Ghazi of Iraq
Ghazi was king of Iraq from September 1933, when his father Faisal I died in a Berne clinic, to April 1939, when he drove his sports car into a lamp post outside the palace at Baghdad at speed and died at twenty-seven. In six years the young king, who had been raised in the Hejaz by his grandfather Hussein and spoke Arabic with the Bedouin and English badly, was the army's and the nationalists' king against the British and the politicians his father had balanced. The reign began with the Assyrian massacre of August 1933, in which the army under a Kurdish general killed some three hundred Assyrian villagers at Simele and was cheered in Baghdad. It continued through the tribal risings of the Euphrates of 1935-36 that the army bombed. It turned in October 1936 with that general's coup, the first military coup in the modern Arab world, which the king welcomed and which was followed by his assassination in 1937 and a succession of governments the officers made and unmade. The crown was the army's partner and the parliament a spectator. He was born in Mecca in 1912, the only son, and was left with his grandfather when his father went to Damascus and then Baghdad, was educated at Harrow for a year that he hated and at the Baghdad military college. He married his cousin Aliya in 1934, who gave him the son Faisal II in 1935. He had a private radio station in the palace, Qasr al-Zuhur, from which he broadcast against the British, the Zionists and, in 1939, for the annexation of Kuwait, whose sheikh's British treaty he called an outrage. That brought British troops to Kuwait and Whitehall to discuss his removal. He raced cars, flew, drank, and he was the first Arab monarch to be a popular hero, which the crowds showed when he died. The crash of 4 April 1939 was officially an accident and unofficially, in every Baghdad coffee house, the work of the British and of Nuri al-Said, whose British consul at Mosul was murdered by the mob at the news. His four-year-old son became king under the regency of the uncle Abd al-Ilah, whom Ghazi had despised and who governed for the British until the revolution of 1958 dragged him through the streets.
- Lived: 1912 CE – 1939 CE
- Nationality: Iraqi
- Roles: monarch, king
