies are not the preserve of Riyadh and its enablers (see the ludicrous claims of Saudi collaboration with Daaish against Iran[xvi]). Nonetheless, the exaggerated, if not baseless, claims of an Iranian nexus with the Afghan insurgency say more about its authors than facts on the ground.

 

Appendices

 

Taliban Sanctionees; Biographies; and Evidence

Sadar Ibrahim. Mulla Sadar Muhammad Ibrahim Alizai served as Taliban military commander since 2014; he served as second-in-command in 2012-14. Sadar came from the Helmand Alizai clan and he lost a foot in the mujahidin campaign in the 1980s. An early Taliban member, he served as a field commander on the Bagram frontline during the emirate. He helped organize the insurgency but during 2006-07 Pakistan imprisoned him, only to release him in 2012-13 whereupon Akhtar Mansoor promoted him as second-in-command to Abdul-Qayum Zakir, whom he replaced in 2014. During 2016, Sadar negotiated with Iran. During October 2016, he captained an assault on Lashkargah together with Abdul-Mannan Abdul-Rahim. Sadar’s promotion by Akhtar has put him in that camp, but he largely seems to avoid shura politics. The basis is solid for his sanction given his role in the 2016 talks. Note: An airstrike slew Sadar during 2019.

Hafiz Abdul-Majeed. Hafiz Abdul-Majeed Nurzai served as Taliban security commander and a Quetta shura member during the 2000s. He had served at a mujahidin front – captained, incidentally, by Hamid Karzai’s Nurzai future minister Muhammad Arif – at Spin Boldak in Qandahar during the 1980s. An early Taliban member, he served as Qandahar sheriff during the emirate and conducted negotiations at the city during its 2001 siege; even after the city fell he fought on in the hospital and was later injured when he retreated to Pakistan whereupon he immediately organized insurgency, mainly in Spin Boldak’s Nurzai community. He reportedly opposed Akhtar Mansoor’s candicacy and he was affiliated with Akhtar’s competitor, Abdul-Qayum Zakir, as well as coming from the same community as Abdul-Rauf Arifi, who later participated in Rasoul Mujahid’s mutiny. However, he did not join the mutiny. The basis of this sanction is weak, though if Iran has actually backed Zakir in 2014-15 it is not impossible.

Daud Muzammil. Mulla Muhammad Daud Muzammil Ishaqzai served as Taliban second-in-command since 2018. He had formerly served as second-in-command to his Ishaqzai clansmate at Helmand Province, Abdul-Mannan Abdul-Rahim. During May 2018, Muzammil captained an assault on Farah city. He has taken up the insurgency command in this southwestern region, which borders Iran. The basis of the sanction is weak but plausible; given Farah and Helmand’s proximity, it is quite possible that he had contacts in Iran.

Naeem Baraikh. Mulla Muhammad Naeem Baraikh Alizai served as a Taliban shura member as well as on-off Helmand commander. He captained Taliban operations in southern Helmand against both the British and US expeditions in the 2000s and 2010s and as such was well-connected to contraband across the Pakistan and possibly Iranian border. He was close to Abdul-Qayum Zakir, though it is not certain if he supported Zakir against Akhtar Mansoor, to whom he had deputized at the aviation ministry during the emirate. If Zakir was indeed linked to Iran in 2014-15, then it is possible that Naeem was as well; nonetheless there is no solid evidence so the basis is weak if plausible.

Abdul-Mannan Abdul-Rahim. Mulla Muhammad Abdul-Mannan Abdul-Rahim Mansoori Akhund Ishaqzai served as Taliban Helmand commander in 2003-08 and then 2013 onwards. A Taliban colonel during the emirate, Abdul-Mannan captained Taliban operations largely in northern Helmand against the British army during the 2000s. He surrendered voluntarily to the Pakistani regime in 2008 and he was imprisoned until 2012-13, whereupon he reassumed the command in Helmand Province and has captained the Taliban insurgency’s increasing progress in that province. He may have been promoted to the shura as a result. Abdul-Mannan’s Ishaqzai clan has given rise to speculation that he is linked with Akhtar Mansoor, but otherwise he seems to have avoided shura politics. Abdul-Mannan’s various codenames have helped lead at least ten separate reports – the majority in 2007-08 – that he was killed, but finally the United States seems to have cottoned on. During October 2016, Abdul-Mannan’s increased campaigns around Lashkargah culminated in an assault on the city alongside Sadar Ibrahim. Given Helmand’s proximity with Iran and Abdul-Mannan’s reported proximity, the claim may hold, but there is no real evidence; he also operates in northern Helmand rather than the bordering south. The basis is therefore weak if plausible. Note: The United States finally slew Abdul-Mannan during December 2018; this time, the government photographed his corpse.

Abdul-Samad Farouqi. Mulla Abdul-Samad Farouqi – mispelled by the United States with typical rigour as Abdullah Samad Farouqi – served as Taliban Herat second-in-command, and probably the provincial commander in fact. He captained the Taliban campaign against the mutiny mounted by Javaid Nangialai in 2016. During December 2017, he was injured in this same on-off conflict and he was taken to Pakistan for treatment. The basis is likely given that it was the difficulty at this front that prompted Taliban negotiation with Tehran.

Abdul-Aziz Zamani. This is the only Taliban member on this list whom I do not know about and can not comment.

Citations to follow in sha Allah

 

[i] Thomas Joscelyn, “US and partner nations seek to disrupt Iran-Taliban nexus,” The Long War Journal, 23 October 2018. https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2018/10/us-and-partner-nations-seek-to-disrupt-iran-taliban-nexus.php; accessed 14 November 2018

 

[ii] Perhaps the best overview of this support comes in Antonio Giustozzi’s Empires of Mud: War and Warlords in Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Co Publishers, 2009).

[iii] Dexter Filkins, “The Shadow Commander,” New Yorker, 30 September 2013.

[iv] Empires.

[v] These included most prominently the onetime Herat corps commander Abdul-Salam Majruh, a Nurzai from Helmand; his relative distance from the Taliban movement proper – he was a Hizb member before joining the emirate – did not prevent his instatement, which even puzzled other Taliban leaders. See Mike Martin, An Intimate War: An oral history of the Helmand conflict, 1978-2012 (London: Hurst & Co, 2014); and Abdul-Salam Zaeef, My Life with the Taliban, tr. Alex Strick (London: Hurst & Co, 2010). Abdul-Salam, who was often mistaken with namesakes in the Taliban movement, was later killed in Helmand against the British campaign; Bill Roggio, “Afghan forces kill senior Taliban commander in Helmand,” The Long War Journal, 5 May 2009.

[vi] Ron Moreau, “Taliban feud: tribal rivalries, limited resources split commanders,” The Daily Beast, 17 August 2011, https://www.thedailybeast.com/taliban-feud-tribal-rivalries-limited-resources-splinter-commanders; accessed 14 November 2018. While the article represented a years-long tradition in Moreau’s confident over-optimism on the Taliban insurgency’s imminent collapse, its basic facts relevant to this paper are correct.

[vii] The Long War Journal, “Taliban leader confirms infighting and vows revenge, plots to kill Quetta shura leadership,” 12 May 2012, https://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2012/05/taliban_leader_confi.php. It should be noted that Ismail was publicly implicated by government sources that prompted his arrest, though it is not clear how factual the allegations against him were. Dean Nelson and Ben Farmer, “Taliban paid ‘protection money’ by Afghan government,” The Daily Telegraph, 16 April 2012.

[viii] The best source on Khadim appears in Borhan Osman, “The Shadows of ‘Islamic State’ in Afghanistan: what threat does it hold?”, Afghanistan Analysts Network, 12 February 2015; https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/the-shadows-of-islamic-state-in-afghanistan-what-threat-does-it-hold/; accessed 14 November 2018. Giustozzi’s The Islamic State in Khorasan: Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the New Central Asian Jihad (London: Hurst & Co, 2018).

[ix] Ron Moreau and Sami Yousafzai, “Freed Taliban prisoners in Pakistan and Afghanistan return to jihad,” The Daily Beast, 6 December 2013, https://www.thedailybeast.com/freed-taliban-prisoners-in-pakistan-and-afghanistan-return-to-jihad; accessed 14 November 2018.

[x] Giustozzi, Khorasan, is the only source that confirms links between Zakir and Baraikh on one hand and Iran on the other, though he claims that this was soon eclipsed by emergent links between Akhtar – and even more so his successor Hibatullah – and Iran. While his book is valuable in its insights on internal Daaish workings and particularly eastern Afghanistan, however, his analysis on southern and western Afghanistan lack the same rigour and are often based almost exclusively on interested anecdotal sources that sometimes contradict one another. For instance, he first alleges, based off what he himself admits are allegations, that Akhtar’s network enabled Daaish’s commander Khadim as a counterweight to an allegedly Iranian-backed Zakir, but ignores the fact that Khadim was far more hostile to Akhtar – whose Ishaqzai network was a major reason for Khadim’s defection – than he ever was to Zakir; he also ignores the fact that it was Akhtar’s lieutenant, Abdul-Mannan Abdul-Rahim, who captained the crackdown against Khadim in 2015. He portrays what was a conflict involving at least four power centres in southern Afghanistan – the networks of Akhtar and Zakir respectively, the Daaish front founded by Khadim, and the Afghan government’s loyalists, with both Pakistan and Iran lurking in the region – with by far the most significant violence taking place between Akhtar’s network and the government, both Zakir and Khadim relatively insignificant by 2015 – into a two-sided conflict pitting Khadim on various sides of the divide between Akhtar and Zakir.

[xi] Borhan Osman, “Taleban in Transition 2: Who is in charge now?”, Afghanistan Analysts Network, 22 June 2016, https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/taleban-in-transition-2-who-is-in-charge-of-the-taleban/; accessed 14 November 2018.

[xii] Syed Ibrahim Moiz. “Afghanistan: Finding peace amidst chaos,” Policy Perspectives 13, No 2 (2016): 131-47. doi:10.13169/polipers.13.2.0131.

[xiii] The “retirees” included senior Taliban members Tayeb Agha, who at until that point served as a “foreign minister” at the Qatar-based office; Hasan Rahmani, emirate-period Qandahar governor-general and a former mediator between Akhtar and Zakir; Abdul-Razzaq Akhundzada, emirate-period interior minister; Abdul-Rahman Zahid, emirate-period foreign minister; and the front commanders Saleem Haqqani, an emirate-period minister, and Abdul-Sattar Akhund. Hasan passed away in early 2016, but Abdul-Razzaq and Abdul-Sattar returned and announced their allegiance to Hibatullah Akhundzada in December 2016, while Zahid and Saleem did the same in November 2018.

[xiv] Fabrizio Foschini, “Under the Mountain: A pre-emptive Taleban spring offensive in Shindand,” Afghanistan Analysts Network, 20 April 2016, https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/under-the-mountain-a-pre-emptive-taleban-spring-offensive-in-shindand/; accessed 14 November 2018.

[xv] Many such reports seem to take the fact that Sadar and Abdul-Mannan operate in Helmand while Hibatullah is based outside Afghanistan, as sufficient proof of a split. Yet this ignores the fact that Sadar and Abdul-Mannan’s official area of responsibility is indeed Helmand, and that Hibatullah’s location away from the battlefield is simply continuation of the same policy that has been adopted since at least the late 2000s, when a number of senior Taliban leaders were slain in the battlefield. As with Giustozzi’s claims on Khadim, moreover, the sources are shaky and at times contradictory; some sources claim that the Helmand commanders are pro-Pakistan, others that they oppose Pakistan; some claim that they are pro-Iran, others anti-Iran. Giustozzi goes so far as to claim that Hibatullah has relocated to Mashhad, Iran, and set up a new shura there, but this is otherwise completely uncorroborated. The point is that such claims have to be taken with extreme caution, based as they are off both contradictory dichotomy and shaky sources. For an early example of such shoddy reportage, see Jon Boone and Sami Yousafzai, “Taliban facing financial crisis as civilian deaths deter donors,” The Guardian, 29 November 2016; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/afghan-taliban-facing-financial-crisis-as-civilian-deaths-deter-donors; accessed 14 November 2018.

[xvi] Antonio Giustozzi, “The Arab-Gulf connections of the Taliban,” in Pan-Islamic Connections: Transnational networks between South Asia and the Gulf, ed. Christophe Jaffrelot (London: Hurst & Co, 2017). Yet in Khorasan, Giustozzi instead claims that it was Qatar, not Saudi Arabia, that backed Daaish – again based off the verbal testimony of Daaish foot soldiers, hardly unimpeachable sources, and off logic that is questionable at best. It is unfortunate that Giustozzi’s recent work, particularly when dealing with Daaish and the international dimension of the conflict, lacks the rigour and comprehensive care of his earlier work.

Bism Allah

Iraq’s military regimes, 1958-68: the bumptious barracks of Baghdad

31 July 2018
Ibrahim Moiz

Fifty years ago this month, a new and particularly bloody period of Iraqi history began with an ironically bloodless coup by the Baath party that put to an end an exact ten years of military rule. The life and crimes of the Baath regime are infamous, but less well-known today is the decade of none-too-smooth military republicanism that preceded it. This article surveys the tumultuous history of military-ruled Iraq, dating from the bloody revolution of July 1958 that put an end to the Hashimi monarchy, through to the successful Baath takeover a decade later.

Background

The history of the modern Iraqi state dates from the aftermath of the First World War, when a revolt forced British Empire that had conquered this region from the Ottoman sultanate to cede some level of independence to their cheated client from the Arab Revolt, the Hashimi emir Faisal I bin Hussein. Having originally revolted against the Ottomans in the hopes of carving out an independent Hashimi principality based on the Levant, Faisal had been ousted from Damascus by Britain’s French allies in 1920, the same year that saw a major revolt – the first, and certainly most widespread, of many – erupt againt the British occupation in Iraq. The solution lay in Britain’s yielding to Faisal an Iraqi realm with limited independence. But in the pattern common to Arabian sheikhs in the colonial period, Faisal – however much he chafed under foreign domination – was forced to depend heavily on Britain, particularly when various smaller revolts erupted in Iraq’s peripheries among the northern Kurdish highlanders and the southern, mostly Shia Arab, lowlanders.

Iraq has often been described as an “artificial” polity, including as it did a diverse population whose communal interests overlapped its borders: the northern Kurds gravitated towards ethnic kinship in Iran and Turkey; the southern Arabs towards their neighbours in southwest Iran and the British-occupied Persian Gulf; and the largely Sunni Arab middle, the strongest holdover from the Ottoman period, linked to some extent with the Levant and the central Arabian peninsula. But this need not be oversimplified; rare is the polity that is not communally diverse, and rarer still the polity unaffected by its neighbours. Iraq was no less natural than most modern states, and its instability stemmed more from other factors.

Most relevant to this paper was the role of the army, a part holdover from the Ottoman period but with significant differences. As highlanders had largely enjoyed autonomy and lowland Shias had tended to shun conscription in a Sunni sultanate, the Ottoman army in Iraq overwhelmingly comprised Sunni lowlanders – mostly Arabs, but with a significant minority of Kurds, Turkmen, and Circassians. Only a minority had defected to the Arab Revolt, including a particularly shrewd, unscrupulous officer of Turkmen stock called Nuri Saeed, but it was left to them to build the Iraqi army. Moreover, many such defectors – though not Nuri, a firm friend of Britain – chafed against British domination. Whether from nationalism or religiosity – and contrary to popular revisionism, the two were difficult to separate at a time of domination by a European power – many officers, particularly the second-generation, resented the scheming, unstable, and easily exploited parliamentary politics in Iraq and saw a modernized, militarized state as the key to real independence.

Two particular dissident brands, which sometimes overlapped, were common in the army. These were what shall be called rightist transnationalism (often referred to by the Arabic word qawmia) here; popular among Sunni Arab officers in particular, these were partly influenced by pan-Islamist or pan-Arab currents, and tended to see union or federation among Arab states as the key to Iraqi independence; figures such as Amin Hussaini, the famous Palestinian mufti, were particularly influential in harnessing rightist energy. Another, initially only tacitly different, ideology was that of Iraqi statism (or watania), which stressed Iraq’s amity but clear independence from not only Britain but also her neighbours. What they both had in common was the idea of a postcolonial Iraq where the army played a strong role in a centralized state. Both brands, who had sympathizers and influencers in civilian political circles, competed for power with the dominant establishment during the coup-filled 1936-41 period. Two coups were particularly relevant to this article: the first coup in Iraq’s history, harnessed by Iraqi statists, was carried out by the iron-fisted Kurdish army commander Bakr Sidqi in October 1936, and was ended when Sidqi and air marshal Muhammad Jawad were murdered by rightist transnationalists within a year. Most of these transnationalists also played a leading role in the other relevant coup, which took place at the height of the Second World War during spring 1941, bringing to power veteran politician Rashid Kailani as a figurehead, and which advocated an alliance with Germany against the British Empire. Its Nazi influence visible in a bloody, and unprecedented, purge against Baghdad’s ancient Jewish populace, it nonetheless commanded considerable support because it ousted Nuri Saeed and the regent. However, a short sharp British campaign – commanded by John Glubb, the archetypal British Arabist officer – put it to flight, restored the ancien regime, and temporarily knocked the wind out of the mutinous army.

The road to 1958

Over the next fifteen or so years the army was the least of the government’s concerns. A budding communist movement – swiftly banned but for that very reason able to organize underground at a scale unparalleled in the Arab world – and another Kurdish secessionist revolt, led by the Barzan clan’s ambitious commander Mala Mustafa, occupied Baghdad over the next few years. Both movements were backed, the latter rather more reservedly, from the Soviet Union, prompting the government to continue to rely on Britain as a counterweight; in reaction, it lost more and more legitimacy. Britain’s controversial role in Palestine over 1947-48, its attempt to hold onto economic resources in Egypt and Iran, the conduct of its French allies against the Algerian insurgency, and perhaps most importantly the role of both colonial powers, alongside Israel, in the 1956 Sinai war against Egypt helped revitalize discontent both among the public and the officer corps. It was during this period that several groups of Free Officers, naming themselves after their Egyptian forebears, began to organize amid the same officer corps, more or less, that had played a role in the upheaval of fifteen years earlier.

The 1950s were also a period when military coups were an accepted and usually initially popular factor in many newly independent states, whose ancien regimes were seen as too elitist or dependent on foreign tutelage. But military intrusion was not limited to revolutionary regimes – indeed the Hashimi monarchy itself encouraged military dissidence among its rivals, particularly Syria, and the regent Abdulelah approved a brief period of military rule in emergency circumstances during 1952-53, when army commander Nuraddin Mahmoud imposed order in a chaotic situation and immediately stepped down once elections were held. In such episodes pro-government officers were usually the principal protagonists and indeed the retired officer Nuri Saeed, the eminence grise of the Iraqi establishment, tried to cultivate clientele among the officer corps. So it cannot have been difficult for dissident officers to increasingly see a revolutionary coup as the only way to change the Iraqi government. The fact of dissidence was not lost on the government, but they seem to have underestimated it: army commander Rafiq Arif brushed off warnings from Jordanian officials (1), and Nuri contented himself with casually interrogating two leading plotters, his own protégé Abdul-Karim Qasim and army spymaster Rifaat Sirri, who both denied that a plot was in the works. Nuri, a shrewd veteran of many intrigues, could hardly have been convinced, but he only issued a prescient warning: “Listen, if your plot ever succeeds, you and the other officers will be engaged in a struggle between yourselves which will not end till each of you hangs the other from the gates of Baghdad.”

Dissidence grew in the middle 1950s, when the Iraqi government entered the Baghdad Pact – a purportedly anticommunist coalition of Muslim countries including Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, and Iraq that was widely suspected as a vehicle to increase the influence of its organizer, Britain – and when two Arab “unions” were formed in 1958. The first and by far more popular was between Egypt – whose dictator, Gamal Abdel-Nasser, was then at the peak of his popularity at home and abroad after having faced down European threats – and Syria. The second, made again at British pressure, was a federation between Jordan and Iraq, two pro-British regimes who again saw alliance with Britain as the best way to expand Hashimi influence. Needless to say, this caused consternation among the Iraqi dissidents – both statists and transnationalists – and within months they sprang.

The leaders of the July 1958 coup were Abdul-Karim Qasim and Abdul-Salam Arif; while ideological motives for their actions should not be exaggerated, they vaguely represented the statist and transnationalist trend respectively. Qasim, who came from an ethnically and sectarianly mixed family of poor background, had been close to Bakr Sidqi, leader of Iraq’s first coup, and was a cousin to his lieutenant air marshal Muhammad Jawad, who had been killed with Sidqi in 1937. A secretive and reserved veteran from the Palestine war, he was not an obvious ideologue in any direction but does appear to have privately believed in Iraq’s “uniqueness” vis-à-vis its Arab neighbours. His lieutenant Arif, gregarious and outspoken, came from typical Sunni Arab officer stock and an ideological camp to which army spymaster Rifaat Sirri also belonged: a modestly middle-class, conservative and pietistic family of preachers and minor clan sheikhs, and very much impressed by transnational Arab-Islamic schemes and in particular the exploits of Nasser against the colonial powers. This bloc was by far the strongest trend in the diverse Free Officer movement, yet Arif urged his colleagues to unite behind Qasim, whom he called the sole “Zaeem” – a title that Qasim would officially use after seizing power.

After perhaps a dozen plans had been drawn and scrapped, Qasim and Arif finally sprang in July 1958. While the senior officer Qasim commandeered a force at Baqubah, from where he could monitor events, Arif led a brigade from there into Baghdad. The coup was well-planned, and a senior Free Officer Naji Talib diverted supplies into the mutineers’ camp on its eve. Arif’s elder brother Abdul-Rahman captained a camp in southern Baghdad, which swiftly fell to the mutineers; another battalion captained by Adil Jalal occupied the army ministry, and a third captained by Abdul-Sattar Sab attacked the palace. They were assisted by a major upheaval within the city, organized by many dissident civilians – but especially the communists, an irony given most Free Officers’ antipathy towards communism – but in any case the government was too surprised to put up any meaningful resistance.

The ensuing mayhem bloodily tore down the status quo in a scene straight out of the ancien regime’s nightmares. As Arif broadcast calls to hunt down “God’s enemy” or Aduwwulelah, a play on the name of the regent Abdulelah, riotous crowds swarmed the streets. A senior Jordanian delegation that included prime minister Ibrahim Hashim, foreign minister Sulaiman Tuqan, and attache Sadiq Sharaa came under attack; only Sharaa survived to tell the tale. One mutineer, Abdul-Sattar Sab, mowed down the Hashimi family; while the regent Abdulelah had few mourners, the murder of the only recently matured ruler Faisal II bin Ghazi and his remaining family was sufficiently controversial for the Free Officers to ostracize the culprit (2). Nuri Saeed, attempting to escape in disguise, was discovered and lynched (3); mangled beyond recognition, the corpses of Nuri and Abdulelah, the prototypical lackies of Britain in the popular imagination, were dragged through the streets by the mob.

The Zaeem’s rope-dance

It was perhaps ironic that Britain, who had some foreknowledge of a planned coup, chose not to intervene. Nonetheless the regime that ensued – a popular revolutionary regime in rhetoric, but more or less a military junta in practice and composition – alarmed the Western bloc, shredding as it did both the Baghdad Pact and the shaky Hashimi federation. The fact that it coincided with both an apparently formidable Arab union between Egypt and Syria, an alleged pro-unionist plot by a Jordanian officer, Mahmoud Rousan, against the Amman monarchy, as well as a low-level revolt against Lebanon’s pro-Western regime briefly threatened the spectre of an actual revolutionary Arab union to Western eyes; to forestall this, the United States dispatched a Marine expedition to protect the Lebanese regime.

But they needn’t have worried, for in contrast to the vociferous Arif and most Free Officers, the new ruler Abdul-Karim Qasim had no intention of subordinating his diverse, naturally wealthy country to the Arab union. As an Iraqi statist, he wanted to have as broad a constituency– including Kurdish nationalists such as the returning Mala Mustafa, who welcomed the coup and was given Nuri Saeed’s old residence as a token of favour – as possible, as long as they accepted his rule. Qasim’s intentions for the country can be seen in the largely ceremonial three-man council set up as Iraq’s formal representatives. They included the retired Sunni Arab officer Najib Rubai, who like Abdul-Karim Qasim had been a field commander in Palestine whose vocal criticism of the government had earned him many admirers in the Free Officers; the Kurdish officer Khalid Naqshbandi; and the left-leaning Shia Arab lawyer Mahdi Kubba. Transnationalist Free Officers, including Arif, were quickly cut adrift and purged.

