Faisal I of Iraq

Faisal led the Arab Revolt, was made king of Syria and thrown out within months, and was then installed by the British as the first king of an Iraq they had just invented. He was a son of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, and commanded the northern Arab army in the revolt against the Ottomans from 1916, with T. E. Lawrence attached to his staff; his forces took Aqaba and entered Damascus in 1918. He argued the Arab case at the Paris Peace Conference and was proclaimed king of Syria by a national congress in March 1920. France held a mandate over Syria under the secret agreement his allies had made with each other, and a French column destroyed his army at Maysalun in July and expelled him. The British, facing a costly revolt in Mesopotamia, offered him Iraq instead; a plebiscite reported ninety-six per cent in favour and he was crowned in Baghdad in August 1921 with an anthem played by a British band because nobody knew an Iraqi one. He spent twelve years trying to build a state out of three Ottoman provinces with a Shia majority, a Sunni administration and a Kurdish north, while negotiating the mandate down to the treaty of 1930 and formal independence in 1932. He wrote privately that there was still no Iraqi people, only human masses. He died in Switzerland the following year. He was the third son of the Sharif and had sat in the Ottoman parliament for Jeddah before the revolt. His brother Abdullah was given Transjordan in the same settlement, and that branch still reigns in Amman while his own line was destroyed in the Iraqi coup of 1958. The Assyrian massacre at Simele took place weeks after his death and is generally read as the first act of the state he left behind. Lawrence's account of him in Seven Pillars of Wisdom has shaped his reputation in English more than anything he himself wrote.

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