ABSTRACT
After the Thirty Day War of 1941, the Regent Abd Al-Ilah and Nuri AlSaid returned to power by October 1941 and reasserted their strength by eliminating the moderator potential and veto power of the military. Their task was facilitated by the Army’s already weakened status due to a reduction in numbers from desertions. According to the British Colonel Gerald de Gaury, the British chargé d’affaires appointed to the Regent, prior to the 1941 conflict the Army had four divisions and 44,217 men (De Gaury 1961: 146). After the war, the army was in a pitiful state:
Its boots were (at the end of the Second World War) mostly unfit for wear in marching, its supply of clothes short, its leave long overdue, it pay meagre, and its rations had been reduced to a figure of a thousand calories below the minimum considered necessary by European medical men for Eastern troops. Money for repair of barracks and camps has been stopped. The Police were forbidden to assist in tracing or arresting deserters and by the summer of 1943, out of an established strength of thirty thousand men, twenty thousand were deserters.