As had been the case with Bakr Sidqi, Abdul-Karim Qasim initially tried to forge an alliance with left-leaning or socialist civilian politicians and activists such as Mahdi Kubba and Muhammad Hadid. One such leftist activist, Kamel Chadirchi, however refused to have anything to do with the military regime; twenty years earlier he had been wooed by Sidqi, who had quickly jettisoned him in order to placate the rightist transnationalists predominant in the army. Chadirchi would compare Qasim’s ruling method to a ropedancer who swayed from side to side in order to maintain his balance (4). Trusting only a small circle of friends and family, the Iraqi dictator initially swung left in order to remove his more pressing opponents, the rightists; once the right had been checked and the left appeared a greater threat, he would swing right again. The key was to ensure that neither bloc, within whom Qasim tried to wedge splits, was powerful enough to challenge him. The tactic of balancing acts is not in itself an objectionable one and has history both inside and outside Iraq; in a hyperradicalized, highly volatile political sphere drinking in the language of revolution, where large communities and especially entire barracks clung to one ideological tinge or another, however, the failure to follow any specific ideology or live up to its promises would yield deadly results.

Initially it was the transnationalist right, which favoured union with the Egyptian-Syrian United Arab Republic, who presented the greater threat. The rightists had good reason to resent Qasim: in addition to shunning union and therefore cheating them of their prize, he had excluded most from any real power. The interior minister’s role went to Ahmed Yahya, who had not been a Free Officer; the command of a newly established militia, which was heavily leftist in orientation and included predominantly poorer Shias and some Kurds, went to Taha Bamarni, a Kurdish officer who had actually commanded the royal guard before 1958 and was therefore anathema to the Free Officers. Moreover many Free Officers were arrested and tried, along with members of the ancien regime, in a newly created Popular Court that, chaired by Qasim’s cousin Fadil Mahdawi, attracted international notoriety.

Widely broadcast and conducted in public, the court initially attracted large audiences, as both Mahdawi and the prosecutor, Majid Amin, literally played to the gallery and indulged in theatrical denunciations of the defendants, often mocking them and even reciting satirical poetry. Though the court was raucous, however, it was not especially ruthless; only a handful of defendants were ever sentenced to death, and even less approved by Qasim – who critics claimed kept the threat of execution looming overhead to intimidate their relatives. Among the few victims of execution was the former interior minister, a Kurd called Saeed Qazzaz who gave as good as he got; when given his sentence, he retorted that he looked forward to being hanged, since suspended in air his feet would be rightfully hovering over and therefore humiliating the court (5).

Faced with a rightist threat, Abdul-Karim Qasim must have felt some unease when Rashid Kailani, the veteran politician who had collaborated in the rightist officers’ pro-German coup of 1941, returned from exile to considerable acclaim. Qasim greeted him courteously but soon had him arrested and publicly tried on what appear to be grounded charges of conspiracy during December 1958 (6). This only infuriated the rightists and their allies in the United Republic further. During spring 1959, a conspiracy emerged between three leading Free Officers – Rifaat Sirri, the pioneering former army spymaster whose rightism had a distinctly Islamist flavour and was of course inimically hostile to communism; Nazim Tabaqchali, who captained the northern forces from Kirkuk; and Abdul-Wahhab Shawwaf, garrison commandant at Mosul, the stronghold of rightist transnationalism. They would simultaneously mutiny at Baghdad, Kirkuk, and Mosul, thereby forcing the government to submit to a union. The United Republic also helped contact the large Shammar clan, which spanned the Syro-Iraqi border, and whose chieftain Ujail Yawer brought his clansmen towards Mosul to assist the mutiny there.(7)

The plot was quickly discovered, and the speedy arrests of Tabaqchali and Sirri – who, in contrast to most opponents of the regime, were eventually executed – left the government free to concentrate on Mosul. Qasim’s lieutenant Saleh Taufiq transported a large body of so-called Peace Partisans led by a communist lawyer, Kamal Qazinchi, to Mosul to rally on the day of the planned mutiny, thereby disrupting military movements. Both urban and tribal Kurds were largely hostile to the city’s rightist factions, and the tribesmen were as well-armed as their Arab opponents. Finally the newly assembled, largely communist militia at Mosul, captained by Mahdi Hamid, also opposed the rightists.
Shawwaf’s mutiny quickly spiralled into a bloody disaster; both Qazinchi and Shawwaf were killed, the latter buried in Damascus amid considerable uproar from the United Republic. With Shawwaf dead, communist officer Hasan Abboud took over the garrison, and apparently decided to punish the dissidents for good. The bloody battle having been won, loyalist troops did nothing to prevent several days of bloody reprisal by the militia as upscale neighbourhoods were sacked and pillaged. Though the Mosul crisis had not been initiated by Qasim, it set in motion a trend of brutal violence by militias that has continued at crisis moments in Iraq up to the present day.

Through the spring and early summer violence – primarily between leftist-or-loyalists and rightists-or-dissidents – continued, the former camp receiving air cover ordered by communist air marshal Jalal Awqati. The Kurdish adventurer Mala Mustafa, himself no leftist by ideology, nonetheless had an alliance with urban leftists and a rivalry with several more “reactionary” Kurdish chieftains. Aided by aerial bombardment, Mustafa first crushed a challenge by his nephew Muhamed Khalid over control of the Barzanis, and then a rival clan leader, Peshdari chieftain Abbas Muhamed, who had objected to the government’s proposed land reforms and was therefore fair game.

The violence peaked at Kirkuk in July 1959; here Tabaqchali’s replacement communist officer Daud Salman attacked his intended replacement, independent officer Mahmoud Abdul-Razzaq (8). Again Mahdi Hamid swooped in with the militia as well as primarily urban Kurdish militants. In contrast to Mosul, what followed at Kirkuk was a one-sided massacre that soon took on ethnic and socioeconomic dimensions as the Kurdish militiamen attacked the mostly uppercrust Turkmen in this mixed city, killing dozens and pillaging their homes. Though in future years Kirkuk would become notorious for Arab purges against Kurds, the first such purge in modern Iraqi history was ironically perpetrated by Kurds. Conducted independently of the government, the Kirkuk riot prompted Qasim to denounce the perpetrators and distance himself slowly but steadily from his erstwhile allies.

The last major manifestation of dissidence against Qasim in the decade came from a relative newcomer to Iraqi politics, the Baath party. Founded in the Levant, the Baath soon gained a foothold in Iraq partly because it did not adhere to one fixed position. Like most influential groups at this time, the Baathists advocated socialism and antiimperialism; in contrast to the atheistic communists, they paid lip service to religion, but their secularism contrasted with the predominantly Sunni rightist-transnationalists and attracted Shias, who comprised a large proportion of their early membership. They advocated Arab union but, increasingly embittered with their exclusion under the military-ruled United Republic, were independent and critical of Egypt. They recruited heavily in the same manner as the communists among civilians, but they also infiltrated the army, whose Baathist members appreciated their relatively rigid structure – though the same rigidity meant that the Baathists would splinter several times in their history over relatively trivial issues. At the international level, the United States in particular would come to appreciate the Baathists as an alternative to both communism and the Egyptian brand of Arab socialism.

In October 1959, an early Iraqi Baathist leader called Fuad Rikabi (9) planned an audacious attempt to murder Qasim. It was carried out by a squad of militiamen led by Iyad Thabit, and including a young street thug called Saddam Hussein (10). The attack on Qasim’s car injured the Iraqi dictator, who had to retire for several weeks while his loyal deputy Ahmed Abedi took over. Rikabi escaped into the United Republic, but Thabit, Saddam, and several others were publicly tried in the Popular Court by Fadil Mahdawi and Majid Amin. They defended themselves with some courage – leaving even the vociferous Mahdawi lost for words – and though they were found guilty most were spared.

A shaken Qasim continued to struggle over the next few years. By all accounts hardworking and personally honest, he does appear to have devoted considerable resources to Iraq’s economic underclasses, particularly in his commission of a new district for Baghdad’s poorer Shia workers, which was then called the Revolution Quarter and is today called Sadr City. To this day, many Iraqi Shias revere Qasim. At the international level, he could hardly rejoice in the United Republic’s eventual breakup because by that time he had himself experienced a foreign-affairs disaster when he laid claim, anticipating Saddam by some thirty years and citing the precolonial boundaries of the Persian Gulf as proof, to the newly independent Kuwaiti emirate. Qasim’s dispatch of an army force captained by Khalil Saeed to the border with Kuwait caused brief trepidation in the West and Britain in particular, but Iraq was so isolated in the Arab League that they were swiftly rebuffed without a shot.

More serious and longer-lasting was the violence that eventually led to a Kurdish revolt in the north. Again, this was in large measure an unintended consequence of Qasim’s rope dance, having alienated his erstwhile vassal Mala Mustafa as well as Mustafa’s rivals in the north. He had permitted Irbil governor Badruddin Ali and Mosul sheriff Ismail Abbawi extraordinary powers; according to Mustafa’s son Masoud, both men were “totally biased” against the Barzani clan and armed their opponents. By 1961 it had become clear that the government had switched sides and was now backing various tribes hostile to Mustafa – including the Zibaris, who were incidentally led by Mustafa’s hostile father-in-law Mahmoud Agha, the Surchis, the Shaklawis, the Baradostis, the Harkis, and the Loulanis. A low-scale but fairly serious conflict had erupted between these competitors, who were also backed by the small Assyrian community, and Mustafa. The principal urban Kurdish party, a leftist group led by Ibrahim Ahmad and his son-in-law Jalal Talabani, had also thrown in their lot with Mustafa, whom they viewed more favourably than other “feudal” clan leaders because of his experience as a commander in the Iran-based Kurdish Mahabad Republic. When it became clear that Mustafa had fallen out with the regime, some former opponents such as Abbas Muhamed, the Peshdari clan chieftain, also joined him. This uneasy coalition often squabbled and to a large extent it seems that the reignition of Kurdish nationalism was an attempt to unite them against a common enemy, as the idea had only mixed popularity among Iraqi Kurds at the time.

Indeed, Iraqi Kurds had generally welcomed the 1958 coup – when a major Kurdish commander, Omar Mustafa, earned the nickname “Dabbaba” or Tank for climbing onto such a vehicle in Baghdad – and they had largely been redoubtable auxiliaries for Qasim in his conflict with the right over 1958-59. This held especially true for urban, usually leftist Kurds such as Ahmad and Talabani, who had founded the Kurdistan Democratic Party – which would ironically later be coopted against them by Mala Mustafa – and supported Qasim’s leftist alliances. But in spring 1961 they had fallen out with the regime, after Ahmad was accused as having murdered the pro-regime Shaklawi clan leader Sadiq Othman, and instead escaped north, where he and other leftist Kurds would accuse Qasim as having reneged on his promises for autonomy. The fact that such an issue had not come up until 1961 indicates that Kurdish nationalism was perhaps at this point a useful vehicle for the ambitions of Mustafa, Ahmad, and others. In future years, when Iraqi regimes would commit major abuses, Mustafa’s denunciation of his opponents as “jash”, or donkeys, would earn currency and become a blanket term among Kurdish nationalists for the hirelings of hostile governments; at the time, however, this was simply a multifaceted conflict between rivals that had little to do with nationalism. Large sections of the Zibari clan, to which the Barzanis belonged, fought on the government side, including Arshad Mahmoud, a Mosul-based Kurdish leader whose family was hostile to Mustafa and who has consistently opposed secession (11).

Nonetheless, the fighting in summer 1961 was a strictly inter-Kurd affair, the government largely viewing from afar. This changed in September 1961 when Peshdari chieftain Abbas ambushed a military patrol. The regime immediately responded by airbombing the Barzanis, leading to an open break as Mustafa and the Kurdistan Party commander Ali Askari overran most of the mountainous ground between, and including, the northwestern city Zakhou, and the highlands outside Sulaimania. It was suspected that Qasim wanted to keep potential mutineers at the frontlines, thereby using war in much the same way as his Kurdish opponent Mala Mustafa. If so – though in Qasim’s period the actual ground force in the north remained modest – it was one of a series of eminently avoidable escalations in the government-peshmerga conflict, apparently intended to quell interal dissent among the protagonists as much as fight their external foes.

The largely Kurdish northern Iraqi army forces, still captained by Mahmoud Abdul-Razzaq, succeeded in recapturing Zakhou, but probably only because the rebels – or “peshmerga”, death-welcomers, a name borrowed from the Kurdistan Party militia and since used for Kurdish nationalists at large – focused more on guerrilla tactics from the mountains and avoided open confrontations. The Iraqi troops were thinly spread at this point: a more pressing worry for the peshmerga was the airforce commanded by Mustafa’s erstwhile ally, Jalal Awqati, which liberally and lethally bombarded the countryside. Such bombardment, indeed, seems to have been the major complaint in the 1960s war, which helped drive many formerly indifferent Kurds into peshmerga ranks. There was still considerable difficulty in unifying them, however; Mustafa and his counterparts among the Kurdish chieftains remained suspicious of the leftists, and so maintained a division that has by and large lasted to the twenty-first century, where the tribal commanders dominated the central-western Kurdish region while leftist commanders such as Ibrahim Ahmad, Jalal Talabani, and Omar Dabbaba organized in the eastern region around Sulaimania. While the clan background of Talabani, in particular, helped their prestige, the leftists began to try and undermine traditional power structures and replace them with socialistic councils that advocated land reform and reported to the politburo.

During spring 1962 Mustafa mounted several raids on government garrisons at Douhak and Zakhou, and he followed this up with a manifesto that claimed only autonomy within Iraq, not independence, thereby winning considerable support among non-Kurdish Iraqis. At the same time, however, conflict continued apace: Khalil Saeed arrived in the north to assail the tribal frontlines in the centre-west, while Mahmoud Abdul-Razzaq attacked the leftist Kurds in the east. Another veteran officer, Khalil Jasim, who had fought with the mujahidin in Palestine, organized a set of largely autonomous Kurdish militias, often named after such famous historical figures as the Ayyubid sultan Salahuddin Yusuf b. Ayyub. These fought more or less independently, however, and as Iraqi airpower continued to devastate the north many members would defect. Iraqi ground troops could make little headway nonetheless, for the peshmerga were superb fighters on mountain terrain.

Abdul-Karim Qasim’s refusal to consider the fairly reasonable manifesto laid out by Mala Mustafa probably stemmed from his not unreasonable suspicions that the Kurdish leader, backed by Iran and perhaps the West, did not intend to stop at autonomy (12). It is unclear if he was aware of the meetings between the peshmerga and the Baathists over the next year. Mala Mustafa and a recently sacked Baathist Free Officer, Tahir Yahya, secretly negotiated during the peak of the northern campaign in spring 1962, as did civilian Baathist leader Ali Saadi with a peshmerga diplomat Salim Yusufi the following year. Underestimating the Baathist threat was clearly Qasim’s last error, for it was they who played the major role in ending his regime, and life, in February 1963.

The first Baath regime: short, nasty, and brutish

As noted above, and as we shall see, the regimental structure of the Baath Party meant that it was divided into largely distinct patrimonial or ideological groups. The original Syrian Baath command was already hardly in control of its official subordinates at both regional and local levels; the same was true in the Iraqi Baath. While many Iraqi Baathists were civilians – usually lower-middle-class Shia Arab unionists who, as we have seen, preferred Baathist secularism to both Sunni-dominated transnational rightism and communist atheism – this wing was itself divided, and somewhat distinct from another heterogenous, often Sunni Arab and usually more right-leaning wing in the army that rubbed shoulders and tactically collaborated with the army rightists. Prominent among the army Baathists were Hasan Bakr, Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar, and Saleh Mahdi – each a Sunni Arab scion of the central Iraqi city Tikrit. It was Bakr who, collaborating with a rightist faction led by the now-cashiered but still ambitious Abdul-Salam Arif, played the major role in the coup against Abdul-Karim Qasim, and emerged as prime minister and strongman in its aftermath.

The February 1963 coup was even bloodier than its predecessor from 1958. Early on a quiet morning, the communist air marshal Jalal Awqati was murdered at home and his command taken over by Arif Abdul-Razzaq and the Baathist officer, Mundhir Wandawi, who commandeered the airfield at Habbania and personally flew in air assaults against the regime. Abdul-Salam Arif and Hasan Bakr, meanwhile, had commandeered a cavalry force from the nearby town Abu Ghuraib, which entered Baghdad. Abdul-Karim Qasim and a small coterie of loyalists – including his deputy Ahmed Abedi, Fadil Mahdawi, interior minister Taha Shaikh, Majid Amin, and his communist advisor Wasfi Tahir – quickly slipped into the fortified army ministry, from where Shaikh issued an urgent dispatch to the communist party. Though Qasim had always kept a wary distance from the communists, the party were well-aware that they stood little chance in a rightist or Baathist regime, and so dispatched their militia to defend the regime. The next few hours saw running battles in Baghdad between communist militias and army tanks, while planes bombarded the army ministry. As Arif had once branded Abdulelah Aduwwulelah, God’s enemy, he would now call Abdul-Karim Qasim the same thing, Aduwwul-Karim.

Inexorably, it was the coupists who steadily tightened their grip. Sensing the inevitable defeat, Qasim telephoned Arif from within the army ministry, offering to resign and go into exile in return for an amnesty. Qasim’s first phone call was intercepted by Talib Shabib, a civilian Baathist leader who feared that the party would get cut out, but he needn’t have worried, for Arif had no confidence in his former Zaeem and refused Qasim’s terms outright. The checkmate came when a commando force, captained by the Baathist officer Abdul-Karim Nusrat, was airlifted onto the army ministry and broke inside, cornering Qasim. Arif arrived to interrogate the trapped dictator, accusing him as having betrayed both Islam and the Arab world. Qasim protested that he had helped uplift Iraq’s poor – an undeniable fact – and defended himself with some courage (13). He had earlier intervened to save Arif from execution, but his erstwhile lieutenant was in no mood to repay the favour and the bloodied corpses of Qasim, Mahdawi, Tahir, and Shaikh among others were soon broadcast across the city and broke whatever loyalism remained. The Zaeem’s rope-dance had ended in morbid fashion.

The new regime was officially led by Abdul-Salam Arif, though for several months he was merely a willing puppet while the Baathists held sway. Hasan Bakr had the luxury of both forming the cabinet and leading a separate Baathist command council, which dominated policy. Saleh Ammash became army minister; Tahir Yahya, who had negotiated on behalf of the Baathists with the peshmerga the previous spring, became army commander; Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar air marshal; and Ali Saadi – a thuggish young Shia Arab vagabond with his own powerbase among the civilian Baathists – interior minister. Saadi set up a Baathist paramilitary force, led by the veterans of the coup, first Abdul-Karim Nusrat and then Mundhir Wandawi. In the subsequent months the Baathist militias and paramilitary forces would more than repay the communist atrocities of 1959, with a savage reign of terror across Iraq in which uncounted numbers, both communists and other perceived enemies, were butchered.

A partial, though by no means causal, explanation of this brutality came in the Baathists’ none-too-discreet links with United States intelligence, who had prepared a communist hitlist for the party in order to flush Soviet influence from Iraq for good (14): the purge’s most infamous victim was communist leader Salam Radhi, who was tortured to death over a fortnight. Baathist anticommunism also seemed to be a move to gain sympathy of independent rightists: when in July 1963 communist officers Hasan Sari and Muhammad Habib, in league with civilian communist cells, attempted to commandeer the southern camp near Baghdad, it was at Arif’s insistence that Bakr had the plotters marched to perish in a desert camp. This also prompted the Soviet Union to officially endorse the Kurdish insurgency, which was thereafter assisted by a local communist militia founded by the Chaldean Kurdish communist Toumas Toumas. This Toumas had, it appeared, attempted to mount a communist “countercoup” against the February 1963 coup in Mosul, but this was a bad choice: Mosul was a stronghold of rightist sentiment, and the mutiny was swiftly crushed, with Toumas escaping into the mountains.

The July 1963 mutiny was more serious; it allegedly involved some two thousand troops led by Habib and Sari, who were in direct contact with Ibrahim Ali, a communist labour leader. They overwhelmed the barracks at the camp, capturing along with the Baathist paramilitary commander Abdul-Karim Nusrat both interior minister Ali Saadi and foreign minister Talib Shabib. However, they lost contact with their collaborators in the communist centre – then led underground by Jamal Haidari – and were soon cornered by loyalist troops and cut down. Haidari and the other remaining communist leaders, Saleh Abli and Abdul-Jabbar Wahbi, were soon captured by the Baathist militia leader Ammar Alwash as well and executed: their tormentors included Baath party potentates Abdul-Karim Shaikhli, a future foreign minister in the Baath regime who would one day be himself executed, and Khalid Tabrah.

There was a moment when 1963 seemed poised to be a Baathist summer. A month after the Iraqi coup, another loose officer coalition seized power in Syria, where the Syrian Baathists dominated – first only unofficially, and then officially; the Syrian Baathists soon built up apparatuses akin to their Iraqi namesakes, with military cells, paramilitaries, militias, and separate command councils. With talk of a Syria-Iraq union in the air, the Iraqi Baathists handily scrapped their rapport with the peshmerga and a new campaign was mounted under the overall direction of the Baathist army minister Saleh Ammash. Emergency rule was imposed in such northern cities as Mosul, Sulaimania, Irbil, and Kirkuk under a Turkmen officer, Saeed Saqalli, as three prongs advanced into the north.

The easternmost prong, advancing from Kirkuk, focused on and around Sulaimania, where the leftist peshmerga commander Jalal Talabani had ensconced himself, and where it was credibly suspected that the Iranian regime was delivering supplies. In an attempt to smoke out peshmerga sympathizers, the garrison and militia resorted to merciless measures: the garrison commandant, Siddiq Mustafa – himself a Kurd – had at least a hundred prisoners slaughtered (15). Meanwhile another force captained by Mahmoud Abdul-Razzaq approached the city from Kirkuk. However, they could only make limited headway as the peshmerga fighters held out in the mountains around the road for weeks. The central prong met a similar fate; its vanguard regiment, captained by Saeed Hammou, advanced towards Rawanduz but was trapped in the valley outside the town by a much smaller peshmerga force under Omar Dabbaba’s command. It took several weeks, major aerial bombardment, and a rescue mission captained by Khalil Jasim and jash militias to rescue the force. The westernmost force, captained by Abdul-Karim Farhan in concert with Shaar, had the most success, ploughing into the Zakhou-Douhak region and occupying these cities with little resistance from Mustafa, who prudently withdrew into the mountains. The peshmerga chieftain’s prestige was hurt when Barzan and Zibari, the strongholds of the eponymous tribes, were briefly occupied by the government.

By autumn 1963 the campaign in the north had petered out. A more pressing crisis unfolded in the south, as the Baathists became victims of their own success. The prospect of an imminent Baathist union could hardly thrill Abdul-Salam Arif or his Free Officer counterparts, most of whom followed the rightist bloc or the pro-Egypt bloc. They managed to capitalize on a break in the Baath between several factions – an extreme faction led by Ali Saadi the brutish interior minister, the Syria-based Baath command led by Michel Aflaq – who himself competed with the Syrian military regime – and finally a predominantly military “rightist” faction that included Baathist officers as well as several prominent civilian Baathists, such as Hazim Jawad and Talib Shabib. Attempts by Saleh Ammash to mediate between them failed, and the party imploded in November 1963. Aflaq, Jawad, and Shabib united against Saadi, who was arrested with his men and exiled to Spain. Thereupon Mundhir Wandawi, the paramilitary commandant and one of Saadi’s few followers in the army, attempted to mutiny and thereby played into the hands of Arif, who saw an opportunity to dispense with the Baathists at last. Aided by defections from the senior Baathists in the armed forces, army commander Tahir Yahya and air marshal Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar, who were both indifferent to Baathist ideology, the government quickly purged the remaining Baathists – Shabib, Jawad, and prime minister Hasan Bakr (16). Two army forces, captained by Arif’s brother Abdul-Rahman and Abdul-Karim Farhan, quickly surrounded the Baathists at Baghdad, and forced them into exile. The short, brutal first Baath regime was over; sadly for Iraq, it would not be the last.

The Arifs: Officer blocs, peshmerga, and contested unionism

If Abdul-Salam Arif moved less unilaterally than Abdul-Karim Qasim – always representing a certain bloc in the Free Officer cliques – he proved no less flexible a ropedancer. Having washed his hands of his erstwhile allies, Arif quickly banned the Baath party – which was now branded a heretical group and whose abuses were now conveniently recalled and broadcast – and proceeded to flex real power for the first time. Tahir Yahya’s defection from the Baathists was rewarded with the prime minister’s portfolio, though the promotion of this rather opportunist intriguer dismayed some other Free Officers. The other senior Baathist who had turned coat, Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar, soon fell out with Arif; during September 1964, he schemed with Hasan Bakr, Ali Saadi, and Abdul-Sattar Abdul-Latif to abduct and overthrow Arif, but the plot was soon discovered and Hardan purged as well, replaced at the airforce by the pro-Egypt Free Officer Arif Abdul-Razzaq. In order to bolster the regime against further coup attempts, Egypt sent a large tank force, captained by Ibrahim Uraby, to Baghdad. Meanwhile Arif founded his own praetorian force, largely comprising Free Officer friends and especially his kinsfolk from the Jumaili clan, led by his cousin Saeed Sulaibi. The Iraqi praetorian guard that would grow and assume such a major role in the later Baathist regime was, ironically, founded as an anti-Baathist measure.

