ip8 A Short History of the Middle East
tions that die consulates of such neutral, but unfriendly Powers as
Japan, Hungary, Roumania and Bulgaria in such strategic centres
as Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez were nests of espionage, and
closed them down.
But the easy optimism engendered by Britain's swift liquidation
of the grandiose Italian African empire in 1940/1 was soon to be
rudely awakened. In April 1941 Germany struck at the Balkans
and in one month overran Jugoslavia and Greece; at the same time
Rommel and his Afrika Korps came to the help of the routed
Italians in Libya and drove the British forces, depleted for the
Greek campaign, back from the Gulf of Sirte to the Egyptian
frontier. In Iraq, where the Golden Square and Rashid Ali had
suffered a temporary reverse in an attempted coup d'etat in January,
the incitement of the Mufti and his followers to a breach with
Britain had been supported by the propaganda of the German
Armistice Commission sent to the Levant States after the French
collapse. Directed by Baron von Hentig, who had been a member
of the German mission to Afghanistan in the First World War, it
disposed of large sums of money and won the support of some of the
Arab extremists in Syria. It apparently sent emissaries to the Mufti,
who was in receipt of subsidies from the Axis through the Italian
Minister in Baghdad. Early in April the invasion of Greece
seemed to the conspirators in Baghdad to be the signal for their
rising. How could Britain, represented in Iraq only by a small air-
force and by a 'gentle, pleasant, and optimistic' ambassador with no
previous experience of the Middle East, resist them? They over-
threw the flabby existing government, reinstated Rashid Ali as
Prime Minister, and sought to secure the person of the Regent for
the boy-King Faisal II; he was however safely smuggled away by
the American Minister. After this coup the Golden Square hesi-
tated, since German help was not yet forthcoming. The newly-
appointed British Ambassador, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, with
twenty years' experience of the Iraqis, seized this opportunity to
secure the landing in Basra, under the terms of the Anglo-Iraqi
Treaty, of Indian troops to reinforce the Middle East. When a
second contingent arrived, the Iraqi government, encouraged by
the German successes in Greece and Libya, demanded that the first
contingent should leave Iraqi territory before the second dis-
embarked. The British authorities refused to comply. On I May
the Iraqi army invested the British air-base at Habbaniya with some