Word: baghdad
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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From the long driveway that leads up to Iraq's huge, yellow-walled Ministry of Defense, a Bofors 40-mm. dual-barrel gun last week glared out at the city of Baghdad. Backing it up were leveled .50-cal. machine guns and recoilless rifles mounted on Jeeps. And even such visitors as got past the gun-toting sergeant at the ministry door were never more than a few feet from the business end of an automatic weapon. Padding up and down the corridors of the ministry, young officers of the Iraqi army kept firm hand on submachine guns...
...headquarters and home-away-from-home of Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, the armed camp that is Baghdad's Defense Ministry was a faithful reflection of Iraq's mood and condition. Nine months after Kassem and a handful of co-conspirators toppled the government of hated Strongman Nuri asSaid, the land that some say was the Garden of Eden is a place of terror, plot and counterplot. Its prisons are jammed with an estimated 5,000 political prisoners and ex-officials, and its lampposts are periodically festooned with bodies. Kassem's Iraq is a place where once-eminent...
Undermined by the twin Communist weapons of chaos and subversion, Iraq, until recently the West's strongest ally in the Middle East, is in real danger of becoming a Soviet satellite. Already the new Iraqi government has withdrawn from the Baghdad Pact, driven Britain's R.A.F. from its Habbaniyah base near Baghdad. Unless the slide toward Communism is halted, the Soviet Union will penetrate the very heart of the Middle East, outflank staunchly pro-Western Turkey and increasingly shaky Iran. Encamped at the head of the Persian Gulf, the U.S.S.R. could then render the rest of the Middle...
...Abdul Karim Kassem. On the face of it, Karim Kassem, 44, seems a weak reed on which to rest the free world's hopes. Modest in deportment, moderate in conversation, Kassem is nonetheless inordinately and naively suspicious. (He recently asserted that one section of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad lured Iraqis in with stories that automobiles can be bought there-and then filled them with anti-Kassem talk.) Cursed by shyness and a weak, high-pitched voice, he is sadly lacking in the rabble-rousing skills on which most successful Arab politicians rely. Most serious...
...that, Kassem is a man so convinced that he has been chosen by destiny to be a leader that he early ruled out marriage for fear that it would interfere with his dreams. Born in Baghdad, the son of a lower-middle-class family, Kassem graduated from the Royal Military College in 1934, fought with distinction in the Palestine war, and over the years won regular promotions. At senior officers' school at Devizes in southwestern England, his classmates nicknamed him "the snake charmer" because of his ability to argue them into undertaking improbable courses of action in field problems...