Yet the Baathists were not the only threat to Abdul-Salam Arif; he had, it will be recalled, made his name as an admirer of Gamal Abdel-Nasser in 1958, and the pro-Nasser faction in the Free Officers expected that he would put Iraq at Masr’s disposal. Yet in spite of cosmetic changes – paying lip service to socialism and following Nasser’s lead on foreign policy – Arif dragged his heels and frustrated the pro-Masr camp. Eventually a real split emerged in the remaining Free Officers between Arif and his more cautious supporters – generally conservative rightists – and unionists who wanted a merger with Masr. There are several plausible reasons: Arif may have simply used the pro-Masr Free Officers in the same opportunistic way that Abdul-Karim Qasim had used him. But it should be remembered that the Nasser of the 1960s was far different from the Nasser of the 1950s, to whom many rightist Free Officers – largely scions of conservative, tribal, or clerical Sunni families – had been attracted. Nasser’s secularism seems to have especially discomfited the ostentatiously pietistic Arif, who indeed at one point during 1964 appealed to the Masri dictator to free the radical preacher Sayyid Qutb (17). Arif and his circle always distanced themselves hurriedly from secularism, and in spite of minor socialist changes – largely at the encouragement of the bank governor, Khairuddin Hasib, who was eventually sacked (18) – the Iraqi dictator remained essentially independent from Nasser in internal matters.

This extended to the Kurdish insurgency as well. In February 1964, the stalemate in the north had prompted a ceasefire and reopened negotiations with Mala Mustafa. Little would come of these negotiations except that a final break occurred between Mustafa and the leftist faction led by Jalal Talabani and Ibrahim Ahmad, which opposed any talks whatsoever. Mustafa’s son Luqman Barzani attacked and routed the leftists, whose much depleted remnants were expelled into Iran during July 1964; not till the autumn would they return. Mustafa’s situation mirrored that of Abdul-Salam Arif: having ridden the nationalist tiger, both found themselves dragged towards confrontation or risk losing their own power.

By spring 1965, negotiations broke down and another major campaign ensued with much fanfare. This time it was commanded personally by the dictator’s elder brother, Abdul-Rahman Arif, though he was somewhat scorned by frontline officers in the northlands and the operation seems to have been actually planned by his aide, the veteran officer Abdul-Jabbar Shanshal (19). It first comprised two prongs, advancing from Irbil to Rawanduz and Kirkuk to Sulaimaniah, under the respective leadership of Abdul-Aziz Uqaili and Ibrahim Faisal, the army’s most seasoned officers in the north; eventually a third prong, captained by Yunis Attarbashi (20), advanced from Mosul towards the countryside northeast of Douhak, and a fourth captained by Nadhir Talib tried to assail the Panjwin border via Halabja in the east. The army had expanded greatly in the previous years – the vast majority of its units in the northlands – but once again the campaign’s results were inconclusive at best.

Mala Mustafa, now commanding the Sulaimania region, continued to hold back the Iraqi army in that region. Though Ibrahim Faisal briefly entered Qaladiza, peshmerga forces soon ousted the army forces and Faisal’s tensions with Abdul-Rahman Arif only discouraged further activity. Northern peshmerga swiftly isolated and besieged the northern forces around Douhak, though by September 1965 a force captained by the veteran mountain fighter Khalil Jasim had managed to break the siege of the small town Imadia. The easternmost force, captained by Nadhir Talib, was however annihilated by peshmerga forces and its commander resigned.

Gamal Abdel-Nasser, already preoccupied with the Yemeni conflict, found himself drawn into the Iraqi arena. Not only the regime but even the Kurdish leaders, Mala Mustafa and Jalal Talabani, separately appealed to him to persuade the other side. Nasser evinced some sympathy for the Kurdish position and urged both sides to avoid a confrontation, but his influence on the Iraqi regime was far less than supposed. Moreover pro-Masr Iraqi officers such as army operations director Muhammad Majid and army spymaster Hadi Khammas, who had been disappointed that the Masri expedition captained by Ibrahim Uraby refused to assist the northern campaign, decided that Nasser’s hesitancy could only be explained by uncertainty, and that a fait accompli would persuade the Masri dictator into a decisive intervention that would end the war and unite Iraq with Masr.

On the advice of his praetorian commandant Saeed Sulaibi, Abdul-Salam Arif tried to placate the dissidents by appointing the pro-Masr air marshal Arif Abdul-Razzaq to replace the unpopular prime minister Tahir Yahya. This backfired, for when the Iraqi dictator left for a trip abroad in September 1965 it was Abdul-Razzaq who spearled the coup attempt. While Majid and Irfan Wajdi commandeered a tank force from Abu Ghuraib, Abdul-Razzaq tried to lure army commander Abdul-Rahman Arif, Sulaibi, and interior minister Abdul-Latif Darraji – the seniormost loyalists – into a trap by summong them to his office. Instead Sulaibi and Baghdad sheriff Abdul-Hameed Abdul-Qadir surrounded the mutineers with their forces, forcing them to surrender. Perhaps unwilling to escalate tensions with Masr, they permitted Abdul-Razzaq’s escape into Cairo.

In this clearest break between Gamal Abdel-Nasser – who had not sanctioned the coup but was unwilling to extradite Arif Abdul-Razzaq – and his professed admirer Abdul-Salam Arif, the road was clear for the Iraqi dictator to free himself from officer blocs. He therefore promoted the first civilian prime minister since the 1958 coup, Abdul-Rahman Bazzaz. A fervently pietistic Sunni Arab professor, Bazzaz would nowadays be called a “moderate Islamist” ideologist and appears to have reflected the conservative worldview in which rightist Free Officers such as the Arifs had been raised. Certainly his caution with regards to socialism, his guarded neutralism on foreign policy between Masr and Saudi Arabia, and his insistence that there was no contradiction between Islam and Arab independence was probably approved by Abdul-Salam Arif; what galled other Free Officers was the fact that he attempted to civilianize the regime and, in a reflection of longtime civilian opinion, reopen talks with the peshmerga rebels.

This last proposal was seen as dangerous naivete by the new army minister, Abdul-Aziz Uqaili. An energetic disciplinarian from the Mosul bloc of militarist officers, Uqaili was no Arab supremacist, instead having always favoured Iraqi statism, but he was an inveterate opponent of Mala Mustafa who he believed represented only a small fraction of Kurds to whom most other Kurds, such as the Zibaris, were opposed. This opinion may have been true in 1961, but the polarizing years of conflict since rendered it less convincing to both Abdul-Rahman Bazzaz and many officers. Uqaili also believed that a military campaign over the winter – a period when Iraqi forces tended to retreat into their garrisons – would better prepare them for a decisive push in spring 1966, and that this was the only way to achieve peace. The target was Panjwin, the small but strategic town overlooking the eastern road into Iran. During the dead of winter, a sudden Iraqi raid on Panjwin briefly scattered the peshmerga forces there.

The tension between Abdul-Rahman Bazzaz and Abdul-Aziz Uqaili aside, Abdul-Salam Arif’s position seemed stronger in early 1966 than ever. He had maneouvred skilfully to eliminate both the Baathists and pro-Masri unionists, and the officer corps appeared to have some momentum for an advantageous deal with the peshmerga rebels following the spring campaign. But Arif did not live to see that spring campaign; in April 1966, he lost his life in a plane crash – along with three ministers from the officer camp: his trusted aide Abdul-Latif Darraji, Mustafa Abdullah, and Abdul-Hadi Hafiz (21). Yet another Iraqi regime had ended suddenly and sharply, and there was some consternation over who would succeed Arif: his older brother Abdul-Rahman, a rather retiring character whose length in service was not matched with prestige among the officer corps, or the forceful Uqaili. Uqaili’s aggressiveness on the Kurdish issue, which was more popular in the Mosul barracks than the Baghdad corridors of power, and Abdul-Rahman’s apparent malleability seem to have decided the issue in the latter’s favour.

Moreover, the spring campaign in the north did turn out to be decisive – but in the peshmergas’ favour. In perhaps the finest moment of hiss military career, Mala Mustafa ambushed the Iraqi vanguard, captained by Saeed Qattan, in the Rawanduz valley and utterly obliterated it: at least a thousand soldiers were slain, Uqaili sacked, and the campaign broken. The Iraqis had often complained that Israel was supplying the peshmerga, a wild exaggeration based largely on individual contacts between diaspora Kurds and the Israelis, but on this occasion it appears that an Israeli officer, Zuri Sagi, allegedly helped the peshmerga against the same Iraqi unit that had rescued his birthplace, Jinin, from Israel conquest during 1948. (22)

That summer Abdul-Rahman Bazzaz reopened negotiations with both Mustafa and Jalal Talabani. Reflecting the utter fatuousness of the conflict, the compromise they agreed upon restored a status quo not too different to that that had existed before 1961, with lip service to Kurdish rights and defacto autonomy in the northlands. Over the next year or so, Mustafa effectively cannibalized the once-leftist Kurdistan Party, which has remained in his family since; Jalal, who would later found a rival organization, would meanwhile hobnob with the Iraqi Baathists, tellingly insisting that the Kurds enjoyed better treatment by Iraqi Arabs than by Turks or Persians – not that this would prevent another outbreak of war not long into the second Baath regime. The Kurdish war plays no further role in our story, but underscores that in both Baghdad and the northern highlands appeals to nationalism were frequently tactical cards in personal adventurism.

The last days of the Iraqi junta

Abdul-Rahman Bazzaz may have well hoped that his role in ending the wearying conflict would entitle him to some longevity in office. Instead, the very next day after the deal was made another military coup attempt occurred that compelled his ouster. It was carried out again by the restless adventurer Arif Abdul-Razzaq, this time possibly with Masri foreknowledge, with the aim of capitalizing on Abdul-Rahman Arif’s exposed position. Ever the dashing pilot, Abdul-Razzaq secretly flew into Mosul with the connivance of its commandant Yunis Attarbashi; they dispatched planes to attack various strongpoints in and around Baghdad. Army spymaster Hadi Khammas, whose role in the previous mutiny had gone unnoticed, commandeered yet another tank unit from Abu Ghuraib while also taking charge of the camp where the Masri expedition had been based in 1964. This time the resourceful new praetorian commandant Bashir Talib led the fightback, while the Iraqi dictator kept his wits about him and ordered loyalists in Mosul to arrest the mutineers, a task that fell to Mosul’s professional officer par excellence, Khalil Jasim. The fact that the mutineers were arrested with George Habash, the Palestinian Marxist ideologue then in firm cahoots with Gamal Abdel-Nasser indicates that unlike the previous attempt Cairo was aware of and possibly involved in this coup.

Abdul-Rahman Arif’s cool performance under pressure helped rally the army around him, but the coup attempt also underscored the importance of keeping the officer corps happy. The attempts of Abdul-Rahman Bazzaz to civilianize the regime had been a major complaint, and so Naji Talib – a veteran Free Officer acceptable across factions – took his place (23). Two major issues dominated the elder Arif’s period: Iraq’s oil policy and the treatment of former mutineers in the army. It was these issues that would bring about Arif’s downfall. The traditional Iraqi oil policy had been mildly permissive to the major Iraqi oil company – a policy implemented by Abdul-Salam Arif’s oil minister Abdul-Aziz Wattari during 1964 – and this prompted a furious reaction from the leftist faction of the Syrian Baath that had seized power in Damascus during February 1966. This eventually prompted Talib’s resignation, and the eventual return of Tahir Yahya to power.

By this time Israel had crushed Masr, Syria, and Jordan in the 1967 war; Iraq’s only contribution, swift as the war was and distant from the Iraqi frontier, was Tahir Yahya’s incidental presence at Masr when the Israeli airforce attacked. This opened the government as well as the oil ministry, linked to the West as it was, to furious criticism. Arab union was the order of the day, and in particular advocated by such socialists as Khairuddin Hasib and Adib Jadir who had the ear of the pro-Masr officers. While Hasib was sacked, Jadir was promoted to oil minister in spring 1968 and embarked on steps to nationalize Iraq’s oil. Meanwhile Abdul-Rahman Arif’s lenience towards the pro-Masr faction – who were generally pardoned, even Arif Abdul-Razzaq – alienated his supporters, who felt vulnerable and exposed to a pro-Masr backlash. These included both the wily Tahir, who resigned rather than face the inevitable backlash, the acting foreign minister Ismail Khairullah, as well as two rightist officers whom Arif had trusted with key military positions: his Jumaili cousin Abdul-Razzaq Nayef, the army spymaster, and praetorian commandant Ibrahim Daud. This unquiet in the regime played into the hands of the returning Baathists, led by Hasan Bakr and Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar. They struck a deal with Nayef, Daud, Khairullah, and the praetorian cavalry commandant Saadoun Ghaidan; apparently, United States intelligence was also involved.

In contrast to the previous coup in which the Baathists were involved, the July 1968 coup – taking place a decade after the original Free Officer coup – was a bloodless affair. The independent officers seized important positions, and Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar courteously escorted Abdul-Rahman Arif to an airport and exile; before he left, the outgoing Iraqi ruler – that rarest of phenomena, a reluctant dictator – wished the coupmakers success in their rule, though he reserved some bitterness for Abdul-Razzaq Nayef, his kinsman whom he felt had been blinded by greed. Bakr now served as dictator, Nayef as prime minister, and Ibrahim Daud as army minister. For the Baathists, the situation was a reverse of 1963, when they had held the prime ministry and army ministry – but Bakr was determined to preempt any challenges to his power. The Baathists secretly wooed Saadoun Ghaidan, now the praetorian commandant, and Baghdad commandant Hammad Shihab, who was Bakr’s Tikriti kinsman. A fortnight after the coup, Daud visited Iraqi forces on the Israel frontline at Jordan, leaving Nayef dangerously exposed in the capital. Sure enough, the Iraqi prime minister was rapidly surrounded by Baathist forces – including, according to a possible rumour, Bakr’s young kinsman Saddam Hussein (24) – and forced at gunpoint to exile along with Daud.

Though Hasan Bakr, Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar, Saleh Ammash, and the original Baathist leaders were soldiers, the second Baath regime would differ fundamentally from the regimes of the past decade. Its power lay not in the officer corps but in independent networks of apparatchiks and street militias, among whom Saddam Hussein would soon become paramount. The Iraqi army did not yield its political primacy without a fight – several military coup attempts would take place in the 1970s and 1990s – and yet it was the Baathists, with an unprecedented network of spies, informers, militiamen, and militias who would win out, transforming Iraq along the way from a contested garrison state into a totalitarian police state. The Baathists were not without their achievements, for military withdrawal from politics was not an unpopular notion, Iraq’s army was certainly much more efficient without its political role, and the Baath regime eventually, though temporarily, came to a peace accord with the peshmerga that was more durable than the stopgaps of the 1960s and broken not by the regime, who nonetheless responded brutally, but the peshmerga leaders.

Yet it came at a terrible cost, the first signs of which were already apparent in the late 1960s when Baathist militias rounded up, imprisoned, tortured, and not infrequently executed opponents both real and imagined, whipping up bloodlust and jingoism amid overblown accusations of treason and disloyalty. Among the victims were many individuals referred to in this paper, even some Baathists (25). Sadly, if the Baathists took cruelty and opportunism to new extents, they were not alone. The military juntas had failed in their purported aims: Abdul-Karim Qasim’s ropedances had introduced militia politics and provoked Kurdish secessionism, while the Arif brothers thrived in and were eventually done in by the politics of a militarist military elite. With the Baathist triumph a ghastly new period in Iraqi history had begun, but it cannot be understood without understanding the tumultuous decade that preceded it.

 

Recommended sources:

Beitullah Destani; Minorities in the Middle East: Kurdish communities, 1918-1974.

Majid Khadduri; Republican Iraq: A study in politics, 1969.

Ibrahim Marashi; Iraq’s Armed Forces: An analytical history, 2010.

Malik Mufti; Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and political order in Syria and Iraq, 1996.

Edgar O’Ballance; The Kurdish Revolt in Iraq, 1961-1970, 1971.

 

ENDNOTES

1. Rafiq Arif, himself a field commander from the 1948 Palestine expedition, may have hoped to persuade the Free Officers or contain the problem with tact. If so, this failed, for he was imprisoned after the coup – as was his second-in-command, another veteran of 1948 but a staunch government loyalist, the Turco-Circassian officer Ghazi Daghistani. See Majid Khadduri’s Republican Iraq: A study in politics (1969), a painstaking account of military-ruled Iraq.
2. It is unclear that Abdul-Sattar Sab did in fact commit the murders on his own initiative. One rumour had it that when the possibility of execution was raised among the Free Officers, one mutineer cynically compared the Sharifi family to the livestock who were sacrificed to feed the people everyday;a few more, he seemed to say, would make no difference. Khadduri (1969).
3. The communist Free Officer Wasfi Tahir, whose family was on good terms with Nuri Saeed, had been dispatched to capture him. Nuri quickly absconded in an abaya but was discovered and, according to different accounts, he either committed suicide or was lynched. Khadduri (1969)
4. Khadduri (1969)
5. As well as Qazzaz – whom Khadduri describes rosily as an honest and conscientious minister – the other members of the ancien regime executed were either intelligence or administration officials, including Baghdad governor Abdul-Jabbar Fahmi, security commander Bahjat Attiya, and political warden Abdul-Jabbar Ayoub.
6. Rashid Kailani blamed the case on his co-defendants, who quickly turned on him in turn. He would not be released until after Abdul-Karim Qasim’s period was over.
7. Ujail’s son Ghazi Yawer briefly became Iraq’s interim premier in 2004.
8. The role of certain Kurds in the violence against Turkmens inevitably attracted controversy; in his book Mustafa Barzani and the Kurdish Liberation Movement (2004), Kurdish leader Mala Mustafa’s son Masoud Barzani pointedly blames only the communist militia and claims that Turkmen agitators were being armed by anti-Kurdish Kemalists in Turkey. Notwithstanding Ankara’s own repression of its Kurds, however, the Turkish regime played a very mixed role in Iraq and indeed during the 1960s was involved in several border incidents against Iraq, though during 1963 they did participate in an alleged plan to surround the peshmerga that was quickly jettisoned.
9. A Shia Arab leader, Fuad Rikabi was nonetheless reportedly a cousin of the arch-Sunni officer Abdul-Salam Arif. He was constantly sympathetic to the Masri regime, and later when the Baathists fell out with Cairo Rikabi became an “independent” Baathist who constantly backed Cairo. Rikabi’s plan to murder was carried out, apparently, on his own initiative without consulting Baathist colleagues, who initially denounced the attempt.
10. Saddam and another militiaman, Samir Najam – who would later be his lieutenant in the Baath regime right up to 2003 – were injured, while another attacker, Abdul-Wahhab Ghurairi, lost his life in the confusion.
11. Arshad cooperated with the army and successive Iraqi governments, often as a minister. After 2003, he founded a political faction in the Mosul region that continues to stress Iraqi territorial integrity.
12. The accusations about Iran were correct, but not so the accusatons about the West where Kurdish nationalism had yet to become a cause celebre.
13. See Eliezer Beeri’s Army Officers and Politics in Arab Society (1969), a studious and surprisingly sympathetic – though not always entirely accurate – account of Arab military politics in the postcolonial period.
14. This widespread accusation was levelled by no less a pro-Western ruler than the Jordanian ruler Hussein bin Talal, who protested that he was hypocritically attacked as a Western agent when the Iraqi Baathists were in direct cahoots with US intelligence. The Syrian Baathists, hitherto unaware of the link, confronted the Iraqi Baathists, whose leader Ali Saadi protested that they had exploited US links in the same way as the Bolshevik revolution had exploited German links. See Malik Mufti’s excellent Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism and political order in Syria and Iraq (1996)
15. Peshmerga sources alleged that the garrison had rounded up a hundred “promising” Kurds – intellectuals, doctors, engineers, and so forth – and eliminated them in a precursor to genocide. This claim is otherwise unsubstantiated, but was faithfuly reproduced in Gareth Stansfield and Liam Anderson’s 2004 book The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, democracy, or division? It seems likelier that the victims were suspected peshmerga collaborators – who in the case of the leftist factions tended to belong to intelligentsia. Ethnic cleansing and genocide do not appear to have been government aims until the 1970s and 1980s respectively, though this could hardly comfort earlier victims
16. Mufti (1996) records Ali Saadi’s lieutenant, Dhiya Faliki, as claiming that the repentant faction led by Shabib and Jawad told them, “We betrayed you and were betrayed in turn.
17. Gamal Abdel-Nasser acquiesced, but two years later Qutb was executed
18. In an interview with Khadduri (1969), Khairuddin Hasib explained that he played on Abdul-Salam Arif’s ambitions, telling him that there was no way to achieve either union or personal fame other than socialist reforms
19. A stiff-backed officer who avoided politics, Abdul-Jabbar Shansal served in the army right down to the 1990s, eventually ending up as army minister. He was the only non-Baathist officer to survive so long in the Baath regime, at a time when Baathist purges were cutting down his colleagues left, right, and centre. This situation goes some way in explaining this otherwise very competent officer’s timidity: Israeli intelligence sources in the 1990s would remark on Shanshal’s almost pitiful meekness before Saddam Hussein, while his own subordinate officer Raad Hamdani criticized him for his unwillingness to take responsibility. Obviously, responsibility was a dangerous thing for an army officer in the Baath regime
20. Abdul-Aziz Uqaili had fought Mala Mustafa in the 1940s and, though a Free Officer in the 1950s, was otherwise uninterested in politics a. Ibrahim Faisal played an important role on the ground throughout the 1960s conflict; as late as 2004, an anonymous Kurdish official claimed that he had “fought on every mountain in Kurdistan against us.” See Luke Harding, “US fails to talk round defiant council,” The Guardian, 1 June 2004. Both officers played a major role in expanding the army in the northlands. Khadduri (1969). Yunis Attarbashi came from a prominent transnationalist family in Mosul; he had been imprisoned, though eventually released, for having allegedly plotted with Rashid Kailani against Abdul-Karim Qasim in 1958, and his cousin Qasim Attarbashi was promoted to command the Mosul force in 1960-61 as a sop to the right.
21. Abdul-Latif Darraji had been perhaps Abdul-Salam Arif’s closest aide since the 1958 coup in Baghdad, where he accompanied the Arif brothers in securing southern Baghdad. Mustafa Abdullah was a more minor Free Officer, while Abdul-Hadi Hafiz had been principally known as an officer in the Mosul bloc.
22. Naji Talib, a rare Shia Arab Free Officer, had been an important mediator between Free Officer blocs from the start. Together with Rajab Abdul-Majid, another early Free Officer and onetime rival of Abdul-Karim Qasim, and army minister Shaker Shukri, Talib represented the Free Officers’ interests in the regime
23. See Pesach Malovany’s Wars of Modern Babylon: The Iraqi Army 1921-2003 (2017). Sagi’s presence need not be over-analyzed; though it is clear that at some point Israel tried to win over the peshmerga, nor were the peshmerga always open to their flirtation and, for instance in 1973, Mala Mustafa withheld from attacking the Iraqi army when it sent a force to fight the Israelis in Syria.
24. Because Saddam became such a central figure in subsequent years, it is not always clear that every feat attributed to him in the 1960s is true. Another reported participant in the purge was army officer Salah Qadi, who would later command Iraqi forces against Iran and was the first victim of Saddam’s executions after the Iranian city Khurramshaher-Muhammirah was reconquered by Tehran in 1982.
25. It is indeed somewhat difficult to know how many coups against the Baathists were real and how many were propaganda; so too the incessant reports of their purges, because on several occasions a reportedly executed officer would turn up years later in a position of command. Nonetheless, the examples of the Baath’s victims simply in the elite are many. They include Tahir Yahya, who was imprisoned and perished in squalor, with Saddam Hussein reportedly taking a personal delight in pegging down this flamboyant officer. Abdul-Razzaq Nayef was murdered at Britain in 1979, where he had allegedly been plotting to topple the Baathists. Both erstwhile rivals Abdul-Rahman Bazzaz and Abdul-Aziz Uqaili were imprisoned: the harmless Bazzaz was released because of a terminal sickness, but Uqaili starved in prison. Ibrahim Faisal had barely taken over as army commander when Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar, the most “rightist” from the Baath command, entrapped him in what appeared to be a scheme for a coup against the regime. Faisal languished in prison for decades; his nephew Nizar Khazraji later became army commander, but defected and escaped to the West following the 1990 Kuwait invasion. After 2003, Nizar organized Faisal’s release and he was briefly considered to command a reconstructed Iraqi army, but Kurdish opposition told against him and instead he was simply given a pension. Saeed Hammou was initially reported slain, but was instead simply briefly imprisoned and later left the public sphere. As mentioned above, Abdul-Jabbar Shanshal only survived by keeping painstakingly clear from politics or responsibility. Abdul-Salam Arif was posthumously attacked as a Western agent, as was his oil minister Abdul-Aziz Wattari. The communist officer Daud Salman had already been murdered in the 1963 regime on account of his role in the Kirkuk slaughter. But Baathists were not exempt; Hardan, a particularly dangerous competitor for power, was purged as a scapegoat for having failed to defend the Palestinian fidayin against Jordan in 1970, and he was murdered in exile the next year. Former paramilitary commandant Abdul-Karim Nusrat, who allegedly sympathized with the Syrian Baath, had been murdered in mysterious circumstances during 1969. Hammad Shihab was murdered by Saddam’s sadistic rival for power, Nazim Kazzar, during an abortive coup attempt in 1973, where his fellow defector from 1968 Saadoun Ghaidan was also injured.

