As one of its first acts the restored pro-German administration sent its artillery to attack the British air base at Habbaniya causing the Brits to respond by invading Basra. The hoped-for support from Nazi Germany never came and Kaylani eventually fled to Saudi Arabia.
Haj Amin al-Husseini who issued a fatwa (Islamic religious ruling) calling on all Muslims to help the pro-Axis government in Iraq became one of England’s most wanted men. In May 1941 a group of Jewish fighters including David Raziel leader of the right-wing Irgun set out for Iraq to assassinate the former Mufti on a mission sponsored by the Churchill government. The mission ended prematurely when Raziel was killed by a bomb dropped from a German plane. Aware that his life was in danger al-Husseini fled to Europe dressed as a woman.
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On November 28 1941 the former Mufti was officially received by Hitler who agreed to establish a bureau for al-Husseini which was used to spread propaganda on behalf of Nazi Germany organize spy rings in Europe and the Middle East and most importantly establish Muslim Nazi SS divisions and Wehrmacht units in Bosnia the Balkans North Africa and Nazi-occupied parts of the Soviet Union. After the meeting the Mufti was also named SS gruppenfuehrer by Heinrich Himmler and referred to as the Fuhrer of the Arab World by Hitler himself.
The largest Muslim Nazi SS unit was the 13th division known as Hanjar. Husseini also encouraged the creation of smaller less efficient units including the Waffen SS divisions known as Skanderbeg (made up predominantly of Albanians) and Kama (made up mostly of Yugoslavian Muslims). Thus Hitler’s Mufti organized or encouraged three out of 27 Waffen SS divisions formed before 1945 (eleven other SS divisions were formed in 1945 but most of these were of questionable caliber and accepted soldiers of questionable skill).
According to the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust al-Husseini organized in record time Croatian units that went on to massacre hundreds of thousands of Serbian Orthodox Christians. Jacenovac the third largest death camp where more than 200 000 people met their death was run by Croatian Ante Pavelic with the aid of al-Husseini. In all at least 800 000 Yugoslavian civilians were murdered by Pavelic’s pro-Axis Ustaschi regime.
Despite the relative inefficiency of the Hanjar division and the total incompetence of the other two divisions it can still be said that the units established and encouraged by the Fuhrer of the Arab World played a significant role in the genocide. Tens of thousands of Jews outside Yugoslavia also perished when the Mufti argued against trading them for German POWs held by the Allies.
Al-Husseini opened a North African Bureau in Germany with the goal of recruiting 500 000 Arab soldiers from Morocco Tunisia and Algeria. The plan failed when German forces were forced to withdraw from much of North Africa after a successful British operation.
But an Arab Legion was founded and it fought under the German flag. Arab soldiers had hoped to fight in the Middle East but were instead sent to the Russian front where they were completely wiped out while fighting in the Caucasus region. Some time later in responseto the British decision to create a Jewish Brigade made up of some of the 26 000 Palestinian Jews who had fought under the United Kingdom’s flag the Mufti convinced the Germans to create an Arab Brigade. The unit however either did not fight or was not very efficient because very little is known about it.
The Mufti also made a particularly strong effort to recruit Soviet Muslims. It was largely due to Haj Amin’s propaganda that on the arrival of German armies in the northern Caucasus in 1942 five indigene tribes – the Chechens the Ingushes the Balkars the Karachais and the Kabardines – welcomed them with bread and salt wrote Joseph Schechtman in The Mufti and the Fuhrer. Stalin’s response was deadly. Caucasian Muslims including nearly all Chechens and Ingush were exiled from their land with up to a third dying as a result of inhumane treatment by Soviet authorities.
