On the main road north of the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank, located between the steep hills covered with olive groves, and just before the southern entrance to Jenin, the road branches west towards an Orthodox church believed to date back to the fourth century AD, one of the oldest churches in the world, at that point you can easily distinguish that Iraqi flag flying over a short mast, and directly below it roses that grew timidly here and there, herbs that swelled among modest tombs, and names written on tombs that cannot be distinguished. To find out which of the martyrs buried here was Shiite, and which of them was Sunni, there is only one word on all the graves: "martyr of the Arabism of Palestine."
Here is the cemetery of the martyrs of the Iraqi army in Palestine, which bears witness to the valor of 44 Iraqi soldiers and officers who sacrificed their lives in defense of Palestine more than 70 years ago.
The story goes that in 1967, after Israel launched its attack on Sinai, the West Bank and Gaza at the same time, and occupied them all in six days, the residents of the Palestinian city of Jenin heard a number of men speaking in the Iraqi accent outside their homes, and they were overjoyed, and they thought that the Iraqi soldiers who came in 1948 to defend them against the Zionist gangs at that time had returned again, but it soon turned out that the speakers of the Iraqi accent on the outskirts of the city were only soldiers in the army. Israelis, and that they are Jews of Iraqi origin and nothing more.
Iraqi Championships in Palestine
Paradoxically, the Iraqi army had only been established for 27 years when it decided to go to war in Palestine, but it performed exceptionally, occupying the best strategic positions among the Arab armies at the end of the war, so that the city now called "Tel Aviv" was at one point under the fire of the Iraqi army. The popular and student movement in Iraq was one of the strongest movements that pushed the Arab armies into the 1948 war, and the pressure of the student movement worsened to the point of organizing sit-ins in Iraqi schools. Not surprisingly, many of the Iraqi school teachers were Palestinian, and the Iraqi child, adolescent and young man were associated with Palestine from the first days of his studies.
(Social Media)
The Iraqi forces began their journey in Palestine on May 15, 1948, and consisted of 3,<> soldiers led by Brigadier General Muhammad al-Zubaidi, and crossed the Jordan River towards Palestine, and their first step was to occupy the site of the "Rothenberg" project to generate electricity on the east bank of the Jordan River, and then attack the fortified castle of "Kesher". But after blowing up the gate of the citadel, the military orders came to the Iraqi army to stop the attempt to take control of the citadel, head towards Nablus, and take control of the village of "Jiftlik". The Iraqi moves likely went in the direction of seizing an important economic center for the Zionists, the city of Netanya, which was built on the ruins of the Palestinian city of um Khaled, with the aim of isolating the northern and southern Zionist forces from each other. The plan to seize Netanya apparently entailed first capturing Kfar Yona, located to eastern Netanya.
On the other hand, the Zionist gangs had a plan of pre-emptive deterrence by attacking the town of Jenin. Indeed, 3,31 Israeli soldiers from the Carmeli Brigade headed to capture Jenin as part of the pre-emptive attack plan. The offensive began on May 1948, 1948, according to a tight military move, and there was only a small Iraqi garrison led by Lieutenant Colonel Noah al-Jabali, an officer in an Iraqi mechanized battalion, with armored cars, an artillery battery, and some Palestinian volunteers. Zionist gangs began to easily control the villages one by one, with the support of their own air force facilitating the task of encircling the city and inflicting casualties on the Iraqis. Although the Israelis took control of most of the city by June <>, Iraqi soldiers were able to hold the old citadel, a former police station in the city.
Iraqi military commander Omar Ali al-Bayrakdar, commander of the Fifth Infantry Brigade in the 1948 war. (Social Media)
The biggest shift occurred when Iraqi military commander Omar Ali al-Bayrakdar, the commander of the fifth infantry brigade who made history, made history. According to the plan, the brigade was supposed to go on the offensive against Netanya. We are not yet sure whether the orders came from the political leadership to change the course of the plan and then move towards the liberation of Jenin, or whether the movement was carried out without higher political orders. In any case, popular accounts say that Bayraktar moved after he saw the old Palestinians fleeing Jenin, and told him what had happened to them at the hands of the Zionists. Therefore, Al-Bayrakdar made a decision to go to the city in order to liberate it, and organized his forces with the volunteer mujahideen from the Palestinians of Nablus, "Araba", "Burqin", "Rumana" and "Sanur", and was able to reach Jenin despite the harassment he met on the way from some Zionist gang soldiers.
The incoming Iraqi forces began a historic battle to retake the city, and began their efforts by striking the Israeli army at the Qabatiya crossings. With the heroic performance of the Iraqi army, the Zionist gangs, led by the Haganah, withdrew from the southern hills of Jenin. By June 4, Iraqi forces had completed the victory and completely crushed the Zionist fighters. According to some estimates, the spoils of the battle were 10 mortars, 20 machine guns, 4 wireless devices and 300 rifles of various models, and 300 Zionists were killed and wounded, while Iraq provided 100 martyrs and wounded.