 

 

The Nakba, Part 3/3: The statelets fight it out

Ibrahim Moiz, rights reserved

 

24/6/2018

 

The termination of the British mandate, which coincided with the announcement of Israel’s independence as the first Jewish nation-state and the attack by several neighbouring states to save Palestine, marks the last and perhaps most tortuous chapter in the 1947-48 Nakba. While the inter-militia conflict that marked the previous six months had played out largely independently of the United Nations, the newly established Israeli ethnostate and the advancing opposition – comprising military contingents from Syria, Masr, Iraq, Transjordan, and Lebanon – could not afford to ignore international dynamics, which were uneasily juggled with forces on the ground. In the end, both international and local dynamics tilted in Israel’s favour, completing the final stage in Palestine’s tragedy.

The conflict was interspersed with three internationally brokered ceasefires, whose main effect was to enable its protagonists to catch their breaths. The first ceasefire, taking place some four weeks after the British mandate ended during June 1948, occurred with the Israeli forces enjoying only a slight, and by no means decisive, advantage on the battlefield. Ten critical days separated it from the next ceasefire, in July 1948, and in those ten days the Israelis seized the initiative with a flurry of triumphs on various fronts, making various advances everywhere except the Hashimi-held West Bank region. These advances pressed the opposing states decisively onto the back foot, resulting in frenetic negotiations whose main effect was to place the West Bank, in eastern Palestine, under Transjordanian rule, given that it had the strongest international connection – with a still relevant British Empire, mainly – and that its Arab Legion had garrisoned the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The coup de grace occurred in October 1948, where a devastating and remorseless Israeli assault plunged north and south, destroying the Inqadh militia in Galilee and the Masri army in the Nagab. This left Palestine, with the exception of the Jordanian-governed West Bank and Masri-governed Ghazza strip, entirely under Israeli occupation.

Though it was technically five Arab armies that, together with assorted militias, failed against the newly formed Israeli army, this was far from an underdog scenario. To begin with, the Syrian and Lebanese states, only recently released from the French yoke, were barely older than their Israeli counterpart; Lebanon’s tiny army could afford only a token contribution at a borderland village. The British-trained armies made only marginally more impact; the oldest army, from Masr, had no battlefield experience. Ministerial management and ammunition shortages plagued both the Syrian and Masri armies; there was no actual coordination between the various militaries; and, most importantly, the Arab governments that led them were riven with mutual enmity and at each others’ throats throughout.

They made a stark contrast to the battle-hardened, unified, politically shrewd, and remorselessly decisive Israelis; even though the Israeli army was merely a renamed Haganah, it functioned as a state army, easily outnumbering, outplanning, and outfighting its scattered opponents. Non-state forces – the remnants of the exile Palestinian regime led by Amin Hussaini and loosely represented by the now-scattered Jihad Army, the Inqadh Army, the Muslim Brethren, and bedouin fighters – proved rather tougher on the battlefield, but were largely isolated from the politics and were forced to yield to tutelage by either Amman, Damascus, or Cairo. The losers were the Palestinians, who were expelled in the tens of thousands as the Israelis drove their advantage home.

The first stage: May – June 1948

As the British mandate ended a rather inglorious thirty-year tenure, the Haganah-led Jewish political-military forces in Palestine, led by the ruthless David Ben-Gurion, announced their “independence” – independence from whom is uncertain, though doubtless countless Jews victimized in Europe saw a nation-state as their salvation – and duly received international recognition. This was accompanied by a sharp uptick in military activity; in addition to a madcap race for British-installed outposts and forts between Arabs and Jews, the vario’us Arab states advanced into Palestine, and the Israelis advanced steadily eastwards in Jerusalem.

With western and southern Jerusalem having been wrenched from Jihad Army forces, the Israeli march rumbled east through northern Jerusalem. Their main opposition – a Jihad unit captained by longtime Palestinian militant leader Bahjat Abu-Gharbia – stood little chance, and the small mujahidin garrison in Jerusalem’s eastern Old City, captained by the Iraqi Inqadh officer Fadil Rasheed, seemed increasingly isolated, its only offensive activity directed to a small Jewish quarter to its south, whose presence compelled it to split its forces on two fronts.

Again this backdrop, the Palestinian exile government’s prime minister, Ahmed Abdul-Baqi, had appealed to the Transjordanian government for help. Amman’s ruler Abdullah I bin Hussein, who wanted nothing more than to expand his realm into Palestine, wasted no time in responding, overruling his British military commander John Glubb’s reservations. The Legion approached Jerusalem from north and south; the southern prong, captained by Abdullah Tal, played an especially vital role. Tal successfully withstood several concerted Israeli assaults on the Old City, while his daring lieutenant, Mahmoud Ubaidat, secured the capture of the Jewish quarter. Within days, Abdullah I was able to appoint a trusted lieutenant, Ibrahim Hashim, as his governor-general in Palestine; the crafty Hashimi ruler was confident in getting at least a slice out of the pie.

The northern advance on Jerusalem, proceeding from Nablus and Ramullah under British officer Norman Lash’s overall command, encountered more difficulty. One battalion, captained by Bob Slade, was assigned to proceed south to the Old City and thereby close off any Israeli threat to East Jerusalem. Slade and his deputy, Major Buchanan, were injured in the fighting and it was, in an early taste of command for native Arab officers, Ali Abu-Nowar and Sadiq Sharaa who directed the advance into Jerusalem under stiff fire. Another native officer from Bedouin stock, Habis Mujalli, scored a major strategic point when, assisted by Bedouin militia, his unit secured control of the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, thereby cutting off the Israeli forces in the city’s north from the Israeli capital; through the summer this front withstood Israeli attacks, thereby assuring that Jerusalem’s eastern half remained unchallenged. Finally, a third Legion unit, captained by Australian officer Bill Newman, attempted to break into Israeli-occupied Jerusalem from the north; after a severe fight ended in stalemate, however, Glubb vetoed further advances, fearing that the Legion was too thinly spread. Nonetheless, Abdullah was eager to capture what was realistically possible; when the influential Jihad commander in Lydd-Ramla, Hasan Salameh, was killed in battle, the Legion swiftly sent a small force, captained by British officer Nigel Bromage, to assume control of these two towns, not far inland from the Israeli strongholds on the coast; a Legionnaire, Idris Sultan, assumed their military governance, leading to popular optimism that envisioned a Legion advance into this region and perhaps up to the coast. This illusion would be shattered after the first ceasefire.

The Arab heartland in Palestine at this point lay in the West Bank’s main cities, Nablus and Ramullah. Transjordan, which had through its British link established firm roots here before the mandate ended, was viewed with suspicion by the other Arab states, with the partial exception of its Hashimi cousins in Iraq. An Iraqi force, captained by Nuraddin Mahmoud, had eventually garrisoned Nablus, thereby freeing up the Legion to move south towards Jerusalem. The Iraqis’ role has been unfairly downplayed; though they famously failed to recapture eastern Palestine’s Baysan area leading into the Jizril valley at the start of their campaign, they nonetheless attempted, albeit with limited success, some more ambitious exploits thereafter. Aiming to drive a wedge midway through the nascent Israeli state, two Iraqi prongs – captained by Ghazi Daghistani and Abdul-Karim Qasim – plunged west from the West Bank towards the coast. They came far closer to realizing this aim than is usually recognized; Qasim reached the outskirts of the coastal town Natanya before he was repulsed by an Israeli counterattack, and Daghistani established a firm frontline at Tulkarm. Meanwhile, a reinforcement unit, captained by Saleh Taufiq, arrived to bolster the defences to the north, in and around Jinin.

The significance of the Iraqi moves was not lost on the Israelis. They soon mounted a counterattack. The smaller, somewhat diversionary assault, failed to penetrate the countryside around Tulkarm; this valley, manned by both Daghistani’s lieutenant Khalil Jasim and various Palestinian militias, held out during the entire conflict. The larger thrust, however, converged at Afoula and plunged southwards towards Jinin. However, an Iraqi force captained by a daring highland veteran, Omar Ali-Daghistani, broke the Israeli siege and pushed them back. Far from the dismissive attitude assigned to them by many historians, the Iraqis did play an outsize role in the West Bank; the reason it is usually missed is the fact that, in contrast to Amman, Baghdad salvaged very little politically from the campaign.

The Lebanese army could only afford a token contribution, which focused on the mountainous border village Malikia overlooking the route into Palestine. They committed a single battalion, captained by Jamil Husami; the village would change hands several times over the war. The route that Malikia guarded had been liberally employed by the paramilitary Inqadh Army, whose commander Fawzi Qawuqji collaborated closely with the Lebanese army minister Majid Arslan and commander Fouad Chehab. Qawuqji himself operated mainly in the central Galilee, where he mounted several unsuccessful assaults from Nazareth towards occupied Tiberias; the kibbutzes on this route remained defiant against these attacks.

The Syrian army was originally intended to take this sector. On the eve of battle, however, the expeditionary commander Abdul-Wahhab Hakim was ordered to change course, instead proceeding far east into the Golan Heights region, and then skirting Lake Tiberias’ eastern shore. Hakim made a breakneck march that briefly overran the border Samakh village; the Syrians evidently expected an Iraqi collaboration that, perhaps owing to the Iraqi failure to penetrate Baysan, never came. They were unexpectedly stopped and then repelled at the kibbutzes on Lake Tiberias’ southern shore; within two days, their advances were completely reversed.

The outcry that resulted in Syria – unlike the other participant Arab countries, a fledgling republic with incredibly volatile politics, whose interior minister Sabri Asali soon mounted a wartime ban on political activity in an attempt to control the situation – forced the changeover of both armyminister Ahmad Sharabati and commander Abdullah Atfa; both accused each other as having underequipped the army. The fact that the same charges would be levelled against their successors indicated that, contrary to popular rumours, corruption and treason were not the reason for the Syrian failure but a systemic shortage of ammunition that should, in normal circumstances, have been calculated before the abruptly planned campaign. Atfa’s successor, Husni Zaeem, took several weeks to plan the next assault, whose aims, however, would be decidedly modest and only slightly more ambitious than the Lebanese attack.

This second assault came in early June 1948. Qawuqji threw himself vainly at the settlements between Nazareth and Tiberias. The Syrian attack came from both north and east this time; the eastern attack failed, but in the north Anwar Bannoud and Taufiq Bashour established a bridgehead on the northern border. Zaeem seems to have realized, much as other commanders would, that succeeding in a minor effort was better than failing in a major effort.

Similarly to Syria, Masr’s campaign at Palestine’s other end soon downsized its ambitions sharply. The Masris contributed both an army division and a Muslim Brethren battalion; the fact that these two unevenly sized forces made a roughly equivalent impression in the battlefield testified to both the army’s inexperience and Cairo’s hesitation. While Farouk bin Fuad I was quite happy to back the Palestinian exile government represented by mufti Amin Hussaini and spite his rival Abdullah I, the government led by Mahmoud Nuqrashy was extremely hesitant to get its inexperienced army involved in any substantive sense. It was a Muslim Brethren battalion, comprising both volunteers and off-duty Masri soldiers such as their commander Ahmed Abdel-Aziz, who made the first foray into Palestine.

In the vast southern Nagab desert, what mattered was control of routes between settlements; the story of this campaign is therefore littered with fights over kibbutzes, police forts, and that most evil necessity in military historiography, the numbered hill. This warfare was heavily conducive to defence; both Jewish kibbutzes and Muslim police forts generally proved resilient against attacks and encirclement. Such strongholds as the kibbutz to Asqalan’s east, the kibbutz between Ghazza and Khan Yunis, and the forts between Ashdoud and Bethlehem proved astoundingly firm, especially given that their garrisons largely comprised untrained amateurs such as the Zionist underclasses and the Muslim Brethren. Initially instructed by army expeditionary commander Ahmed Muawy to remain at the desert town Birsabaa and guard the expedition’s eastern flank, Abdel-Aziz soon responded instead to a request by the Muslims in Bethlehem and Hebron to reinforce them. He rushed north to these towns, assuming control with the acquiescence of the Arab Legion and reducing the neighbouring kibbutzes. While the Muslim Brethren dash into Bethlehem and Hebron proved Masr’s most ambitious exploit in the campaign, it also limited Muawy’s choices; he would spend the remainder in the campaign trying to protect his flank east of the Masri base at Ghazza, where most kibbutzes proved beyond Masri grasp.

Nonetheless, the Masri vanguard, captained by Mohamed Naguib, advanced as far north as Ashdoud, sweeping aside most resistance. There, however, they met a ferocious Israeli counterattack; while the Masri lines held, Naguib thereafter focused his attention not north but east inland. The police forts between Naguib at Ashdoud and Abdel-Aziz at Bethlehem were garrisoned by Masri officers and Muslim Brethren both; this connection could potentially isolate the desert-based Israeli forces and ensure that, come the negotiations, Cairo could negotiate the desert’s preservation from Israeli occupation.

When the first ceasefire was announced in June 1948, therefore, there was reason for guarded optimism on a purely military basis. In political terms, however, this was critically undermined by interstate rivalry among the Arab governments – most pressingly the rivalry between the two regimes with the most potential political-military influence, Amman and Cairo. During the ceasefire Israel bolstered its positions and armaments significantly – most famously, a major weapons supply from communist Czechoslovakia, with Soviet approval in aiding an apparently socialistic “liberation movement”. Astonishingly in the meantime, the Arab regimes failed to agree or coordinate on the most basic political strategy. The rivalry between the Hashimis in Amman and the Pashas in Cairo was paramount. By this point, indeed, the question of an independent Palestine seems to have entirely vanished. Rather Amman and Cairo, who covered the biggest territory in Palestine, were determined to salvage what they could not only in relation to Israel but in relation to their Arab rivals.

In contrast to the effusive credit Abdullah I received from pro-Amman, including British, commentators, modern writers have tended, largely on the basis of his longtime contacts with such Zionist leaders as Golda Meir, to portray him as an entirely selfish quisling who sold out the Palestinians. This should be put in some perspective; to be sure, Abdullah’s entire career was marked by often cynical self-interest, but his vision of a “Greater Syria” was not too different, in purely territorial terms, to the Arab unionism advocated only a decade later by some of his bitterest opponents. And he was the only Arab state leader to appreciate, as did Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion, that international deliberations were no match for battlefield fait accomplis. That said, he had made every effort to frustrate the most influential Palestinian leader mufti Amin Hussaini, and his ambition to join Transjordan with whatever he could acquire from Palestine were no secret. It is rather truer to say that Abdullah put the Palestinians in a spot where they had to choose between him and the Zionists, an obvious no-contest. However grudgingly, many Palestinian veterans – including mufti lieutenants by no means inherently sympathetic to Amman – soon threw in their lot with Amman, which was the only Arab state to attempt to merge Palestinians into Jordanian nationality in a reflection of its founder’s ambitions.

A disastrous ten days: July 1948

What contributed more than anything else to Amman’s subsequent vilification – including not only among the Palestinians, but many of its own Legion officers, including most field captains mentioned in this article – was the trauma experienced in the Lydd-Ramla area, at the very extreme ends of the Legion’s operations, during July 1948. This episode, occurring in scorching heat during the month of Ramadan, saw an Israeli campaign overrun the area with virtually no resistance. The Israeli plan was evidently to first take these two towns, and then open the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road and capture Ramullah to boot. In Amman, the first phase was apparently seen as a necessary evil to prevent the second phase by bolstering the forces there. Glubb recalled the already modest Legion garrison in Lydd, and the region fell rapidly. The Israeli advance was utterly remorseless, systemically expelling Palestinians in the tens of thousands and utterly ransacking their property. It was the first, but not the last, time Israel had attempted such tactics on a wide scale since its foundation two months prior. The resultant misery saw vast leagues of Palestinians trickle east towards Transjordan, their misery compounded by widespread resentment that an ambitious ruler who had stripped them of their own independent defences had now withdrawn his own.

These resentments, which trickled for the first time on a serious scale into the Legion’s ranks, were not lost on Abdullah. Glubb served as a convenient foil, though not entirely unfair; in a very publicized encounter in front of his cabinet, Abdullah lashed out at the Legion commander for withholding supplies and suggested – to great shock in London – that Glubb was free to resign. While he stayed on, this stung Glubb, who had always viewed the Legion with a certain paternalism, but it did help deflect criticism from the monarchy to its British advisors. When the Legion commander angrily pushed for the recall of Omar Ali-Daghistani, the skilful Iraqi Jinin commandant who had just mounted a successful northward march towards Afoula, such misgivings simmered further. And the fact that Habis Mujalli, the ultra-loyal Bedouin officer, had withstood another concerted Israeli attack on the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem road, and that serious Israeli attempts to capture East Jerusalem were thereupon jettisoned after one final push at the Old City, was only cold comfort in this atmosphere, even if it vindicated Amman’s decisions in a purely cold-blooded sense. During October 1948, Abdullah’s threat to withdraw the Legion from Palestine entirely should the Arab governments continue to court mufti Hussaini’s exile government confirmed to many observers – not least his own officers, many of whom would sharply turn against him – that he had effectively sold Palestine out even as he claimed to have salvaged it.

The Masris in the south, bolstered further by assistance from Muslim Brethren, bedouins, Arabian volunteers from Yemen and Saudi Arabia, and Sudanese units, sprang a day before the ceasefire ended. Planned independently by Naguib, this initiative featured joint assaults against several kibbutzes and Israeli settlements in the desert to Asqalan and Ashdoud’s east. When most such attacks ebbed away without success, the expeditionary commander Muawy temporarily removed Naguib and adopted the far more conservative policy of simply holding ground and guarding his extended supply lines. By this point Israel’s airforce was a regular factor in combat, to which its Masri counterpart only offered sporadic ripostes.

At Palestine’s other end, Israel mounted a concerted assault on several lines. With the Lebanese battalion having withdrawn during the ceasefire and handed its position to Inqadh Army, the militia was their main target. An Israeli attack did target the Syrian frontline, captained by Anwar Bannoud, on the northern border, but after several days’ stiff fighting this front remained unchanged. This was not the case in the Inqadh sector in Galilee proper. Another vain attempt by Qawuqji to open the path to Tiberias faltered, and meanwhile his base Nazareth came under a sudden Israeli attack.

Israel’s conquest of Nazareth deserves some elaboration, since it shows the cunning with which Ben-Gurion and his cohorts approached the campaign. In contrast to other Palestinian towns, whose population had been freely brutalized and expelled, Nazareth was well-known in Christianity and thereby bound to attract some interest in Western Europe and America. The Israeli takeover of Nazareth was uniquely orderly and peaceful; Ben-Gurion gave firm instructions to protect its Christian sites, and even falsely claimed that the Israelis had gone in to rescue the town’s Christians from its Muslims and from the predatory Inqadh Army’s Iraqis.

What actually happened was quite different. In contrast to Inqadh conduct in Yaffa, their forces in Nazareth, captained by Iraqi officer Madloul Abbas, had been particularly disciplined. They had also forged a common link with the town’s leading Fahoum family – which included mayor Yusuf and council leader Ibrahim – who much preferred them to the area’s Jihad captain, the Fahoum family’s longtime peasant opponent Taufiq Ibrahim. With Inqadh forces having left in the thrust towards Tiberias, however, the Fahoums were eager not to experience the misery of the neighbouring towns and so agreed to peaceably hand over the town to the Israelis on the condition that it would be spared and its population remain. This was politically convenient, of course, for Ben-Gurion – notwithstanding his strong disdain towards the Arabs, whom he vainly hoped would soon quietly leave – and he instructed commander Haim Laskov to proceed with care. Nazareth, therefore, was the only important town conquered by Israel without accompanying atrocity. The mujahidin position in the Galilee was now shorn of any major towns, and reduced to the countryside. After the delicate balance just ten days earlier, Israel entered the second ceasefire firmly in control.

The Tempest: Israel overruns the North and South, Autumn 1948

Most of the succeeding three months saw the focus shift to the geopolitical and diplomatic sphere. The Israelis had a far more propitious prospect than the United Nations’ partition plan a year earlier; now, they held most of the fertile Galilee and the central hinterland. Transjordan had salvaged the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, if at enormous cost; they had also by this point garrisoned Hebron and Bethlehem, taking over from the Muslim Brethren contingent there. Masr still held a slender chance of retrieving the southern desert, through diplomacy. These bitter rivals therefore found themselves in ironic agreement at the Arab League that the war must end. The best-known United Nations mediator, Swedish diplomat Folke Bernadotte, had in fact been attempting to hammer out a compromise that may have enabled Transjordan and Masr to hold onto their ground. Instead, his infamous murder by the Irgun during September 1948 put paid to that proposal.

To Amman and Cairo’s indignation, it was those governments with the least remaining forces in Palestine – and hence the least to lose from continued conflict – who urged that warfare continue until full liberation: these included Syria, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. The former pair, among whom Lebanon’s Maronite establishment had privately reconciled itself to an Israeli presence but dared not provoke its Muslim populace with an open admission theretofore, were largely playing to their domestic gallery, where unrest among various political factions at the Palestinian plight was rampant. By contrast, both Amman and Cairo, however otherwise different their aims, had a monarchic elite that responded largely to British overtures.

It was probably; in order to placate Britain that Masri prime minister Mahmoud Nuqrashy suddenly banned opposition activity, including the then still militarily active and widely popular Muslim Brethren. This was a blow to the Masri frontline, and in fact the army’s expeditionary commanders – Ahmed Muawy and his replacement Fouad Sadek – would lobby staunchly in the Brethren’s favour, arguing that they had manned the frontlines where other civilians had failed the army. This would also strengthen the bonds and collaboration between the Brethren and the army’s dissident Free Officers; many officers secretly belonged to both groups. But events had overtaken them in the meantime. During November 1948, a Muslim Brother student called Abdel-Magid Hassan murdered Nuqrashy. Though the Brethren’s leader Hasan Banna condemned and distanced the group from the murder, this prompted a merciless crackdown by Nuqrashy’s replacement Ibrahim Abdel-Hady, which would result in Banna’s own murder three months later.

Accompanying the political turmoil in Masr was the turmoil on the battlefield. During October 1948, Israel was given two separate pretexts to complete its conquest. In the north, Qawuqji – declaring his independence from international ceasefires – foolishly attacked a kibbutz; the Israelis had been waiting for just such an opportunity, and immediately stormed Galilee in a savage campaign led by that veteran punisher, Moshe Carmel. Villages were systemically wrecked and plundered, peasants murdered and expelled, as the majority of the Galilee’s Palestinian populace bore north to safety. They were given no leeway by the Israelis, who seeking to maximize their acquisitions stormed across the Lebanese border and as far as the Litani river, undoing at a stroke the previous year’s hard-won Arab bulwarks.

In the south, the Masri army fared little better. Israel required a similar pretext here; a United Nations-approved relief convoy into the desert bypassed a Masri unit, but to the Israelis’ frustration the Masri soldiers kept to their word and did not attack. So the convoy fired at them first, prompting a retaliatory Masri burst that became Israel’s pretext for their southern conquest. Led by Yigael Alon, who had directed the summer conquest in Lydd-Ramla, this Israeli attack was impressive in its breadth; its further reach extended into the Sinai proper, where commando teams sabotaged Masri supply lines and blocked off supply routes. This development suddenly forced the Masri force to defend its rear; in order to do this, Muawy recalled the frontline coastal force from Ashdoud, thus enabling Israel to both overrun the coast and break the encirclement of their counterparts in the desert by November 1948.

