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towards the end of September 1944 that they had learnt officially of the
ex-Mufti’s proposed expedition for which they had been selected: to form
armed bands to fight the Jews in Iraq and Palestine—not at all what they
had wanted to hear.
Upon landing, the group members buried their equipment, changed
into civilian clothes, and set out for Tel Afar. Meanwhile, the moment they
learnt of the arrival of the parachutists, the three most important local
officials—the mukhtar (village head) of Hayouoglukoy, the qaimaqam
(subgovernor) of Tel Afar, and the mutasarrif (governor) of Mosul—all
deemed them to be enemy intruders and sprang into action. Local police
were placed on alert, and the RAF armoured car company stationed at
Mosul was notified. In the early afternoon Rasul was arrested on the out-
skirts of Tel Afar. At roughly the same time, Fellah was captured attempt-
ing to leave the town by bus. Neither offered any resistance; both were
fully cooperative under interrogation. By mid-afternoon, the ALO, the
deputy assistant political adviser (DAPA), and the FSS were in on the case
and set about recovering the parachutists’ equipment. Meanwhile, earlier
in the day, the expedition leader Karradi and his deputy Jifani had evaded
capture and had succeeded in catching a bus to Mosul, where they
promptly went underground and disappeared. Rasul and Fellah were
greatly relieved to be ‘abandoned’ and left to their own devices, as neither
had ever had any intention of taking orders from or cooperating with the
other two once they reached Iraq. According to Rasul, their purpose in
joining the mission had always been simply to rejoin their families, and the
ex-Mufti had unwittingly provided them with a golden opportu-
nity to do so.
The purpose of the expedition, as explained to Rasul by Karradi, was
the formation of armed guerrilla bands to fight the Jews and attack Jewish
interests in both Iraq and Palestine in the name of the ex-Mufti. The idea
was to recruit fighters in the cities and, in order to escape interference
from the security forces, to build a base out in the desert somewhere west
of Baghdad with an aerodrome and aircraft hangars made from Bedouin
tents. There they would be directly reinforced and supplied from Berlin.
Recruits were supposed to be found mainly among former Fawzi al-
Qawuqji irregulars who had fought against HABFORCE during the
Anglo-Iraqi War and had been rounded up after the campaign by a special
British flying column, MERCOL.^80 However, once Karradi had discov-
ered that both W/T sets had been damaged beyond repair on landing,
and that he would never be able to contact Berlin, he had decided to abort
A PLACE IN THE SHADE