The Iraqi army, according to testimonies, was the most consistent with the plan set for the Arab armies. The Iraqis fought honorably in Tulkarm, um al-Fahm, and the Triangle area, as well as the heroic battle of Jenin. The Iraqi army also came close to liberating Haifa, northwest of Jerusalem, had it not been for the political orders that prevented it from completing the military mission there, and its heroism ensured the preservation of the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians and their homes at the time.
The book "Palestine War.. Rewriting the History of the 1948 War" (social media)
However, the political management of the Iraqi army is still the subject of many questions, as are the other political administrations of the Arab armies that participated in the 1948 war. According to political science professor Dr. "Ahmed Adnan Al-Mayali", in a previous interview with Al Jazeera Net, the Iraqi army did not receive sufficient support from his government in the war because of the British influence on the country in that period. The book "The Palestine War.. Rewriting the history of the 1948 war", issued by the University of Cambridge, Britain, to a paradox related to the political administration in Iraq at the time, as the Iraqi leadership was the first to call for military intervention in Palestine after the partition decision, but its actual orders sent to its army focused on occupying defensive positions only, and it also called for an oil boycott (banning the export of oil) to the countries supporting the partition plan, but it did not implement itself an oil boycott of this kind.
There are many steps that raise questions about the orders given to the Iraqi army during the war, starting with the attack on the Kusher Fort, which consumed a long time and killed martyrs, until its gate was actually blown up, before the orders came to go to Nablus without completing the occupation of the fort. Amer Hasak, one of the battle's field commanders, points out that moving to Nablus was a strange move from his point of view, as there were no Jews originally occupied in that city. At the end of the battles, and despite the Iraqi leadership's refusal to end the war and surrender to defeat, it did not in fact develop an effective strategic offensive at the level of the political administration, despite the outstanding performance of its army and its good positions throughout the war.
"No Zionist dares to harass an Iraqi soldier"
The first truce of the war came on June 11, 1948, and embodied a major disaster, according to the testimony of "Saleh Saeb al-Jubouri", former chief of staff of the Iraqi army, through this lapse committed by the Arab political administration by accepting the armistice, the Zionists were able to better prepare and arm to achieve broader gains after the end of the armistice, and the Zionist gangs have already triumphed over the Egyptian forces and the Salvation Army, which is composed of volunteers later.
Nevertheless, the Iraqi army did its job in Jenin after the truce, and continued to perform with excellence in the small missions it undertook on the battlefield. According to al-Jubouri, the heroism of the Iraqis did not end here, but was written during the battle of Ramat Hakovich, in which Iraqi forces were crushed in a defensive operation by their Zionist counterpart after the Zionists tried to grab new positions in 1949. This was the last page of the Iraqi combat effort in Palestine, after which the Zionists did not dare to seriously harass any sector of the Iraqi army.
Beginning on January 7, 1949, Arab governments entered into talks on the Greek island of Rhodes to conclude a permanent armistice with the newly established Israeli occupation state. But only Iraq refused to negotiate with the new entity, and thus Iraq and Israel remained legally and effectively at war. After the withdrawal of the Arab armies, the Iraqi army handed over the areas it had captured in the war to its Jordanian counterpart in July 1949, as Iraq had the best strategic position among the Arab armies when the war ended.
Here we can return to the aforementioned book "The Palestine War", which deals with the ambiguous decisions of the Iraqi administration. While Iraq rejected a ceasefire, on the other hand it did not develop any strategic attack on the Zionists, just as its heroism in the war was tremendous combat efforts and great valor, but without a broader plan to change the status quo politically and strategically. Iraq's refusal to sign the truce was not followed by a desire to develop a long-term strategy to confront the Israeli presence, but rather it seemed determined to eventually withdraw its forces and hand over the territory to Jordan as quickly as possible.
The 1948 war is still full of mysteries, and it has not yet received the research work it deserves to solve these mysteries, whether those related to the Iraqi, Egyptian or Jordanian army, and the nature of their failures separately, and what is on the ground, and what is related to the plan of military leaders and the strategies of political leaders, or sometimes their absence altogether. But apart from the nature of the political management in the Arab countries of the 1948 Palestine war, and the similar question marks that have not been answered satisfactorily to this day, it is certain that the Iraqi soldier did not spare his soul on Palestine, and that his heroism deserves to be told. Iraqi soldiers even shared their food with the Palestinian population, as well as taking Palestinian refugees to Iraq on their return from war. The Palestinians bid farewell to the soldiers of Iraq as they left the Palestinian territories in a solemn ceremony – not without sadness and sorrow, of course – and did not forget under the weight of defeat to stand in love and respect for the sacrifices of Iraqi heroes on their land.
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