This included the capture of Birsaba, the Nagab’s main town, whose small Masri garrison, captained by Helmi Gomaa and reinforced by Abu-Sitta bedouins under the leadership of Abdullah Moussa, quickly crumbled after two days’ bombardment at the end of October 1948. The main focus in the campaign hinged at the Nagab desert’s northern edge, where the line of police forts that had hitherto help encircle the Israelis in the desert were now themselves encircled. This comprised some four thousand soldiers, with a large Sudanese contingent including its commander Sayed Taha, as well as volunteers from Yemen and Saudi Arabia. They literally fought tooth and nail – astonished Israelis would recall how Saudi fighters whose bullets had run out resorted to using their teeth instead. It took several attempts for the attackers to capture one fort from its commandant, Salah Badr, and surround the remaining force in a narrow gap at the Nagab’s northern desert. The force was now besieged, but its morale remained intact, as Taha consistently refused Israeli offers to surrender. The Arab League, having lost any hope of conquest, now busied itself with attempting to relieve the besieged pocket by diplomacy.

There was one final flurry in the southernmost extremity, however. The Masri expeditionary commander Fouad Sadek, who had just relieved Ahmed Muawy, had wisely decided to ignore Cairo’s orders and tacitly collaborate with a Muslim Brethren unit led by Kamel Sharif. Sharif and Dair Balah commandant Mahmoud Rifaat collaborated in repulsing one final Israeli attack on the Sinai border. Realizing that a foray into the Sinai was not worth the effort, the Israelis soon pulled back. Negotiations opened at Cyprus over the new year; though the Arab regimes publicly refused to acknowledge Israel, they had in practice come to terms with its existence as a regional power, one whose military effectiveness had outstripped their own and whose diplomacy, wooing both superpowers in the emergent Cold War, stemmed from its status as a major outpost of Global Northern imperialism in the Levant.

The Nakba, part 2/3: The militias’ war, November 1947 – May 1948

Ibrahim Moiz, copyright

30 May 2018

In one sense the 1947-48 Palestinian war was one of the earliest examples of the pattern of warfare that has been common across the world since the Second World War. In contrast to most conflicts of the previous century, it did not involve entrenched world powers deploying massive armies against each other; instead, the tumult resulted from the duels between rather small, localized militia units. What helped the Zionist side was their effective unification of such localized fronts into a sizeable, cohesive force of some sixty thousand fighters, the Haganah, and the resultant strategy they were able to plan and coordinate. By contrast, for both political and incidental reasons, the Palestinian fronts whom the Haganah routed were largely fragmented, scattered, and uncoordinated. The largest Palestinian fronts, such as that in Jerusalem during spring 1948, numbered just over a thousand; most were only a few hundred strong, with numbers fluctuating regularly because most fighters were part-timers from the Palestinian countryside. The arrival of the Arab states’ expeditionary forces raised the number to respectable levels, but even so the largest state forces – those from Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan – numbered just a division apiece, with no effective coordination and particularly ineffective resource management. It was, in the manner typical of post-World War conflicts, a war carried out between forces of decidedly modest size, but no less devastating for that.

The remainder of the article shall proceed in two parts: first we examine the conflict in the final six months of the British mandate, when the Haganah and other Zionist militias faced off against Inqadh, Jihad Muqaddas, and other Palestinian levies (to whom I shall refer, without controversy it is to be hoped, as mujahidin), and next we shall turn to the war between the fledgling states, which lasted roughly another six months before the Arab rout. Eventually this conflict saw Israel establish control over the entirety of Palestine, except for the Jordan river’s West Bank and the southern Ghazza strip, which would only be conquered two decades later.

Battle lines

Though there had been some violence before autumn 1947, the United Nations’ decision during partition Palestine, celebrated by the Zionists and bemoaned by their opponents, marked the start of major conflict. In a pattern familiar to those who study modern militia warfare, the fighting was overwhelmingly localizd, yet the Haganah was able at length to coordinate its fronts and thereby expand its activity by spring 1947, when a devastating campaign overran the coast and the Galilee, just prior to the British evacuation.

The geographic distribution of the protagonists contributed to the early localization. The Jewish population was most heavily concentrated on the coast around Tel Aviv; there were also significant Jewish centres in the Galilee and in western Jerusalem. Jerusalem was swiftly divided into its Arab-majority and Jewish-majority districts, the former comprising most of the city’s east, south, and centre. Similarly, mixed towns such as Haifa and Safad were barricaded between their Arab and Jewish quarters. In the countryside, the Arabs generally enjoyed a numerical advantage, but rural Jewish settlers had, partly for economic ease and partly in shrewd preparation, built fortified kibbutzes at strategic points and routes, such as the Jinin-Haifa road and the Baysan route overlooking the route from Jordan to the Galilee. These fortified farm blocks would, together with forts such as the Qastal ruins outside Jerusalem and the soon-to-be abandoned British police outposts, assume outsize importance.

Officially, the British government, led by Alan Cunningham, wanted to preserve order until their departure in May 1948. In practice, however, British patrols would intercept and force back mujahidin assaults on many occasions, an inhibition rarely practiced on the Zionists. By the time the mandate ended, Zionist forces had already conquered Safad, Baysan, Tiberias, Haifa, Acre, and Yaffa, as well as much of the surrounding countryside; the only British reaction was to shuttle out Arab refugees, with the occasional muted protest. Quite simply, the Zionist movement understood – and implemented – the concept of a fait accompli far more skilfully and ruthlessly than their Arab opponents could, would, or did; once the Haganah and related militias called the British bluff and attacked, the British garrison could, would, and did do little about it.

British obstructionism towards the mujahidin was also motivated by their approach to the Arab states. Most mujahidin forces attached themselves to either the Jihad Muqaddas Army, loosely directed by the British bane Jerusalem mufti Amin Hussaini, or to the Arab Inqadh Army commanded by Fawzi Qawuqji. Both factions, particularly the former, were viewed with intense suspicion by the premier British client, Transjordanian ruler Abdullah I bin Hussein. Abdullah’s well-known ambition to annex Palestine to his small, impoverished realm was in direct opposition to the mufti’s aims. He wanted to achieve this with his relatively efficient army, the Arab Legion. This would not be permitted by Abdullah’s British patrons while the mandate remained, but that fact did not stop him from trying to impede the mujahidin, particularly the Jihad Army. Though Jordanian officers did covertly train and arm Arab militias, this seems to have been done largely on their own initiative. Muhammad Hunaidi, who tried to organize the Haifa garrison, had resigned from his military post in the Legion first.

In the Arab camp, Abdullah was backed by his Hashimi cousins in Iraq, who also commanded an efficient army with relatively promising prospects and shared his British tutelage and enmity with the mufti. They did enjoy the support of several Palestinian council leaders, if only if mutual opposition to the mufti as a competitor in the Palestinian upper class; as we shall see, several Palestinian council leaders tried to inhibit militant activity in the hope that the more promising Arab Legion would take over. Meanwhile Transjordan’s competitors in the Arab League, Masr and Syria, offered assistance to, respectively, the Jihad and Inqadh factions without ever exercising real control over them.

First shots

The Jihad and Inqadh forces swung into action over winter 1947-48. During December 1947, Amin’s nephew Abdul-Qadir Hussaini laid siege to Jewish western Jerusalem by cutting off the road to Tel Aviv and mounting attacks from the western half’s only Arab neighbourhood. In contrast with other towns, mujahidin cooperation at Jerusalem was usually strong: Anwar Nusaiba, the city’s council leader, was a Hashimi sympathizer, but coordinated nonetheless with Abdul-Qadir and his kinsman, Khaled Hussaini, who commanded Jihad forces in the city proper. The fact that the charismatic Jihad commander, a veteran of former anti-British revolts, was seen as sincere and indifferent to partisanship, and that the mufti’s more pragmatic prime minister Ahmed Abdul-Baqi was at hand to observe local events, contributed.

The leading Jihad commander to the north, Hasan Salameh, was also an anti-British veteran but never managed to circumvent politics in the same way. This was evident at Yaffa, an Arab-majority coastal enclave surrounded by Jewish settlements and just a stone’s throw from the Jewish stronghold Tel Aviv. In Yaffa city itself, Nimr Hawwari, a lawyer who had long competed with the mufti for control in the anti-British resistance, had taken over as commander. He was approved by mayor Yusuf Haikal, who though an independent member of the mufti’s shadow cabinet gravitated towards minimizing violence until the mandate’s end; doubtless Yaffa’s vulnerable position as well as their political inclinations influenced their considerations. When Hawwari negotiated a local ceasefire with a Zionist militia, however, mufti Amin portrayed this as treason and demanded Hawwari’s ouster. However, his own favoured lieutenant, Salameh, could hardly take over, since he was based further inland around Ramla and Lydda. Eventually a compromise was reached whereby Salah Nazir, acceptable to both factions, served as Salameh’s lieutenant in Yaffa. But this could not paper over the garrison’s deep divisions. In this factionalism, the Inqadh Army’s recently deployed unit, largely comprising Iraqi soldiers, could have potentially helped whip the garrison into shape. But the first Inqadh commandant, Abdul-Wahhab Shaikh-Ali, soon quit in frustration over the factionalism and his replacement, Adil Najamuddin, only fuelled factionalism by attempting to replace the local garrison entirely with his troops, who meanwhile earned an unsavoury reputation. At Yaffa, the Iraqi soldiers’ patronizing attitude and, worse, abuses soon gave them a uniquely hated reputation.

Apart from sending largely uncoordinated contingents to bolster such towns as Yaffa, the Inqadh Army had also entered Palestine from two directions: the north, via Lebanon and Syria, and the east, via Transjordan – in spite of some consternation in Amman, where the already uneasy government was further pressured by indignant appeals from the British Palestine governor, Alan Cunningham, to bar off mujahidin passage. The strategy, it appears, involved these two prongs fighting their way to a convergence the Galilee, and then proceeding southwards through the West Bank towards Jerusalem. The plan never came close to fruition for both political and military reasons. The northern commander, Adib Shishakli, first unsuccessfully attempted to reduce the kibbutz at the Naharia border with Lebanon and was, moreover, prevented by the local British garrison from mounting any offensives in the main Galilee region around Safad; the most he could do was send troops to reinforce the local militias. In the east, Fawzi Qawuqji dispatched another Syrian officer, Muhammad Safa, to attack the kibbutz near Baysan that abutted the Jordanian route into the Galilee. During the subsequent assault, mangled communications between Qawuqji and Safa descended to farce; the attackers’ already unpromising prospects faded when a heavily armed British patrol arrived and ordered Safa’s dispersal. From that point, Qawuqji would relocate further south in the West Bank heartland and attempt to reach the coast from there, leaving Shishakli to operate autonomously in the Galilee.

A critical window

Though violence did not abate, the “frontlines”, such that they were, remained largely static until April 1948. This period saw continuing discord amid the mujahidin, while the Haganah subtly strengthened its positions. They steadily eliminated Arab militia leaders with diverse methods: at Jerusalem, several Jihad officers – including Mahmoud Jamil, son of the shadow cabinet’s influential member Jamal Hussaini, and district commandant Subhi Barakat – were killed in battle. Haifa’s respected Jordanian commandant Muhammad Hunaidi fell to a bomb attack while Shakib Wahab, the autonomous Inqadh vassal in the northwest hinterland, was assiduously wooed and persuaded that a fragmented, mostly Sunni Muslim cause was not worth the blood of his minority Druze constitutents. Wahab’s betrayal demonstrated to the Zionists the value of wedging between the Sunni majority in the Levant and assorted disgruntled minorities, a policy that continued and perhaps most destructively manifested itself through Israel’s role in the Lebanese civil war thirty years later.

At any rate, the Arabs were doing a fair job at internal combustion without Haganah infiltration. As we have noted, urban notables largely comprising the enemies of mufti Amin Hussaini sought to maintain the status quo until the British withdrawal; militants – largely rural peasants whipped up by preachers or by career officers – chafed at this apparent defeatism, especially as violence continued from the Zionist side largely unchecked by the same British mandate that regularly disarmed mujahidin forces. The “conciliatory” camp argued that inferior firepower – for the Damascus-based military council was unable, perhaps under political pressure from the anti-mufti bloc, to deliver arms consistently – required conservation. Yet the Hussainis’ bloc, drawing on its fundraising links with such groups as the Arab League, Muslim Brethren, and anti-Hashimi governments, and its strong roots in the countryside where the mufti retained considerable popularity, armed its fronts much more assiduously, drawing into its camp both autonomous militias and Inqadh officers who were frustrated with Inqadh inefficiency.

The split in Inqadh was evidenced at several fronts. Qawuqji had dispatched as Jerusalem Inqadh commandant Iraqi officer Abdul-Hameed Rawi to reinforce the small Inqadh force there. Abdul-Hameed came into conflict with, and was eventually forced to stand down in favour of, that small Inqadh force’s commandant Fadil Rasheed, another Iraqi officer. This was because of Rasheed’s strong local links: he was close to the Hussainis, having participated with them in the 1941 campaign against Britain at Iraq. Most Jerusalem mujahidin – the Hussainis, Abu-Gharbias, Uraiqats, and Barakats – were veteran comrades-in-arms from anti-British insurgencies, and this helps explain the superior coordination in the city.

Safad, whose first commandant, Syrian officer Ihsan Kamulmaz, veered towards the mufti’s camp and had a reputation for bold action. For unknown reasons, he was replaced with a Jordanian officer, Sari Funaish, who adopted a far more defensive approach, arguing that the garrison needed to conserve its ammunition; his conciliatory stance may be explained by his sympathy with Amman, where his second-in-command Amil Jumaeen would later become a key aide to the government. Funaish accused as an adventurist Kamulmaz, who in turn accused him – with some local approval – as a traitor. Funaish’s disappearance during Safad’s final conquest only strengthened this impression; he was briefly imprisoned in Syria after the war, but accused the regional field commander Shishakli as having deprived him of ammunition. Shishakli, who had first promoted Funaish and also vocally accused the Syrian government as failing to sufficiently arm the fronts, would echo Kamulmaz’s accusations towards Funaish. Whatever actually transpired, the blunt fact is that Safad’s garrison was bitterly divided and would give away easily.

At times the conciliatory camp’s attitude bordered on outright complacency. This was certainly the case in Tiberias, the Galilee town whose two-fifths Arab minority was led by the eponymous Tabari family – comprising mufti Tahir with his kinsmen Sidqi, Nayef, and commandant Kamel – who dominated the council. They had contributed to Tiberias’ unusual avoidance of bloodshed, a situation they vainly hoped could persist. This illusion snapped in April 1948 when Zionist commandant, Zelig Optik took the murder of a Jewish citizen – whose culpability was never investigated – as an opportunity to declare war. Even as Tiberias was being overrun, its notables remained mired in denialism; when a peasant militia, hastily assembled by Mustafa Abu-Dis, tried to relieve them, Sidqi Tabari pled that they withdraw so that he could negotiate a ceasefire that never came. Well-meaning but naïve, the genteel Tabaris – as with most Palestinian notables of their generation – were simply unprepared for the style of total warfare that the Zionists, hardened and embittered after the traumatic Holocaust, had introduced for the first time in generations. It was ironic that Tiberias, prized for its traditional coexistence, was the first Palestinian town whose Arab population was systemically purged.

While the expulsion of Palestinians is not the main focus here, it should be noted that, in the worst traditions of total warfare, the Zionists were willing to resort to whatever means were necessary to maximize their conquests. To this extent, they were perfectly willing to employ massacres – most infamously but by no means exclusively at Dair Yasin, a village outside Jerusalem that had strenuously but vainly sought to avoid conflict – that would intimidate the broader population into flight. The geographic dispersal and scope of these massacres suggests, contrary to what was until recently the standard Israeli position, a broader strategy by the Haganah and other Zionist militias. To be sure, some Arab citizens, particularly those who could afford to such as the Haifan upper classes, had been trickling from the Palestinian tinderbox for some months. Others in the rural areas may indeed have fled before the expected Arab governmental offensive, while word-of-mouth, sometimes ironically stirred by Zionist agents, may have prompted other flights. But these explanations, which have been conventionally employed by Israeli propagandists and many pro-Israel historians to explain the mass exodus, were not unique to the 1948 war and do not explain the mass flight adequately. It is apparent from a vast but often studiously ignored microhistorical record that the Zionist offensives of spring and summer 1948 involved, to a far greater extent than any Arab provocation, mass slaughter and calculated expulsion, on a scale regionally unmatched until the current Syrian war.

Conquest and calamity in the mandate’s dying days

A major Jerusalem offensive began when the Haganah force in its besieged western district attempted to break out towards the Jihad Army strongpoint at the hilltop Qastal castle. It was during this campaign that Zionist militias had butchered the population of Dair Yasin; days later, an Arab militia in northwest Jerusalem, captained by Adil Najjar, slaughtered a Jewish medical convoy approaching the northern city, an atrocity that significantly embarrassed the Arabs and – notably in this polarized atmosphere – led to profound apologies from various Arab officials and civilians alike. But it was southwest Jerusalem where battle was joined. With ammunition running low – for the Hussainis’ pockets were not bottomless – Abdul-Qadir had already travelled to Damascus to obtain more. The military council , chaired by Ismail Safwat, was theoretically meant to liaison between the Arab governments and mujahidin; however, whether because of Abdul-Qadir’s links to the mufti or simply their inability to channel resources, they failed to do so. The Jihad commander, suspecting the former motive, exploded: accusing the council as traitors and announcing his intentions to attain martyrdom at the frontline, he stalked back to Jerusalem. Here he found the frontline in turmoil, as the Haganah had broken through to Qastal; Abdul-Qadir lost his life in the bold but unsuccessful counterattack on the fort, and the size of his funeral attested to his unique popularity and respect in the region.

The Jihad Army’s front, now shared between Abdul-Qadir’s loyal lieutenants Kamel Uraiqat at the western road and Ibrahim Abu-Dayyah at the southern district, survived a little longer, its dwindling ammunition stocks briefly refurbished by Uraiqat’s blistering assault on a Haganah convoy from Tel Aviv. But that could not last long; eventually a ferocious Haganah assault overran the southern district. The themes familiar from this conflict came into play here: Abu-Dayyah, then returning for an ammunition resupply, was captured by the British garrison before he could return to the frontline. The district included several Arab consulates, and its conquest prompted consternation by the Arab governments, even Amman. But it was not till the Haganah had conquered the district that the British garrison forced a ceasefire. Haganah commander David Shaltiel, in desperate straits only weeks earlier, could view the results with satisfaction, and turn his attention to the remaining portions of Jerusalem.

Meanwhile, from the West Bank Fawzi Qawuqji had made a number of vain assaults on the kibbutz overlooking the road to the Haifa port. Qawuqji’s concern was not baseless. For such an important city, the wealthy port Haifa was chronically undermanned; the fact that its citizens could afford to sail away and avoid the war contributed to a slow trickle even before the Haganah assault. Rural mujahidin militias captained by Abu Mahmoud Safouri and Taufiq Ibrahim had arrived to bolster the garrison, but they were partly barred off by the British commander, Hugh Stockwell, and at any length the garrison still numbered less than a thousand fighters. The Arab council was split and indecisive, its veteran leader Rasheed Ibrahim having set sail after disputes with his peers, and the Inqadh commandant – a Lebanese officer called Amin Izzaddin – unable to assert control. Compounding this was the suspect attitude of Hugh Stockwell, who removed his buffer forces in apparent coordination with the Haganah. Haganah commander Moshe Carmel then mounted a brutal assault, which the Arabs were in no way prepared to face. The most Stockwell would do was to urge the Arabs to accept a ceasefire. But there was nobody both willing and able to accept such a ceasefire. The trickle from Haifa had become a flood; escapees by boat included the magistrate Ahmed Khalil, Izzaddin himself, and a day later his replacement Yunis Nafaa. In their wake, Carmel’s fighters let loose on the populace to accelerate the flight, pillaging and killing on sight; by the end, only some four thousand Arabs remained in what had once been the stronghold of the Palestinian merchant class.

Izzaddin and Nafaa did not abscond immediately; their next stop, as with the Haganah force bearing northwards, was the historic port Acre. The sudden influx of refugees, and the tales they brought of the pursuing Zionists, had already prompted the town’s rapid disintegration. By the time Izzaddin and Nafaa arrived, they inherited a garrison that numbered only a few score. Needless to say, resistance was negligible; within a blink Carmel had conquered Acre, Izzaddin and Nafaa making their final northward voyage into Lebanon. Further inland, the Inqadh fronts in the Galilee were also collapsing. Spying the incoming Israeli assault, Adib Shishakli tried to divert it by dispatching his brother Salah on raids against kibbutzes near the border. Ignoring this – for the kibbutzes were never in serious danger – the Haganah commander Yigael Alon bulldozed through the Galilee. The mujahidin’s morale completely collapsed with Safad’s conquest; with its commandant Sari Funaish missing, his second-in-command Amil Jumaeen announced the surrender. Further east, Haganah forces – interestingly, supported in part by airstrikes – also overran the besieged village Baysan, where, reflecting a common pattern, the Inqadh commandant Ahmed Jayousi had struggled to contain divisions in a small, under-equipped garrison.

Apart from the northern coast and the Galilee, there was one other major stronghold captured by the Zionists before the British withdrawal. Yaffa had been perched uncomfortably in an overwhelmingly Jewish neighbourhood outside Tel Aviv. Morale remained low, not simply because of Jewish encirclement, but the conduct of the Iraqi Inqadh forces captained by Adil Najamuddin. This reached such a point where Fawzi Qawuqji had to replace Najamuddin with a locally born Lebanese officer, Michel Issa. Najamuddin, refusing to obey a former subordinate, sailed off in indignation with his entire contingent. This took place just before the Zionist assault. The Haganah had not, apparently, originally intended to attack Yaffa just yet; they were drawn into it when the more extreme Irgun militia initiated the charge. The battle outside the city was remarkably fierce, with hundreds killed as the garrison, reinforced in the hinterland by Hasan Salameh commanding the peasants, put up a fierce fight. But it was a lost cause; Jaffa was largely cut off, and though the garrison appealed to the Arab governments none could come to the rescue in such an isolated area. British mediation tried to staunch the wound with a ceasefire, but fearing accusations of treason none of Yaffa’s notables, except Issa, signed it. Issa was eventually last to leave the city; only Salameh’s local lieutenant, Nazir, remained in a rapidly shrunken Arab contingent from a population whose disappearance testified to the costs of endemic factionalism.

With the mujahidin position at Jerusalem in peril, meanwhile, the Arab Legion at long last moved. The Legion had based itself in the West Bank under British approval, preparing for an imminent offensive on Jerusalem; an appeal from Hebron’s militia leader and shaikh, Muhammad Jabri, prompted another unit’s dispatch to the city. In contrast to most Legion units, these forces – at Ramullah and Hebron respectively – were captained by native officers, Sidqi Jundi and Abdullah Tal. The Arab position in Jerusalem was increasingly shaky; Fadil Rasheed, backed up by the Syrian Muslim Brethren leader Mustafa Sibai, ordered the forces to concentrate in the southeast Old City where they would hold out against the advancing Haganah. Jihad leader Khaled Hussaini put his forces under Rasheed’s direction and slipped south to meet Tal. The British force had not quite left yet, but the Legion’s officers – particularly Tal, who had a deserved reputation for independence and initiative – were now chomping at the bit. The Legion force first attacked a kibbutz bestriding the road from Hebron to Jerusalem, which had stubbornly withstood mujahidin harassment for months but now found itself outgunned, and abandoned by the Haganah, which preferred to focus on Jerusalem itself in preparation for the coming battle. The kibbutz’s defenders, rejecting Khaled’s offer to negotiate their exit, instead surrendered to Tal – but were slaughtered en masse shortly thereafter.

The next day, governor Cunningham left Haifa and the thirty-year British occupation of Palestine came to an end with an air of almost embarrassed inconspicuousness. “The Union Jack was lowered,” wrote Jack Marlowe, “and with the speed of an execution and the silence of a ship that passes in the night British rule in Palestine came to an end.” It was an ignominious end to a troubled, divisive tenure. Britain left as its legacy a trail of impending slaughter.

Bism Allah

 

 

Ibrahim Moiz, copyright

28 May 2018

The 1947-48 conflict in Palestine, which permanently uprooted hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants and established the Jewish state of Israel on the remains of the former British occupation, is without a doubt the single most notorious event in modern Islamic history. The loss of this precious territory and the cataclysmic, and sustained, expulsion and repression of its native populace has received more attention than most events of the twentieth century, and is known among Arabs as the Nakba, or calamity. The Zionist conquests of spring 1948, the foundation of Israel, and its subsequent repulsion of a badly organized and disparate pan-Arab offensive that summer continue to profoundly affect and shape international politics and public memory seven decades later.

