Rashid Ali al Kaylani

Rashid Ali al-Kaylani was an Iraqi politician and army officer who served as Prime Minister of Iraq on three occasions: from March to November 1933, from March 1940 to February 1941 and from April to May 1941. He is chiefly remembered as an ardent Arab nationalist who attempted to remove the British influence from Iraq by starting a coup against the government in 1941. During his brief tenures as Prime Minister in 1940 and 1941, he attempted to negotiate settlements with the Axis powers during World War II in order to counter British influence in Iraq. Al-Kaylani began his career in politics in the first government led by Prime Minister Yasin al-Hashimi. He held several cabinet posts in the 1920s and ’30s, including minister of justice (1924) and minister of the interior (1925–28). He was elected as the president of the Chamber of Deputies in 1925 and 1926. He was exiled to 'Ana in 1938 for his suspected role in the Baghdad bomb-throwing of November and the general political upheaval. He was reappointed as Prime Minister in 1940, but was forced to resign in 1941 by the British, who still had a strong presence in Iraq. He then staged a pro-Nazi coup in Baghdad, seizing control from the regent, ʿAbd al-Ilāh. British troops were sent to the country, and al-Kaylani's regime was toppled in May 1941. He fled to Berlin, where he was received by Adolf Hitler. He lived in exile in Saudi Arabia and Egypt and returned to Iraq only in 1958 following the revolution that overthrew Iraq’s Hashemite monarchy. He was imprisoned and sentenced to death in 1961 for his involvement in a plot against Iraqi Prime Minister ʿAbd al-Karīm Qāsim. He was released from prison by a special amnesty in 1961 and settled in Beirut, where he died of pneumonia in 1937.