Omar Ali and the 1948 Battle of Jenin: The Iraqi Commander’s Story

While they were singing to establish what they called the State of

Israel in a place not far away Bodies were scattered

and a people were displaced when the Palestinians lost their land after a war that

Arab leaders did

not strive to fight in as much as they strove to choose its name,

so it was the Nakba of

1948, which perhaps would never have happened if the Iraqi army had continued its

advance after the Battle of Jenin,

which witnessed a story that every Iraqi is still proud

of and that makes every Arab’s body shudder, when an Iraqi officer

named Omar Ali humiliated Ben- Gurion,

who would become the first president of Israel,

after he forced him to bow to him following the crushing

of hundreds of Israeli soldiers, among them Ben- Gurion’s daughter,

then the advance toward Tel Aviv to liberate it,

but a suspicious order was issued to the Iraqis to halt their advance and

wait until Palestine fell into the hands of the Jews. So what happened?

And who is Major General Omar Ali, over whose killing Israel celebrated after 26

years from the Nakba,

to the extent that fingers of accusation were pointed at Mossad for assassinating

him in revenge?

From the files of the Nakba emerges the story of the Iraqi Major General Omar Ali

Jenin Under Fire

On the tenth of May every year, Israel commemorates its dead at its military

cemetery in occupied Jerusalem who were killed while trying to occupy Jenin in

1948, after a fierce battle with the Iraqi army with the participation of

Palestinian fighters

This was when the Jews launched a wide- scale attack on the city,

where fierce fighting raged in its streets,

and after they tightened the siege around it and cut communication between the

cities of Jenin and Nablus, then besieged the government compound on the Haifa road

and began shelling it with mortar guns,

plunging the city into chaos which was, for all practical purposes,

considered militarily fallen into Jewish hands

The Iraqis in Jenin

Despite the British occupation of Iraq at the time, popular Iraqi

pressure forced the government to send forces to take part in the Palestine war,

estimated at 35,000 fighters divided into three divisions, and the brigade commanded

by Colonel Omar Ali was tasked with defending the Palestinian Triangle,

made up of Jenin, Nablus, and Tulkarm,

and during its movement The Iraqi brigade was

to take position in the city of Qalqilya and Kafr Qasim east of Tel Aviv,

when Commander Omar Ali picked up the besieged people's wireless distress call,

so he immediately redirected the brigade toward the north, toward Jenin,

instead of heading west toward Tulkarm, without consulting the Iraqi command.

The brigade entered

the battle on the twentieth of June without being supplied with a military map,

an operational map of the area,

yet the Iraqi army fought a decisive battle in which it liberated

the city of Jenin from the Jews.

The result of the battle was astonishing to everyone, how an army with a strength

of about 800 fighters was able to rout a force of 10 thousand Zionists.

The Iraqi forces did not stop at Jenin at that time,

but then Colonel Omar Ali ordered his soldiers to head to Tel Aviv,

the seat of the Zionist government,

where a part of the brigade’s forces rushed toward the city.

But the advance was halted by order of the Iraqi command,

on the pretext of waiting for the Iraqi army to be fully assembled to enter.

to Palestine,

but the Battle of Jenin kept the city under Jordanian rule until it was

occupied by Israel again in 1967

The humiliation of Ben- Gurion

When the truce was concluded and orders came to Commander Omar Ali to

exchange prisoners and the dead,

it turned out that among the Zionist dead was Ben- Gurion’s daughter,

the first president of Israel,

who sent someone to request the delivery of his daughter’s body without asking for

the bodies of the hundreds of Zionists killed with her in the Battle of Jenin,

but Omar Ali insisted on humiliating

Ben- Gurion and demanded that he come in person to receive his daughter’s corpse

and bow to the Iraqi commander before taking the body,

and he imposed on the Zionists

a withdrawal of 12 kilometers from Jenin,

and this withdrawal is what enabled the Iraqi army to reach the

outskirts of Tel Aviv,

so Ben- Gurion accepted those two conditions and received his daughter’s body

The life of Commander Omar

Major General Staff Omar Ali Al- Bairaqdar, a military officer from Iraq,

was born in Kirkuk in 1910 to the Al- Bairaqdar family of Kirkuk. After finishing

his studies After high school, he joined the military college

in Baghdad and graduated from it as a lieutenant in September 1928

Then he joined the Staff College and advanced through the army ranks until he became

a staff colonel in

1946, when he led units of the Iraqi army to end Mustafa Barzani’s uprising in

northern Iraq,

and he took part in crushing the second Barzan revolt after his participation

in the 1948 Palestine War

He returned to Iraq and became commandant of the Military College, then was promoted

to the rank of staff brigadier,

and he was also entrusted with the post of acting governor of Suleimaniyah

Province until

1954, then he was promoted to the rank of major general, becoming commander of

the First Division until the July movement in 1958

Between prison and death

Major General Omar Ali’s stance rejecting the July fourteenth movement

in 1958 led him to move some units toward Baghdad to overthrow it before

being caught by Abd al- Salam Arif, who put him in prison until Abd

al- Karim Qasim pardoned him in 1961. Then he withdrew

to his home until he left Iraq for Lebanon, and while returning from In Beirut,

he died in a car accident near the town of Rutba in September

1974, and although there is no evidence proving that the accident was orchestrated,

the way Israeli leaders celebrated his death made some

people point the finger at Mossad,

so was it really possible for Commander Omar’s forces and other Arab brigades

to change history and prevent the establishment of the State of Israel in Palestine?

Or was the matter decided in favor of the Jewish militias from the very beginning?