This three-part article aims to trace the political and military history of the Nakba, explaining how and why both Palestinian forces and the regional Arab governments failed to check the conquest of Israel. It is not a review of the major population changes caused by the Zionist conquests and their systemic colonization; nor is it a question of the conflict’s conduct under international agreements and international law (which are neither here nor there yet for political reasons dominate much of the analytical literature); nor is it a polemic about the campaign’s rights and wrongs – though, as should become clear, I sympathize entirely with the Palestinians in this matter. It is rather an attempt to summarize and explain the main political-military events of the Nakba both in a Palestinian and regional context. Because the focus is primarily on whom I consider the (very flawed) protagonists in the tale – that is, the Muslim, Arab, and/or Palestinian side – there will be little in-depth exploration of internal politics and organization among the Zionists – though it is obvious that they were politically, organizationally, diplomatically, and militarily far ahead of their opponents. The first part of this article focuses on the buildup to 1947-48.

Israeli, and pro-Zionist, literature has unsurprisingly dominated in the aftermath of their conquest; for several decades it was virtually unchallenged in the English language, though this is no longer the case. The idea of a tiny, embattled Jewish underdog resisting a voracious, concerted Arab assault bears no resemblance to what actually transpired, but remains a popular one partly because it is politically convenient for Tel Aviv to regurgitate. At the same time, anti-Zionist literature has not been averse to rhetoric or exaggeration, partly because political champions of the anti-Zionist cause tended to interpret the events as befitted their particular ideologies – pan-Arab socialism, Islamism, royalism, communism, and so on – and partly because it is strongly emotive. I cannot promise strict neutrality, but I shall certainly do my best to give a comprehensive and intellectually honest account.

Palestine and the region after the Second World War

The British and French empires, which had conquered and dominated the politics of the region after the collapse of Ottoman rule and the First World War, were dealt a severe blow by the costs of the Second World War, one that made their continued occupation in the Levant unsustainable. This historic region had, of course, been carved up into specific enclaves – Lebanon, Syria, Transjordan, and Palestine – among whom Paris had ruled the first pair by “mandate” and Britain the latter pair in addition to indirectly dominating politics in Iraq and Masr.

A generation of largely elite “nationalists” (for want of a better word) had occupied an ambiguous position vis-à-vis this European domination. This ambiguity was epitomized by the Sharifi Hashimi rulers in Transjordan, particularly, and Iraq. Descended from the Prophet Muhammad (may Allah bestow peace and blessings upon him), they had revolted against Ottoman rule with British assistance in the vain hope that they would rule an unspecified united Arabian realm, not necessarily limited to but certainly including the Fertile Crescent. This dream had been quite cruelly punctured by the Entente, however, and the family had to content themselves with Iraq – under strict British supervision against the tumult of a restless society and political class – and the Transjordanian enclave. Abdullah I bin Hussein, ruler of this small, poor desert enclave, could nonetheless dream of outliving the European mandates that so inhibited him and establishing control over, at the very least, the Levant. Hashimi ambitions were a very real factor in regional politics and would remain so until the 1950s.
Abdullah I’s most conspicuous competitors at the time were the other monarchies in the region. The ambitious Saudi monarchy to the south had already shown an expansionist inclination on several occasions, and was engaged at one point or another against most neighbours, including Transjordan. It was only British protection towards its most favoured Arab client that held the Saudis at bay. In Masr, meanwhile, Farouk bin Fuad I – scion of the Albanian Pasha dynasty that had dominated every competitor, except British protectionism, since the nineteenth century, was also opposed to Hashimi extensions of their influence.

But there was also an increasingly relevant non-royal challenge. This came largely from private political actors. Elite families – comprising landowners, merchants, clan leaders, and magistrates – had dominated localized politics, particularly in Syria and Palestine, since the Ottoman period; they marshalled considerable opposition to European domination and were therefore instrumental in the “nationalist” movements against the mandates. Joining and sometimes competing with them were military officers, preachers, and other private actors from humbler origins. None of these categories were monolithic and often local concerns and rivalry trumpeted grand strategy and ideological blocs. To give one example, the notables of the merchant city Aleppo tended to support Hashimi expansionism, because it would link them up to Iraq, yet the notables in Jerusalem, particularly its infamous mufti Amin Hussaini, were intensely suspicious of the Hashimis.

Bedraggled by the Second World War, the once-invincible Entente powers began to plan their exit from the Levant. France quit Lebanon in November 1943 and Syria in April 1946; Britain quit Jordan in May 1946, though its subtler and more insidious policy of “indirect rule” meant it still exerted major unofficial influence in Jordan as in Iraq and Masr. The question of Palestine prompted far more controversy than the other colonies, because the mandate period had seen a major influx of Jewish immigration, mainly from Europe where entrenched persecution culminated in and provoked the Zionist movement, a largely European-influenced ethnonationalist movement calling for the return of Jewry to the ancient homeland of the Hebrews. The Levant has always been a diverse, multi-confessional land, but the steep rise of Jewish settlements under British rule prompted tensions and unrest between these newcomers and the settled Arab-speaking inhabitants that ran parallel to native revolt against British rule. Jewish organization into “kibbutzes” – essentially fortified farmers’ complexes in the countryside – would give them a major advantage in the upcoming war.

Zionist organization outflanked their opponents in other ways. At an international level, Zionist diplomats cultivated ties with Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and at the United Nations, building on a process that had begun decades earlier. The horrific experience of the Holocaust, and the systemic extermination of millions of Jews by its antagonists, lent further weight to their claim for the urgency in a Jewish homeland; the fact that it was far away suited Europe perfectly. This was accompanied by “civilizational” appeals that continue to the present day, drawing on European supremacist ideas that portrayed the proposed Israeli state as an outpost of civilization amid oriental barbarians, and drawing on socialist ideas of collectivism and progressivism that appealed to the Soviets. Both blocs in the emergent Cold War probably saw the skilled, organized, and determined Zionist movement as inevitable victors over the scattered local Arabs, and sought to build ties with it as a potentially useful strategic partner.

Though the Arab League, founded during 1945 by Abdel-Rahman Azzam at Cairo, had been meant to present the Arab governments en bloc, in fact it was complicated by internal rivalry. The Hashimis, especially Abdullah I, saw it as a vehicle of Masri influence. Nor was this Transjordan’s only concern: they shared a bitter mutual rivalry with Amin Hussaini, the ambitious Jerusalem mufti. Though originally instated during British rule, Amin – scion of one of the major elite families in Palestine – had engaged in several anti-British revolts since then – most notoriously collaborating with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, a move that would prompt Israeli propagandists to portray the Palestinians as Nazi-collaborating anti-semites en masse thereafter – and had a knack for portraying his rivals, not always without basis, as traitors and puppets. The Hussainis had immense influence on the ground, largely marshalled by his relatives, the mufti spent most of the war in exile at Masr, though this did not prevent him from restless schemes and attacks on his rivals.

Abdullah I was hardly less ambitious, of course, and to compete with the anti-Hashimi political groups sought to control military organs. Both Hashimi dominions – Iraq and Transjordan – boasted the most efficient Arab armies, trained by British officers, so Abdullah tried to leverage this: his conduct in the war can be partly explained by his ambition, directly opposing that of Hussaini’s, to annex Palestine to Transjordan as part of a larger Levantine realm. The Hashimis played a major role in the formation of a military council, based at Damascus and containing officers from the various Arab armies, which would transfer weapons from their governments to the frontline. The council’s composition revealed its pro-Hashimi bias: there was no Masri member, while Iraqis provided both its chairman Ismail Safwat, the former Iraqi army commander, and its eminence grise, the former Iraqi prime minister Taha Hashimi.

Militias and councils: localized organization in Palestine

Career officers also played a major role in the composition of the parallel Inqadh Army, a theoretically paramilitary force founded by the experienced but bombastic Levantine adventurer Fawzi Qawuqji, who had fought in the Ottoman army and in every anti-European revolt – at Palestine, Syria, and Iraq – since then, as well as serving a brief stint with the Saudi army. His braggadocio and lack of political connections (for both Hussaini and the Jordanian monarchy despised him) made Qawuqji an easy scapegoat after the Zionist conquest, but this is not entirely fair: while he was hardly a brilliant strategist, nor was he a total incompetent. It is unlikely that a more astute commander would have fared much better, and his commitment to the cause was unquestionable.

The Inqadh Army did, however, completely fail to live up to its advertised raison d’etre: to “professionalize” the Palestinian resistance. The rote military doctrine and structure learnt by its officers was totally unsuited to the rather messier arena of non-professional militia forces, and it was fatally decentralized. In spite of the mutual disdain between Qawuqji and Hussaini, for instance, several Inqadh ground officers – such as Ihsan Kamulmaz in Safad and Amin Izzaddin in Haifa – sympathized with the mufti. Similar autonomy was exercised in practical matters: Inqadh’s nominal vassal in the critically important hinterland, the Druze chieftain Shakib Wahab, was entirely independent. Rivalry between competing officers also hampered Inqadh effectiveness, as we shall see: at Safad, the Syrian officer Kamulmaz and the Jordanian officer Sari Funaish were bitter opponents, while Yaffa’s Iraqi commandant Adil Najamuddin resented his local-born lieutenant, Michel Issa, a Lebanese officer of lower rank but greater local influence. The role of professional soldiers was important in training the overwhelmingly irregular Palestinian forces, but politically and strategically most career officers were simply unable to exercise authority and direct their forces in a substantial manner. This contributed to and was especially complicated by Inqadh’s poor logistics, which meant that units, particularly those from outside the area such as Iraqis, occasionally resorted to plunder and stirred resentment.

The other major militia force was the Jihad Muqaddas Army, politically linked to the mufti Amin Hussaini but commanded by his far more respected nephew Abdul-Qadir. The Hussainis’ considerable grassroots links, owing to the family’s prestige particularly around Jerusalem, helped them build a fairly effective organization in and around the sacred city. Abdul-Qadir assumed responsibility for besieging the Jewish-majority western Jerusalem area, while his cousin Khaled Hussaini commanded a sizeable contingent inside the city. Another major front lay in the hinterland outside Yaffa and Tel Aviv, where Hasan Salameh, a longtime Hussaini contact from the anti-British revolt, commanded an important, if irregular and thinly spread, front of clansmen and peasants. Yet another veteran from that revolt, Taufiq Ibrahim, founded a similar front in the Galilee. Yet another Hussaini contact with strong local links was Jamal Sourani, whose father Moussa had been former Ghazza mayor; he founded a front in the Ghazza strip and arranged for an Iraqi volunteer, Abdul-Haq Azzawi, to found another sizeable front outside Haifa; soon a local leader, Abu Mahmoud Safouri, replaced Abdul-Haq. The Jihad Muqaddas Army, however, was even less coordinated than the Inqadh Army; it effectively constituted autonomous militias drawing on their local linkages. And while this localism and their anti-British experience gave them more credibility than the Inqadh Army, the fact that their fighters were overwhelmingly volunteers made organization difficult, as the size and strength of the militias constantly fluctuated.

Apart from these two organizations, most of the Palestinian countryside and towns had smaller, uncoordinated garrisons. Their leaders were a disparate and diverse bunch. Tariq Afriqi, an East African soldier who established a front in the Ghazza strip, had the same Ottoman roots and Saudi experience as Qawuqji. Muhammad Hunaidi, who energetically tried to organize Haifa’s defences until he was killed in the spring, had recently quit the Jordanian army. Meanwhile the Hebron militia was founded by a shaikh with no military background, Muhammad Jabri.
One political organ that the mufti attempted to bring, largely unsuccessfully, under his control was the town council. Across Palestine, towns established local councils, led by local notables, that were theoretically under the control of the exiled Palestinian government but in practice quite separate, and indeed often fiercely opposed. Again uncoordinated, these councils tended to take a more conciliatory approach towards the Jewish populace, even at times Zionist militants, than the Arab militias. This could be done from pragmatism – as was the case with Tiberias’ eponymous Tabari family, who were anxious to maintain the tense peace in a Jewish-majority town – or an expectation that Transjordan’s army, the Arab Legion, would come to the rescue, until which hostilities had to be minimized. Yusuf Haikal from Yaffa, Rasheed Ibrahim from Haifa, and Anwar Nusaiba from Jerusalem clung to this idea, holding out for a Jordanian reconnaissance even as they prepared their towns’ defenses.

Competing agendas and the Arab governments

That Abdullah I wanted to add Palestine to his realm was, as we have seen, no secret, and a source of tension with both Palestinians such as the Hussainis and non-Hashimi Arab governments. Abdullah has sometimes stood accused of having conspired with the Zionist movement against the Palestinians. This is an exaggeration, since Jordan did fight fiercely against the nascent Israeli state, but what is certain is that Abdullah showed absolutely no enthusiasm and indeed considerable hostility towards Muslim-Arab Palestine independent of his rule and separate from Transjordan, particularly one that he feared would be dominated by Amin Hussaini.

Even had Abdullah been more sympathetic, his options – as a British client – were strictly limited. The efficient Arab Legion remained dominated by British officers, including its commander John Glubb. The quintessential British Arabist, “Glubb Pasha” had a sympathetic – if patronizing and somewhat self-serving – attitude towards the Arabs and despised the Zionists, but should push come to shove his loyalty to the British crown trumped everything else. While he led the Arab Legion well enough and had established a strong rapport with its Arab fighters, he seems to have believed, as he would write after the war, that the entire venture was a foolhardy one, for which he blamed the Arab League in general and Egypt – Amman’s arch-rival, where mufti Amin Hussaini remained as a state guest – in particular.

Glubb epitomized Britain’s ambiguity in the conflict. The receding empire was anxious to wash its hands of the impending bloodbath while maintaining as much influence in its aftermath as possible. Both sides, Arabs and Jews, would accuse the British government and army of assisting or enabling the other side. The Arab argument holds far more water: as we shall see, British forces intervened several times to block off Arab offensives on the pretext that those could wait till the mandate ended in May 1948, yet they made no real attempt to block off similar assaults from the Zionist Haganah; this even as Zionist leaders organized anti-British boycotts, murders, and subversion. Evidently the British saw the mainstream Zionists, as represented in the Haganah, as a safeguard against the more extreme elements such as the militia founded by Avraham Stern; in fact, the Haganah proved to be enablers. London also backed international diplomacy, via the United Nations, that was tilted in favour of the Zionist movement. At the same time, while British macro-policy was definitely tilted, whether by design or circumstance, towards the Zionists, their stake in Jordan necessitated tolerance for Arab forces so long as they followed Amman. British officers such as Norman Lash and Bob Slade played an important role in the Arab Legion’s campaign, and by all accounts fought with unreserved determination.

Britain, in foreseeing an imminent catastrophe, proved shrewder than most Arab governments. Locked in their disputes, many leading Arab politicians expected till the very end that war would be averted, an expectation that permitted them to bloviate without reserve. An exception was the Arab League founder Abdel-Rahman Azzam, but his attempts to forge a common front were perhaps inevitably viewed with suspicion by Cairo’s rivals. There was more active mobilization by Azzam’s relative through marriage, the Muslim Brethren founder Hasan Banna. This Islamist group, most influential in Masr – where it had a considerable following among younger army officers, including the royal family’s relative-by-marriage Ahmed Abdel-Aziz, as well as broader society – had earned the hostility of the still-influential British embassy and the suspicions of many elite Masri statesmen. But this suspicion was temporarily shunted aside, and the Brethren would form a sizeable unit, captained by Abdel-Aziz, that would be attached to the professional army. While the Brethren’s influence in the Levant was smaller, its Syrian leader Mustafa Sibai, Palestinian leader Kamel Sharif, and Jordanian leader Abdul-Latif Abu-Qurrah played important supporting roles in the 1948 campaign.

Tolerance for the Brethren was motivated partly by necessity, since few Arab armies were in a proper state of readiness. Masr’s large army was largely untested. The Syrians were battle-hardened from the revolts against France, but their army was only a year old and therefore lacked both organization and, in particular, ammunition, which would prove a major issue. As the only republic that dispatched a force of any size (republican Lebanon’s tiny army mainly contented itself with maintaining Inqadh supply lines on the border), Damascus was moreover remarkably unstable in its politics. The misfortunes and vicissitudes of the war, and its tragic aftermath, would play a particularly jarring role in Syria, whose people were perhaps the most invested in their Palestinian neighbours. The Iraqi army was both experienced and efficient, and in fact played an outsize role in the war. Officially, the Arab forces’ joint commander was an Iraqi officer, Nuraddin Mahmoud, who incidentally shared his name with the Zangid amir, Nuraddin Mahmoud b. Zangi, who had fought off the crusaders exactly eight centuries earlier. But Iraq’s Hashimi monarchy, still largely dependent on London, therefore suffered from similar constraints as Jordan, along with the fact that it was geographically remote and itself in some political turmoil. In spite of Nuraddin’s official role, he only really captained the Iraqi contingent, since there was minimal coordination between the Arab armies.

While the major Zionist force, the Haganah, was large, well-armed, more or less cohesive, well-connected, and imbued with a ruthless determination only hardened by the desperation of the recent Holocaust, their opponents – both militias and armies – were completely uncoordinated, generally under-armed, and exceptionally fragmented on both a political and military level. In retrospect the tragic outcome of the war should be no surprise.

A SIX-DAY SHOCKER AT 50: THE ARAB WORLD AND ISRAEL’S 1967 CAMPAIGN

Few events in modern history have had the impact on both the popular imagination as well as regional politics as Israel’s six-day juggernaut versus three Arab neighbours during the summer of 1967. As that war, which led to conquests from the territories of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, and the stifling occupation of millions of Palestinians, reaches its fiftieth anniversary, it’s worth a revisit.

Setting the stage

It is often claimed that the crushing defeat suffered by the leading Arab statesman of the day, Egyptian dictator Gamal Nasser, spelt the end of the lure of the particular brand of pan-Arab socialism that he had marshalled as his ruling philosophy (1). This claim needs a caveat. Nasser, while no doubt the most charismatic and influential Arab leader at the time, had spent most of the past decade overcoming dissidence from a diverse cross-section of actors. Not only did these include the “reactionary”, broadly pro-Western monarchies in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, but many other regimes and non-state actors as well. These included the Baathist regime in Syria, which had feuded fiercely with and overcome Nasser’s Syrian sympathizers over 1963-64 (2); the Syrian “conservative” political class, largely dormant by now but which had helped spoil Nasser’s shortlived United Arab Republic (3); Iraqi dictator Abdul-Karim Qasim, who had studiously tried to avoid joining that same republic; his purportedly sympathetic successors Arif brothers Abdul-Salam and Abdul-Rahman, who in spite of their rhetorical support proved rather more conservative and in fact fought off two coup attempts by Nasser’s Iraqi sympathizers over 1965-66 (4) ; the Iraqi Baathists, against whom Nasser had helped the Arif brothers earlier and who plotted their revenge; the Muslim Brethren movement, which Nasser had banned after seizing power during 1954 (5); the Fateh Palestinian militia, which had worked quite independently of Nasser’s own specially designated Palestinian “government”, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) (6); the newly independent Algerian regime, which in spite of modest Egyptian support during their struggle for independence proved sharply critical of Nasser’s leadership (7); even the republican rebels on whose purported behalf Nasser had invaded Yemen, who turned out to be more conservative and resistant to Egyptian tutelage than he would have wanted (8). 1967, in short, was not 1957, where Nasser’s popularity and appeal had been overwhelming; plenty of faultlines had emerged in the intervening decade.

The divisions in the Arab camp help explain in part why they struggled, yet the year immediately preceding the war (1966-67) had given Israel cause for concern. Egypt still remained the leader in the anti-Zionist camp, and if that camp was divided, its faultlines were at least papered over. During February 1966, one of the many feuds that had beset the Syrian Baathists resulted in the rise of a strongly leftist faction, led in name by Nuraddin Atasi, a Sunni Muslim figurehead in accordance with the constitution, but in fact by a junta of mostly minoritarian officers, chief but by no means undisputed leader among them Salah Jadid, who competed fiercely for influence, partly over assistance to pan-Arab causes. During November 1966, Syria joined a defence pact with Egypt. Moreover, various elements in the junta – notably Ahmad Suwaidani, the leftist Sunni army commander who envisioned Fateh as part of a “people’s war” along newly acquired Maoist ideas, and more recently the right-leaning Alawite army minister Hafez Assad – competed for sponsorship of the major Palestinian guerrilla faction independent of Egypt, Fateh. (9)

Unlike the PLO, whose leader Ahmed Shuqairy was beholden to Cairo, Fateh had emerged largely independently and contained a variety of strands – rightist, leftist, Islamist, Baathist – spread across the Muslim world and Europe, whose common theme was Palestinian nationalism and a general aversion to pan-Arab pressure. Nonetheless, by 1966 the Syrians succeeded through a mixture of coercion and enticement into coopting certain Fateh leaders, such as Yasser Arafat, then a dashing field commander who cared little for the intricacies of regional geopolitics and was willing to work with whoever would have him (10). In order to avert Israeli retaliation strikes, which were frequently brutal and disproportionate, Syria pressed Fateh to raid from across Jordanian borders, thereby putting the pro-Western Jordanian monarch Hussein bin Talal under serious pressure. Though its army was quite efficient, Jordan was in no position to offer a serious challenge to a hypermilitarized Israeli opponent that enjoyed support from both Cold War powers, but especially America (11). Though the Israelis tended to be more permissive towards Jordan than other Arab states, by the end of May 1967 Hussein felt insecure enough to sign a peace treaty with Nasser, prompted in part by an Israeli raid across the border. The arrangement they worked out put Jordan’s army at the command of an Egyptian officer, Abdel-Monem Riad, who was both unfamiliar with the local terrain and handicapped by his subservience to the Egyptian command.

As had become the case with Fateh in Syria, the Palestinian cause was largely subordinate to Egyptian security concerns, thereby depriving the PLO of serious strategy and its leader Ahmed Shuqairy any real influence. By contrast a third Palestinian group, the strongly leftist alliance of Palestinian militias, the Arab Nationalist Movement led by the Marxist ideologue George Habash, was subordinate to Egypt by choice rather than coercion, genuinely believing that Nasser’s leadership would liberate Palestine and unite the Arabs. (12)

Egypt was, of course, the strongest of the Arab states and the major concern for Israel. But it, too, faced serious challenges. Notwithstanding Nasser’s increasingly leftist politics over the decade, the “revolutionary” regime had turned into an aristocracy of its own. The nature of the military junta was such that its army’s top levels had become seriously politicized. In particular, Nasser’s deputy, Abdel-Hakim Amer, a lifelong friend whom he had humoured and indulged, had become a contender for power. Amer’s lavish financial favours and genuine bonhomie covered up his serious deficiencies as a military commander and made him immensely popular in the army, to the extent that Nasser could not dismiss him for fear of inciting a mutiny. At the same time, the army’s performance was distinctly unimpressive, as displayed by the war in Yemen, where modestly armed tribesmen routinely thwarted them. Moreover, in order to oversee the brutal repression of dissident groups, notably Islamists and most famously Sayyid Qutb, Egypt had constructed a sinister security apparatus whose chiefs – the wily spymaster Salah Nasser and the newly appointed army minister Shamseddin Badran – saw themselves as kingmakers. As in Syria, the tussle for power determined Cairo’s stance towards Israel. With nobody seriously believing that Egypt could challenge Israel yet, the dispatch of a massive corps to the Sinai Peninsula was done for purely ceremonial reasons. (13)

Day One

Preferring to see, and portray, itself as an island of civilization on a barbaric frontier, Israel was naturally a militarized state, largely surrounded by hostile Arab states from its bloody inception. This facilitated a siege mentality, partly strong among the founding generation of Israeli army officers who had fought in 1948 and acquired enormous influence and military expertise as genuinely skilful, if usually utterly ruthless, soldiers. This group, epitomized by the army minister Moshe Dayan, was only strengthened in their argument that Israel was under threat by the Egyptian mobilization. On 5 June 1967, therefore, they sprang.

The decisive blows of the war, which set the tone for the next week, occurred at the start, when Israeli air marshal Mordechai Hod ordered a mass bombardment of the Egyptian airforce before it had even left the ground. Egypt’s air defences had been sadly neglected, its deficiencies known to both the incompetent air marshal Sidki Mahmoud, occupying that position for over a decade, and Nasser, who refused to upgrade it for fear of antagonizing the United States beyond a limit. Mahmoud, together with fellow military oligarch Abdel-Hakim Amer and the army strategist, Anwar Qady, were actually in mid-flight when the bombardment of Egypt’s air fleet began (14); by the time they landed several hours later, the army had plunged into turmoil. (15)

Worse yet, Egypt’s state-run propaganda, and the outright dishonest reports filed by Amer and other officers, wrought havoc with battlefield coordination and dragged their allies into the morass (16). They reported to  Riad, whose Jordanian strategy was based on the assumption that Egypt’s army would advance beyond the Sinai and into the Negev desert to bolster Jordan, that the Egyptian airforce had recovered and pounded the Israelis. Riad therefore decided, against the vocal advice of the Jordanian front commander Muhammad Salim and operations director Atef Majali, to encircle Israeli-held Jerusalem by the south, where Egypt’s army could catch up, rather than the north. (17)

If Egyptian mendacity betrayed the Arab alliance, so too did Syrian bluster. In spite of Syria’s militant rhetoric preceding the war and reassurances of reinforcements, Hafez Assad kept the army firmly away from the battlefield. An Iraqi unit commanded by Hasan Naqib (18) and even a Saudi battalion did make their way towards Jordan, but they were so badly bombarded by Hod’s airforce that they could make no real contribution. With the Syrian front completely safe, the Israeli commander there, Elad Peled, instead turned east, attacking Jinin and Nablus in a three-pronged advance. This meant that Jordan was now confronted not only in Jerusalem, where Riad had unwisely ordered an attack against a larger Israeli contingent, but also the West Bank. The Jordanian forces here were rather thinly spread, and when Peled attacked the Jinin commandant Awad Khalidi, cutting him off from Nablus further south, Riad was forced to change tack. He had earlier dispatched a crack cavalry regiment, captained by Rakan Inad, south to meet the expected Egyptian forces; now he ordered him back north to the West Bank in an urgent, gruelling charge overnight under the Israeli air fleet’s fire.

Simultaneously, Yeshayahu Gavish, commanding the Egyptian front, dispatched a three-pronged attack into the Sinai. Each prong was commanded by a veteran of the 1956 war who knew the Sinai well. Israel Tal, at the northern prong, swept through Rafah and west along the coast, an airlifted commando regiment landing behind Egyptian lines to batter the artillery ensconced there. The southern prong, captained by the brutal but brilliant field commander Ariel Sharon, headed straight for the central Sinai fortress at Abu Ugaila. In between, Avraham Yoffe worked his way through the sand dunes, heading for the southern end of the Egyptian frontline. (10)

Egypt could make no cohesive response. In addition to the bombardment of their forces, their command structure had fatal flaws. On the brink of war, Amer had superceded the Sinai corps commander, Salaheddin Mohsen, with a newly formed “front command” under the leadership of Abdel-Mohsen Murtagy (20), a veteran of the Yemen war completely unfamiliar with the Sinai peninsula and thereby forced to play by ear. It was never clear who was in charge – the completely incompetent Amer made no clarification – and the Egyptian command was flung into confusion.

Day Two

By the second morning of the war, Tal captured the important garrison town Arrish, whose commander Abdel-Aziz Suleman had lost his life during a series of hard-fought battles along the coast. Himself continuing west towards the Suez Canal, Tal dispatched his vanguard, led by Shmuel Gonen, south to attack the Egyptian forces from behind while Sharon attacked from the front. Yoffe had already arrived here in improbably short time, routing an Egyptian reinforcement sent by Murtagy. Amer had left the strategic fortresses in the central Sinai, Abu Ugaila and Gebel Libny, to the respective command of his close friends Saadi Naguib and Othman Nassar, both of whom were later reported to be absent from the battlefield (21). Both forts were speedily overrun.

Yoffe now continued south, where the Egyptian cavalry, led by Abdel-Qader Hassan and Saadeddin Shazly, had started to fall back westwards towards the Suez Canal. At the eastern end of the Egyptian front, meanwhile, Gavish now attacked the Gaza strip. A fierce hand-to-hand battle ensued overnight – the garrison assisted by PLA units captained by Wajih Madani – but by the next morning the Gaza commandant Abdel-Monem Hosny was forced to cede this heavily populated region, mindful of the massacre that the Israelis had inflicted in 1967 after facing prolonged resistance. (22)

At Jerusalem, meanwhile, the Israeli front commander Uzi Narkiss had effectively surrounded the Jordanian garrison – advancing, as the Jordanian officers had feared, by north. Narkiss, born in Jerusalem, had bitterly resented the failure to capture its eastern portion during the 1948 war, where he had fought in the Israeli militia. Now he had a prime opportunity to fulfil his ambition . With the Israeli airforce bombarding Jordanian reinforcements out of action, Narkiss was able to dispatch a force by both air and ground to the city’s north. The ground force overran Latroun, a strategic fort that the Jordanians had successfully defended in 1948, and which linked East Jerusalem to the West Bank. The airborne regiment assailed the Jordanian garrison, whose commandant Atta Ali had no option but to withdraw into the Old City under siege.

In the West Bank, Peled had captured Jinin from Khalidi and could now look both south and east. To the south, the reinforcements led by Rakan had remarkably managed briefly not only to intercept but even push back the Israeli march on Nablus, but intense aerial bombardment at last wore them down (24). It was the east, the border with Jordan, that was an especial concern. By now, Riad was convinced that not only the West Bank but even Jordan itself was under threat by an enemy, particularly the ambitious army minister Dayan, who had made no secret of their desire to cross the river Jordan and maximize its conquests (25). He therefore ordered an urgent withdrawal back to Jordan, simultaneously appealing, along with the Jordanian monarch Hussein, to Nasser to call an international ceasefire. By the second day of the war, the wind had been totally knocked out of the once-proud Arab alliance’s sails.

Day Three

With the Jordanian army evacuating the West Bank, Jerusalem commandant Atta realized he could not count on reinforcements. Early on the third morning, he slipped out of the Old City to join the wholescale Jordanian withdrawal. Narkiss’ aim of capturing Jerusalem in its entirety was realized, as the Israeli army took over the vacated garrison. The Palestinian mayor, Anwar Khatib, remained at Jerusalem, recounting the Jordanian side of the Jerusalem battle to his Israeli replacement, Chaim Hertsog, who in turn relied on it to write his history of the war (26). Within days, however, the Israeli garrison accused Khatib of trying to organize rebellious activity and banished him to Safad under a police escort (27). The Palestinian mayor’s experience was a revealing forebear to what his countrymen have escorted in the half-century since, living in what is in effect a brutally controlled police state.

The guns had fallen silent in the Holy Land, but the Sinai campaign was in full swing. In spite of an Egyptian ambush just short of the Suez Canal, the northern Israeli axis, now led by Israel Granit, had reached the Suez. The axis’ commander, Tal, had meanwhile moved south to join Yoffe in surrounding the Matla pass, a strategic path in the mountains of central Sinai that offered the Egyptian cavalry’s only route in and out. Mercilessly harassed by Sharon on the ground and Hod by air, the cavalry commanders Shazly and Hassan had vacated the central Sinai and were headed straight for the Matla pass. There Tal and Yoffe sprang their ambush, resulting in an utter massacre. Hundreds of tanks were constricted and destroyed in the ravine, bombarded from every side on the ground and by air. With Gaza already under Israeli control, it was quite clear that the Egyptian corps in the Sinai was destroyed. In total, at least ten thousand soldiers, and perhaps twice that number, were killed in the short campaign, let down by the bluster and incompetence of their leaders.

Day Four

The fourth day of the war was the one where Gavish completed the Sinai conquest. From the Matla pass, Yoffe had already moved south, targeting the last Egyptian garrison in the Sinai. This was based at Sharm-el-Sheikh, which Yoffe had already captured during the 1956 war. This time the task was easier, for the garrison, captained by Abdel-Monem Khalil, had run out of supplies. With the command unresponsive to Khalil’s repeated requests for refurbishment, and by now quite unable to do anything about it, the garrison evacuated well before the Israeli arrival.
At the Egyptian “front” command, Murtagy held out against hope. One more cavalry force was dispatched to attack, and in fact it held off Sharon for some six hours, but this was merely an attempt to buy time. The rearguard commander, Sidki Ghoul, tried but failed to organize the withdrawal through Matla (28), and the Sinai cavalry was in wreckage, the Israelis capturing whatever tanks remained. Murtagy, who lacked military brilliance but not courage, was at last persuaded to vacate Ismaelea, lest the Israelis take one more high-profile captive to go with the thousands of captured soldiers. It was clear that Cairo, by now in complete panic, feared that Israel’s momentum would not stop at the Suez Canal.

Day Five

In fact, the Israelis were quite happy to stop at the Suez Canal; both Egypt and Jordan were out for the count. They now turned to another rival. This was Syria, whose Baathist regime had done so much to instigate the war, but left its allies in the lurch. In any case, Assad’s hope that his abstinence would placate Israel from attack was disappointed. The Israelis had long coveted control of the Houla valley on the Syrian border, while the Golan Heights gave Syria enviable high ground on the border. Dayan, never shy to strike while the iron was hot, commissioned David Elazar to organize the campaign against Syria. Elazar also had available to him forces from the campaign against Jordan, who now moved north towards the southern Golan heights.
The campaign, again, began with an aerial bombardment by air marshal Hod. Thereafter Elazar’s deputy Dan Laner assaulted the northern Golan on several axes; the main cavalry force, captained by Albert Mandler, rolled up the steep Golan Heights in a frontal assault, while a smaller force led by Yona Efrat attacked the foothills of Mount Hermon, further north. The Syrian frontline commander, Ahmad Mir, had plenty of experience in the Baath junta’s internecine politics but not the battlefield; he advised commander Suwaidani that the frontline would collapse. Assad shared this view, as did Izzat Jadid, another veteran Baathist (and brother of strongman Salah) who served as commandant at Qunaitra, the major regional city. Izzat rejected out of turn, probably prudently, a proposition by Jadid’s lieutenant Awad Bagh to launch a nighttime counterattack. Qunaitra governor Abdul-Halim Khaddam began to organize the city’s withdrawal in anticipation of an Israeli takeover (29). This fear materialized the next day.

Day Six

Pierced on several sides, the Syrian frontline collapsed as Suwaidani ordered a fullscale retreat. The southern end of the Golan Heights was taken without a fight. Further north, Mandler and the cavalry entered Qunaitra, largely vacated by this point yet with equipment abandoned, and looted both the equipment and the town at large; it remains a ghost town to the present day. Over the remainder of the day, Elazar mopped up the Golan Heights’ conquest before the United Nations kickstarted negotiations. These negotiations restored Qunaitra, but not the Heights, to Syrian control; the Baathist regime, for its part, refused to rebuild the town, preferring to systematically leave it ruined as a reminder of the Israeli forces’ rapacity. However true that is, it was equally true that Syria’s regime abandoned both the Heights and the other Arab states; the six-day war reflects badly on every Arab government therein, but perhaps none more so than Syria.

AFTERMATH

Only days after the Israeli conquest, former Syrian premier Shukri Quwatli – a vocal proponent of pan-Arab nationalism and onetime Nasser ally – passed away. It seemed a metaphor. The traumatic defeat marked a turning point in several ways. These did not necessarily include, as is often claimed, the destruction of pan-Arabism; I have already pointed out that that was in its twilight, though the shattering defeat no doubt crystallized its decay and turned away Arabs to its appeal.

Most potently, the defeat shattered Palestinian reliance on Arab states. There had already been some scepticism, mainly by Fateh, on the Arab states’ usefulness in the war versus Israel; now, however, Palestinian factions across the field saw self-reliant guerrilla activity as their only option. Of course they did not outright cut off ties to the Arab states, but the strong hold that Egypt had on the PLO and ANM, and the similar hold that Syria had attempted to replicate on Fateh, were a thing of the past. The vast refugee community swollen further by the Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza would soon add to their numbers, and from now when Palestinian fidayin militias dealt with the states, it was as brazen near-equals, not clients. Fidayin raids on Israel, rarely translating into a decisive strategy but serving to draw their cause to the world stage, multiplied, and with this increased independence of state largesse came contempt for the states – most notably exemplified in the contest to capture Jordan from its monarchy during 1970. It was in attempting to address this latest inter-Arab dispute that Nasser succumbed to a heart failure. During his last years he had made some progress in correcting the excesses committed earlier, but his death came at another moment of crisis. (30)

Egypt. The Palestinians were not the only people disillusioned with the Arab governments; the 1967 defeat sharply threatened regime security. At Egypt, the officers and the security state that had wielded power for over a decade were now discredited. Nasser had publicly offered, perhaps sincerely, his resignation after the defeat; he did not end up resigning, but his powerful deputy Amer, who had long cultivated a parallel network in the army and security, was under threat. Amer appears to have lost heart entirely, but his allies – most notably army minister Shamseddin Badran and spymaster Salah Nasser, both former bulwarks of the regime (31), anticipated that their positions were threatened. They first forced Nasser to reject Amer’s resignation, and then worked feverishly to organize a coup in Amer’s favour. However, Nasser’s loyalists – most ruthlessly, Mohamed Fauzy, who as army commander had been superseded and frustrated by Amer’s control of the army – sprang first. Fauzy, taking the army minister’s role, both countered the coup attempt and imprisoned Amer – who was discovered to have committed a convenient suicide that September – and then ruthlessly purged the army. Many senior soldiers, including the incompetent air marshal Mahmoud and, less justifiably and even unfairly, the unfortunate rearguard commander Ghoul, were publicly tried and disgraced. (32)

Over the next few years, Egypt launched an extensive reorganization – geopolitically, where the dispute over Yemen with Saudi Arabia ended as Egypt withdrew that autumn – politically – as the aggressive Arab socialism of the preceding five years was toned down, a return to religiosity tolerated and sometimes even encouraged, and security barons, including the feared Badran and Salah, disgraced, though their instititutions left largely intact – and militarily. In this last respect, Egypt most notably upgraded its air defence, largely with Soviet-bought technology, and also, as shown during the 1973 reconquest of the Sinai that blindsided Israel, its discipline, meritocracy, and effectiveness. Along with Fauzy, key officers in this process included Riad – who replaced Fauzy as army commander and earned a reputation for daring innovation before he was killed in battle versus Israel during 1969 – Mohamed Sadek (army spymaster in 1967), who replaced Fauzy in 1970, and the Sinai field commanders from 1967, Abdel-Qader Hassan (Sadek’s deputy until 1972), Abdel-Monem Khalil (a corps commander in 1973), and Saadeddin Shazly Shazly, who served as army commander during the 1973 campaign and deserves a reputation as one of Egypt’s best officers. Egyptian resilience was on display shortly after Nasser’s standoff with Amer, when contrary to expectations the Egyptian army resumed a lower-scale border war, backed by Palestinian fidayin attacks, on Israel that lasted through the late 1960s.

Jordan. Prior to 1967, Jordan’s monarch Hussein was lambasted as the ultimate Western lackey. The failure of his Arab allies to deliver their promises, if anything, hardened Hussein towards them, and by the 1970s he regularly conferred through backchannels with Israel. However, he did during 1967-70 initially support and hoped to coopt the fidayin, partly because of Jordan’s vast Palestinian population. The legendary 1968 battle against Israel – at Karamah, a Jordanian border town, where fidayin led by Yasser Arafat stared down an Israeli attack and propelled a generation of young Palestinians to the fidayin cause – was in fact largely conducted by the Jordanian army, commanded by Hussein’s cousin Zaid bin Shaker, a veteran of the 1967 war. Jordanian assistance, and with it an attempt to control their activity along Amman’s priorities, did not impress the fidayin, who soon openly threatened to topple Hussein. A bloody campaign during September 1970, where fidayin control of several towns was backed up by a Syrian invasion, eventually ended in Jordan’s favour after Syrian army minister Hafez Assad again refused to commit his airforce and let the Jordanian airforce pummel the invasion force. Assad, in turn, would use this Palestinian episode to cement his control in Syria’s ongoing power struggle.

Syria. As with Egypt, Syria’s Baathist regime was left vulnerable – but not to external opposition, which was largely mute by this point under an increasingly penetrative police state, but various Baathist potentates in the army and security forces. First to go in this contest was army commander Suwaidani, the officer closest to the Palestinian fidayin, but also vulnerable on account of his failure on the Golan frontline. During 1968, he blinked first in a staring contest with the other Baathist potentates, attempted an abortive coup, and was imprisoned for the next half-century. The same fate eventually befell the regime’s strongman, Salah Jadid, as well as the figurehead civilians led by Nuraddin Atasi. Their downfall was tied to another Palestinian episode, the 1970 war in Jordan, immediately after which Assad, who had tightened his grip on the army during the late 1960s, seized power (33). In spite of his carefully planned stasis during 1967, Assad as dictator would also lead Syria during the 1973 campaign to recapture the Golan. The strategist for that campaign was Abdul-Razzaq Dardari, who had led the Syrian reserve during 1967 and had at least learned from his colleagues’ frontline collapse. But widespread politicization in the officer corps persisted, and the Syrian performance in the 1973 war failed to live up to expectations. To the present day, the Syrian regime remains more committed to the Palestinian cause in word than action; its rhetorical defiance of Israel has rarely been backed up, but serves a useful propaganda purpose. The memorialized ruins of Qunaitra are, in this regard, something of an unintended metaphor.

Other states. The rival Baath party, based in Iraq, also capitalized on the 1967 disaster to topple the military regime that had ruled Iraq in one way or another for a decade. During July 1968, the Iraqi Baathists, led by Hasan Bakr, bloodlessly toppled the rather reluctant dictator Abdul-Rahman Arif, and then proceeded to brutally purge the regime to avoid a repeat of their 1963 experience, when Arif’s brother had ousted them after they outlived their use. Ironically, the 1968 coup was backed by US intelligence after Arif had nationalized Iraq’s oil, but this did not prevent the nascent Baathists from smearing their increasingly widespread net of victims as agents of the West or Israel. As in Syria, a brutal, pervasive, and unprecedented police state took over; unlike Syria, the army was largely cut out from the outset, for though Bakr was an officer, so were most of his rivals, and the Iraqi Baath party had always been suspicious of the army. Eventually it was Bakr’s cousin Saddam Hussein, a veteran of Baathist skulduggery, who would take over the regime. As in Syria, the Palestinian question, and sponsorship of certain fidayin factions, was a key card in internecine struggles between regime members – so that, for instance, Saddam and Bakr exploited the Iraqi army’s failure to intervene on the fidayin’s behalf at the 1970 Jordan campaign to oust their main rival, Hardan Abdul-Ghaffar. However, it was not Saddam’s qualified support of certain fidayin factions nor his thuggery but his quest to acquire strategic weapons that made him a major target for Israel, which – unlike the United States – remained trenchantly committed to his ouster in his quarter-century of rule.

It may be surprising to find that, in spite of the humiliation he had suffered, Nasser’s precedent was not quite yet lost. In 1969, two self-proclaimed Nasser imitators in Sudan and Libya – respectively Gaafar Numairi and Muammar Qaddhafi – seized power in military coups. But a mixture of circumstance and opportunism meant they never quite matched this rhetoric – Numairi’s regime, indeed, was quietly dealing with Israel by the early 1980s – and instead turned into bitter mutual enemies. The Nasserite example may have been a useful tool in capturing and justifying state power, but it proved rather less so in actual governance and military practice. And so while 1967 may not have precipitated the fall of pan-Arabism, it certainly helped to confirm it.

Israel. In retrospect, Israel’s tour de force has been termed a “cursed victory” (34), for while it expanded Israeli territory (in fact, if not officially) over the West Bank and Gaza, those sites became hotbeds of insurgency and various forms of resistance. From a purely military standpoint, the Israeli army had performed superbly, and yet this gave rise to a wave of triumphalism, contempt, and complacency that would nearly backfire in 1973. Most Israeli (and drawing on them other Western) accounts of the war are keen to contrast their army’s enterprise and panache with the politicization, inefficiency, and incompetence of their Arab opponents. This would be fair enough were it not expanded, as has often been the case, to explain Israel’s contrast with the Arab world at large (35). Israeli historians, to this end, never fail to chastise Hussein for his decision to ally with Egypt during 1967; it is not the incompetence of the alliance that they criticize, but the fact that Hussein would have the temerity to consider the alliance in the first place. This is prevalent to the extent that even “balanced” histories such as Michael Oren’s Six Days of War go to great lengths to unnecessarily exaggerate the indubitable inefficiency of the Arab forces and, by extension, explain every grievance against Israel as a result of Arab regime rhetoric and opportunism (it took years, for instance, simply to accept that “Palestinians” were not an artificial creation of inherently anti-Semitic Arab regimes), and every military action against Israel a doomed result of fanaticism or incitement.
Grievances against Israel, foremost among the occupied Palestinian populations, are real, as real as are grievances against various oppressive Arab regimes that no serious Israeli observer would deny; to be sure, Arab regimes may attempt to exploit anti-Israel sentiment, but they did not invent it from thin air. Indeed, to date the most effective anti-Israeli resistance has been carried out by effectively independent local Palestinian forces, best illustrated in the 1980s and 2000s intifadas. It is often forgotten that 1967 – as 1956 and 1948 – featured the same particularly talented pool of first-generation Israeli soldiers whose successors have never displayed, whether in conventional (as in Lebanon 1982 and 2006) or unconventional (various crackdowns in the West Bank and Gaza), anywhere near that level of skill (36). Yet even as most Israeli accounts dismiss their enemy’s competence, they warn darkly against its fanaticism and the sinister threat it poses. A siege mentality persists; in the post-Cold War world, this is most starkly revealed in the Israeli government’s war on so-called “radical Islam” (37), which has in turn deeply affected the equally farcical US “war on terrorism”.

NOTES

1. See, e.g., Al-Jazeera, “1967 and the rise of extremism,” 13 July 2009, http://www.aljazeera.com/focus/arabunity/2008/03/200852518359222993.html, accessed 27 June 2017; Michael Sharnoff, “A humiliated Arab world turns to Islamism,” The Jewish Chronicle, 6 June 2017, https://www.thejc.com/news/news-features/a-humiliated-arab-world-turns-to-islamism-1.439907, accessed 27 June 2017; Asher Susser, “The Six-Day War was a Watershed in Middle Eastern Politics,” Fathom Journal, spring 2017, http://fathomjournal.org/the-six-day-war-was-a-watershed-in-middle-eastern-history/, accessed 27 June 2017; Faisal Al-Yafai, “The death of Arab secularism,” The National, 3 November 2012, http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/the-death-of-arab-secularism, accessed 27 June 2017. In fact, Islamism had been a fairly dominant force in certain Arab countries, including Egypt during the 1940s and 1950s, before it was driven underground by various rulers during Nasser’s heyday; the 1967 defeat did not instigate it, but rather served to confirm Islamist attitudes on the secularist state. I have traced some pre-1960s Islamist history here, https://layyin1137.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/beyond-1979-the-roots-of-islamism-in-the-modern-arab-world/, and William Barnes at Muftah offers a solid rebuttal: William Barnes, “Islamism’s Rise in Egypt wasn’t just because of the 1967 war,” 3 December 2014, https://muftah.org/islamism-egypt-1967-war/#.WVLHz3qK9FU, accessed 27 June 2017.

2. Itamar Rabinovich, Syria under the Baath, 1963-66: The army party symbiosis (New York: Halsted Press, 1972).

3. Elie Podeh, The Decline of Arab Unity: The rise and fall of the United Arab Republic (Sussex Academic Press, 1999).

4. Majid Khadduri, Republican Iraq: A study in Iraqi politics since the revolution of 1958 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969) gives the best account of 1960s Iraq.

5. Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies, and Statesmen: Egypt’s road to revolt (Verso, 2012).

6. The single best history of the Palestinian militias, which also doubles as an excellent history of the Arab world’s politics at this time: Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian movement, 1949-1993 (Oxford University Press, 2000).

7. The Algerian regime, further left than Egypt, had initially been quite supportive of the leftist Baath regime in Syria – two major Baathist leaders, Yusuf Zuayyin and Ibrahim Makhous, had fought alongside the Algerian independence movement and established these links-  but the 1967 war changed this as Algerian dictator Houari Boumedienne accused both Egypt and Syria of hypocrisy. He would play an important role in the far more respectable 1973 campaign. David and Marina Ottaway, Algeria: the politics of a socialist revolution (London: University of California Press, 1970), 248.

8. Jesse Ferris, Nasser’s Gamble: How intervention in Yemen caused the six-day war (Princeton University Press, 2013).

9. Sayigh, Movement, 125-28, 157. Syrian assistance came with attached strings; indeed as late as August 1966 Damascus had imprisoned fidayin commander Yasser Arafat for allegedly murdering the Baathist Syrian officer who had been intended to supercede him, Yusuf Urabi. Interestingly, early Fateh operations and organization was largely facilitated by those stereotypically reactionary monarchies, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which did not share Jordan’s queasiness towards the Palestinian movement.

10. Ibid.

11. Samir Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 war (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). A rather hagiographical account of Hussein personally, and his deliberations, is given by Avi Shlaim, Lion of Jordan: The life of King Hussein in war and peace (London: Allen Lane, 2008).

12. Sayigh, Movement, 75-80, 100-18 provides a detailed account of Egypt’s relations with the ANM and PLO,

13. Kandil focuses especially and provides an excellent account on Egypt’s military-political struggle.

14. The trio were veterans of the 1956 war, where Amer had first shown his incompetence, Mahmoud had done nothing of note, and Qady, by contrast, had put up a somewhat respectable fight as a frontline field commander. Qady was one of the few high-ranked Egyptian officers at the time whose focus was primarily on the battlefield; he also commanded forces in Yemen, where he was wounded in the eye, during 1963.

15.Underscoring the fateful mixture of politics with army operations, the Cairo airport commandant, Mohamed Ayoub, initially assumed from the bombardment that Amer had concocted a plan to topple Nasser, and assailed the group when they landed. Michael Oren, Six Days of War: June 1967 and the making of the modern Middle East (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 177 gives an amusing account of this incident.

16. There is unanimous agreement on the dishonesty of state propaganda, battlefield reports, and its crippling effect on the army.

17. Salim and Atef’s arguments with Riad became quite famous among Jordan’s officers; at one point Atef seized his shimagh and made to leave the room in exasperation, while Riad and Salim traded insults. The broad consensus is that the normally capable Riad was undercut by his reliance on Cairo. Mutawi, Jordan, 125.

18. Naqib remained in charge of Iraqi forces in Jordan over the next few years; he notably advised Arafat during the 1968 battle with Israel, and he seems to have built up a solid rapport with the various fidayin, who in turn viewed Iraqi abstinence in the 1970 war as a personal betrayal. Naqib rose to become Iraqi second-in-command until the Baathist regime exiled him during 1978; he became a PLO member, an advisor to Arafat, and remained active in exile opposition. Naqib’s son, Falah, later returned to Iraq after the 2003 as a member of Ayad Allawi’s faction who served as interior minister. I have written on Falah here https://layyin1137.wordpress.com/2015/01/. Sayigh, Movement, 162, 178, 184, 435-36.

19. The Israeli soldier Chaim Hertsog outlines Israeli operations in a comprehensive if slightly biased history. Chaim Hertsog, The Arab-Israeli Wars: War and peace in the Middle East (Vintage Books), 155-62. Hertsog served as the Israeli army spymaster as well as first Israeli governor of East Jerusalem; his brother Yaacov had served as a secret negotiator with Jordanian monarch Hussein bin Talal since 1960. These ties especially developed during the 1970s. Other Arab states’ suspicions of Hussein were hardly baseless. Shlaim, Hussein.

20. Oren, 65, claims that Murtagy was a lackey of Amer and a commissar, but there is no real indication thereof. In any case, Murtagy had little field experience, even at Yemen where little fighting actually took place. Mohsen, far more familiar with the Sinai terrain, was cut out yet remained officially in charge of the Sinai corps. Notably, an early plan drawn up during 1965-66 but shelved shortly before the war had anticipated precisely the sort of thrust that the Israeli army would launch into the Sinai.

21. Kandil, 82-83, remarks acidly in consideration of the fact that Saadi owed his position to his friendship with Amer, “he was understandably reluctant to leave his side.” The claim about Nassar is made by Oren, Six Days, 215, citing an Egyptian article. It is uncertain, however, if this was a trumped-up accusation made up in the aftermath, when the regime was seeking scapegoats.

22. Eric Hammel’s impressively jingoistic Six Days in June: How Israel the 1967 Arab-Israeli war (Pacifica: Pacifica Military History, 1992), 218 claims that Hosny succumbed to “Israeli pleas” to avoid a massacre. In fact both precedent and the record since have shown that Israel’s army was not queasy about inflicting massacres if it could serve a purpose. Hammel gives the chest-thumper’s account of the war. Wajih Madani was a former Kuwaiti royal guard captain of Palestinian origin, who had served as the PLA commander but been severely inhibited by Egypt’s control. See Sayigh, 169.

23. Hertsog, Wars, 171.

24. Kenneth Pollack, Arabs at War: Military effectiveness, 1948-1991 (London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 310. Even the generally churlish Hammel acknowledges the “aggressive and resourceful” Rakan, Six Days, 375.

25. While Dayan was no wild-eyed fanatic, he had carved out a career as a conqueror and was quite willing, in the ruthless practicality of any warlord, to seize what he could. He believed that Israel could carve out a “Greater Israel” comprising large chunks of the Levant outside Israeli borders. Yael Yishal, Land or Peace: Whither Israel? (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), 63-64.

26. Hertsog, Wars, 180-81

27. In fact, Khatib had appealed to the Palestinian civilians to cooperate with the conquerors. During the battle, he had asked Atta not to fight in the Old City’s holy sites lest they be targeted. Nonetheless, he was caught in limbo, and eventually banished by Dayan to Jordan. Avi Raz, The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians in the aftermath of the Jume 1967 war (Yale University Press, 2012).

28. Ghoul, who commanded the elite cavalry in the rearguard, was blamed by the military court in the aftermath of the war, and publicly disgraced and court-martialled. This seems unfair; Hertsog and even Hammel mark him as a quite competent commander trying to organize a retreat in an impossible situation.

29. A Muslim Brethren opposition article a decade later claimed that Assad’s brother Rifaat had also declined Bagh’s plan. They also claimed that Khaddam, himself a Sunni by background, had given priority to the minoritarian families to whose background trrhe Baathist elite belonged, and accused Suwaidani of fleeing the battlefield. Finally, they termed Hafez Assad “the seller of the Golan”. I cannot confirm or deny the claims about Khaddam and Suwaidani. What is certain is that most of the army was recalled well before combat took place. Robert Rabil, Embattled Neighbours: Syria, Israel, and Lebanon (Boulder: Lynne Riener Publishers, 2003), 34.

30. Sayigh, Movement.

31. They had played a major role in helping Nasser seize power during 1954. See Kandil.

32. One of the officers backing a coup was Othman Nassar, the Gebel Libny field commander during 1967. Now in charge of the commando force, he addressed Amer thus, “We implore you not to give this man [Nasser] power over us…he will not shrink from humiliating and destroying us.” Kandil, 87-91, covers the coup and countercoup.

33. If anything, of course, Assad’s failure to dispatch his airforce to supplement the invasion force and fidayin decided the defeat, and perhaps his coup was an attempt to preempt any such move by Jadid.

34. Ahron Bregman, Cursed Victory: A history of Israel and the occupied territories (Penguin UK, 2014).

35. Examples include Oren, Pollack, Hammel,

36. Julian Thompson, in his foreword to a Dayan biography written by Martin van Creveld, Moshe Dayan (Orion, 2015), is perhaps overstating the point when he claims that modern Israeli operations, “with its ham-fisted tactics in the Occupied Territories, would have horrified Dayan”. Certainly the Israeli soldier was no stranger to ruthlessness. At the same time, the mobile, adaptive, and inventive force he presided over is a far cry from today’s army, which is effectively a gendarmerie heavily reliant on its international diplomacy rather than any military skill and more accustomed to bullying villagers than tank maneouvres.

37. See, for instance, Israel US ambassador Ron Dermer’s remarks in support of a notorious anti-Islam association, one of several, which is in turn linked to Richard Perle, a former advisor to both the United States and Israeli governments. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/israel-dermer-frank-gaffney-232651; accessed 14 December 2016. Several anti-Muslim thinktanks are also linked to rightist Israeli governments, and there has certainly been an attempt by such people as Perle to expand the war against Muslim countries at large, and most pressingly Israeli opponents such as Hamas.

Bism Allah Al-Rahman Al-Rahim

Libya, Syria, and the Oversimplification of the Regime Change Narrative

The Anti-Imperialist narrative

Regime Change is a word that often comes up in analyses of the Middle East and has been misused spectacularly in the purported cause of anti-imperialism while only serving selfish, cruel elites. After the United States’ disastrous invasion of Iraq, premised upon the forcible removal of its brutish Baath regime, as well as the NATO bombardment of Libya to remove Muammar Qaddafi in 2011, a beguilingly simple narrative appeared to anti-imperialists the world over. The United States was trying to destroy revolutionary, anti-imperialist regimes—the infamous neoconservative pamphlet by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) was only, after all, a fairly recent document—and it was spawning and manipulating anti-regime groups in these countries to do so. With Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein gone, anti-imperialist focus swung around to Syria, whose Baathist regime was at least verbally an opponent of the United States and particularly its closest ally, Israel.

Indeed, anti-imperialists fretted, did we not remember Afghanistan, where the benignly invited Russian invasion was ousted by bloodthirsty mujahidin forces that the West termed, at the time, “freedom fighters”? Did we not recall the dismemberment of Yugoslavia, all for the fiendish purpose of expanding NATO under the pretext of humanitarianism (“ha!”, a skeptical antiimperialist may sneer), at the expense of its pro-Russian regime? Or how about Chechnya, where radical forces revolted against the sovereign Russian federation under the guise of autonomy? Pah! Such narratives may have fooled the majority of the media-brainwashed Sheeple, but not skeptical, sophisticated and discerning anti-Imperialists like ourselves. Regime change is the Perennial Agenda, and the so-Called “Arab Spring” simply its tool if not outright creation. (1)

Holes in the Anti-Imperialist Narrative

These “alternative” narratives, very alluring popular among the alternative media (both left and right, both of them self-identifying as opposed to expansionist empire), are of course over-simplified, distorting rubbish. But let us assume for argument’s sake that they are true. In Libya, for instance, the Western air campaign was a major factor in the ouster of Qaddafi. Assuming that these are simply cunning astroturf programmes designed to overthrow a grimly determined Axis of Resistance, we still cannot adequately answer the following questions:

-Why did the Western-backed rebels in Libya fall apart in short order?

-Why did the United States, having favoured Islamist mujahidin in Afghanistan, invade Afghanistan in 2001 and proceed to occupy it on precisely the premise of opposing Islamism?

-Why did the imperial powers, having apparently whipped the world into a state of outrage by framing the Resistance Axis for the Syrian chemical attacks in 2013, fail to overthrow the Resistance regime? Why, in fact, did it reach out to the Resistance and make a deal (suitably criticized by the Israeli Settler State) with Iran within two years?

Anti-imperialists typically have ready-made answers to these questions, usually to do with the radicalism and inherent fanaticism of the reactionary forces that the United States and Imperial Powers concoct against the Resistance. In Libya, the bungling idiocy and irrational factionalism of the rebels is a typical excuse for explaining away the chaos. After all, didn’t Iraq fall apart after the American invasion? It’s clearly an example of American policy backfiring: Blowback, etc.

Some especially Intrepid Anti-Imperialists will go so far as to tell you that this is not Blowback, but in fact exactly what the Imperialists planned: organized chaos to necessitate repeated intervention. Here, typically, Afghanistan is brought in as an example. The mujahidin factions, Taliban emirate, and Al-Qaeda group (used interchangeably, since they are of course to the Discerning Anti-Imperialist for practical purposes one and the same) were known to be fanatics, and it was known that they would haul back Afghanistan into the Pits of Reaction and Fanaticism, thereby necessitating American intervention (the fact that the second half of this statement, assuming that Irrational Islamic Fanaticism and Reaction is the problem, coincides perfectly with neoconservative, Imperialist and interventionist dogma, is lost on these anti-imperialists, who are perfectly willing to agree with Imperialists in the short run if they think it will hurt them in the long run.) The more direct, blunder voices in the Anti-Imperialist sphere will remark that the brutality of Saddam, Assad, Qaddafi, and Najibullah was a Necessary Evil, and the only glue holding these otherwise anarchic, chaotic and irrational countries together.

What the Argument misses

This is a delectably alluring argument, delectable because of its apparent continuinity (contradictions are not readily acknowledged in the Anti-Imperialist Sphere) (2) and alluring because, even though it mimics Imperialist propaganda in its characterization of the Irrational, Fanatical Natives (a mimicry that Anti-Imperialists will never, of course, acknowledge), it ultimately blamed Imperialist Forces like the United States and thereby redeems itself for its momentary flirtations with imperialist rationale.

The inconvenient truth, however, is that these arguments, though not always (though often) wrong in of themselves, miss massive slices of the picture. They miss the fact, for instance, that religiously based politics if not outright religious politics have a long, indigenous history in the region quite separate from—and usually, if not always, opposed to—imperialism. (I partly addressed this in my previous article.) (3) They miss the fact that Qaddafi had an eight-year détente with the West prior to his overthrow, that dyed-in-the-wool imperialists like Tony Blair agitated on this anti-imperialist beacon’s behalf, and that even when the West did intervene against Qaddafi, it intervened on a certain side of a multipronged, complex insurgency. They miss the fact that the most direct and arguably important government involved in Qaddafi’s removal was not a Western, or pro-Western, regime, but the Sudanese government, which had itself been on Western blacklists for decades and itself threatened with an invasion in the mid-2000s, during which that anti-imperialist bastion Qaddafi hosted Sudan’s rebels. (Of course, pro-interventionist Westerners rarely mention Sudan’s involvement either, though for quite different purposes: it hurts the argument that you are selflessly overthrowing a dictator when the dictator next door is playing a major role; either way, this ignorance of Sudan’s involvement is another common point for both interventionists and anti-imperialists) (4) .

They miss the fact, and this is particularly important, that the Libyan opposition, itself locally divided and in some cases completely mutually independent of each other, never mind the West, had different external backers. To be sure, during 2011 there was a somewhat hysterical reaction and exaggeration of the threat Qaddafi posed to his opponents (5) —even the usually excellent Al-Jazeera station rode into this trap—but that does not mean, as Anti-Imperialists would have us believe, that the anti-Qaddafi movement was a monolithic bloc of pro-Western fanatics out to hurt a maligned leader, or that its dynamics were applicable elsewhere to, for instance, Syria. The anti-imperialist narrative refuses to countenance any context or complexity beyond the February-to-October 2011 period, which forever enshrines Qaddafi as the perennial anti-imperialist victim and his opponents forever as an imperially-controlled bloc of NATO mercenaries and fanatics.

For one thing, this narrative, at least as much as any anti-Qaddafi propaganda, misses the complexity and context of Libya before, after and even during the 2011 war. For one thing, the rebel groups were a disunited, heterogenous bunch who cannot be easily dismissed as fanatics, imperial tools or mercenaries. The West (here more Britain and France in the first place, and the United States only tangentially) were supporting a particularly, perceived “liberal” and pro-Western faction in the opposition, led partly by Mahmoud Jibril; in this they were supported by the United Arab Emirates, which was at least as suspicious of the “Islamist” factions in the rebellion as it was of the regime itself. It is the UAE that has been the major international backer of Khalifa Hiftar, the renegade Libyan general who has attempted with Western support to stamp himself as Libya’s new ruler. This group was also generally allied, not because of ideological or strategic purposes but simply by convenience and mutual interests, with the Zintan-based militias from the western ranges of the Nafusa Mountains.

Opposed to this group was a collection of Islamist factions, usually remnants of the former Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (which antiImperialists, like Imperialists, happily term as Al-Qaeda, and which was subjected to torture by the anti-Imperialist leader Qaddafi with the knowledge and compliance of the Imperialist leader Tony Blair) or groups linked to the Muslim Brethren or the Sanousi order, particularly strong in the eastern Cyrenaican region, and Misrata in the western region. A similar pattern has repeated next door in Egypt, where the UAE and Saudi Arabia resolutely backed Abdel-Fattah Sisi over the elected Islamist leader, Mohamed Morsi, who was favoured by Turkey and Qatar.

Finally, the local aspect and dynamics of different conflicts are entirely lost on the Anti-Imperialist dogma. In the Libyan case, even a simple Turkey-etc versus UAE-etc dichotomy can be an oversimplification because of its focus on geopolitics and ignorance of local realities (it is not entirely clear, for instance, that Zintan and Misrata are ideologically different areas), yet not even this minimum geopolitically-focused tip of the iceberg is available in Anti-Imperialist analyses, which blithely puts Turkey (because NATO) and Qatar (because oil) in the same bloc as the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and the West. It also takes no small sadistic pleasure in misattributing the post-Qaddafi violence to the utterly idiotic claim that only his iron fist could have held an unruly land together. (6)

This is the shallowness of the Anti-Imperialist Doctrine on Libya. Its analyses on Syria in particular is even worse, for at least in Libya the West did support a significant part of the opposition and help topple Qaddafi. In Syria—rhetoric notwithstanding—the West has attacked literally everybody apart from the government, even the rebels that anti-Imperialist dogma insists are Western hirelings. The major conflict between Turkey and Qatar, with their typical sympathy for the Islamist-dominated Syrian mujahidin (7) , and the West and the powerless exile SNC; the complete lack of coordination between the Syrian mujahidin on the ground and the generally pro-Western Syrian exiles; the heterogeneity in Syria’s rebel spheres; the fact that the White House has blocked every attempt to diplomatically or financially isolate the Assad regime; heck, the fact that Assad was a longtime collaborator in the same Imperialist War on Terror that the Imperialists hate so much when it comes to Iraq; the fact that Iran, supposedly the strategic target of Syrian Regime Change, has been merrily funnelling tens of thousands of auxiliaries and troops into Syria under the Americans’ nose, just as it did in the Iraq occupation where it was also painted by the Anti-Imperialists as a victim of American intrigue; the fact that it has overwhelmingly been airstrikes, to which the Syrian mujahidin have no recourse, that have levelled entire Syrian cities and towns on a level that Qaddafi could never have dreamt of—none of these facts matter, if they exist at all, to the Discerning Anti-Imperialist’s dogma.

I’ve written elsewhere on the major fallacies in Afghanistan discourse, so I won’t spent much time here; but it is true that a bizarrely simplistic, ignorant revision of the Afghanistan conflict has been a key building block of Anti-Imperialist dogma as much as imperialist propaganda. This included the often-exaggerated American support for the Afghan mujahidin—exaggerated by pro-Americans because it inflates their sense of contribution to the Soviet Union’s demise, and exaggerated by anti-imperialists because it fits so neatly into their dogma—as well as the idea that the Americans had any control over the Afghan mujahidin factions, the vast majority of which were localized, and the more internationally linked of which were largely confined to Pakistan, which was and remains suspicious of American intentions in the region. It also includes a complete distortion of the catastrophic 1990s civil war as the inevitable outcome of American-induced fanaticism, another revision that completes exaggerates American influence in Afghanistan during this period, and which ignores the fact that various remnants of the mujahidin fought with each other and made unlikely deals, including with Russia, for purposes that had nothing at all to do with America. And it offers absolutely no clue—indeed prefers to ignore outright—the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the Taliban-dominated insurgency therein, relegating it—again just like American interventionists and neoconservatives, except that they blame Pakistan and other regional states only, while Anti-Imperialists blame regional states and America’s 1980s role—to currents of fanaticism in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is for such reasons that Anti-Imperialists, echoing imperialists to the letter in their rationale, howl Al-Qaeda at the sight of a mujahid fighter in Syria. The legacy of propaganda runneth deep.

Distortions with the Same Logic

Idiotic innuendo and conjecture has been a common tool of Anti-Imperialist dogma as much as imperialist dogma. In the imperialists’ case, they may point at a picture of (for example) Jerusalem mufti Amin Husaini, an early Palestinian leader against Zionism, with Adolf Hitler and claim that Palestinians are crypto-Nazi antisemites; this argument has, indeed, been done to death by hardcore Zionists. In anti-imperialists’ case, they may point to a picture of Ronald Reagan sitting with various mujahidin leaders to claim that the United States supports regime change by fanatical Islamists against progressive Anti-Imperialist governments, even as the United States has killed literally tens of thousands of Islamists in the interim period.

Just to point out how ridiculous this binary worldview is, imagine how ridiculous the following arguments are:
1) Because the Iran-contra programme involved Israeli weapons being sold to Iran by American neoconservatives, Iran and Israel are secretly best buddies whose mutual ire is just an act.
2) Because the United States and Russia both support the government of Uzbekistan, the United States and Russia are and have always been on the same side.
3) Because Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill allied with and sat next to Stalin against Hitler, America and Britain are actually pro-Soviet communist governments and the Cold War never happened.
4) Because Qaddafi helped undermine Sudanese dictator Omar Bashir in the mid-2000s, with the support of the West, he is obviously a Western puppet and he was, actually, never overthrown at all in 2011 since that would make the Binary Dichotomy of Imperialism crash.

Anybody, including, hopefully, Discerning Anti-Imperialists, would know that these are moronic generalizations that completely distort historical events based on false binaries. Unfortunately, many Discerning Anti-Imperialists have followed the exact same logic in places like Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, and elsewhere, not only making vacuously pompous fools of themselves in public but doing actual harm by spreading blatant lies.

Conclusions

The idea of a centrally coordinated Imperialist conspiracy against them is an attractive proposal to various tyrants of the world, including those who collaborated and rubbed shoulders with Imperialists whenever it suited them. But this argument’s many omissions include local dynamics, which are heterogenous and varied from place to place, never mind country to country, and it cannot easily or coherently explain away these omissions or contradictions that confound its ignorant premises. Moreover, these premises are as often as not based on the exact logic, spectrum and sometimes even rhetoric of the imperialist powers that the Anti-Imperialists claim to see through; they simply position themselves at the apparent, though rarely actual, opposite end of this spectrum, disagreeing with whatever an imperialist power claims to have said irrespective of the actual facts on the ground and even more so the gap between the imperialist power’s actions and its rhetoric. The superimposition of a clumsy regime change across vastly different contexts and regions is as distorting, dishonest and incoherent as that of the imperialists that it claims to oppose.

Notes

1. See among others Tim Anderson, Patrick Cockburn, Charles Glass, Rania Khalek, Nir Rosen, John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, and Robert Fisk, a large proportion of whom used to command some admiration for their purported commitment to justice. See outlets like Al-Masdar News, Mint Press News, Russia Today, Press TV, and frequently the London Review of Books, Counterpunch, The Real News, Democracy Now, Mondoweiss, and Jacobin.
2. The dreaded Wahhabi, Salafi, jihadist, radical Islamist, etc is a particular staple that both imperialists—when dealing with groups as varied as Daaish, Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Ahrar-ul-Sham, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, Hamas, and Muslim Brethren—and anti-imperialists, mostly when dealing with the same factions when they threaten a purportedly anti-imperialist government, employ. Imperialists usually include Iran and Hezbollah in this bracket too, however (substituting Wahhabi for Khomeinist and Salafi for revolutionary), which anti-imperialists rarely do.
3. See https://layyin1137.wordpress.com/2016/09/09/beyond-1979-the-roots-of-islamism-in-the-modern-arab-world/; this deals with the Arab-majority world, and I plan to add sequels for other Muslim regions.
4. Asim Fathelrahman Ahmed, “Sudanese Role in Libya 2011,” African Perspectives, Vol. 11, Issue 38, 2013. http://www.sis.gov.eg/Newvr/africa38/africa38en/10.pdf
5. Maximilian Forte provides a good account of anti-Qaddafi propaganda in his otherwise disorganized, distorting and meandering Slouching Towards Sirte: NATO’s War on Libya and Africa (Montreal: Baraka Books, 2012), which for the most part is precisely the sort of incoherent “anti-imperialist” drivel that this article aims to debunk. I do generally favour the 2011 campaign against Qaddafi, but it is—unlike the case of Assad—true that there was considerable propaganda against him that exaggerated his threat.
6. The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath, edited by Peter Cole and Brian Quinn, is an excellent collection of essays on the Libyan revolt. Another solid source is Cherif Bassiouni’s book on Libya, though I have been unable to read more than a few excerpts as it is very difficult to procure.
7. The word mujahidin is typically reserved for the Afghan guerrillas in the 1980s, but I think it can be easily applied without fear of contradiction to the Syrian guerrillas as well. “Jihadists” is a common pejorative, but I should clarify that this is not what I mean here; similarly, I do not mean it in an uncritically admiring way in that all opposition are mujahidin or behave as mujahidin ideally should. I do not, for instance, condone or support groups like Nusrah Front (Jabhat-Fath-al-Sham) or their ideological positions even though they would self-identify as mujahidin and even though they are more locally rooted than a blanket denunciation may indicate. For an analysis of the “jihad” aspect that I do not necessarily endorse but which has some revealing facts and is generally fair, see Charles Lister’s The Syrian Jihad (London: Hurst & Co, 2015). It should be noted that even not-necessarily Islamist groups have often identified as mujahidin, such as the FLN-dominated Algerian moudjahedine from the 1950s.