Word: baghdad
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Touring the Middle East under the auspices of the U.S. State Department, Duke Ellington and his band found themselves caught in the middle of a coup in Iraq last week. Fascinated by the goings-on, the Duke promised to compose a new piece, "The Baghdad Rock-and I do mean rocking with rockets, bombs...
Next morning Saadi's supporters in the labor unions and the National Guard poured into the streets of Baghdad, led by Air Force Colonel Munzer Wandari, a fiercely mustachioed fanatic who personally took up a jet fighter and strafed the presidential palace with rockets. When the moderates called on the army for help, troops cleared the streets and jailed Wandari. But he had apparently made his point. An emergency meeting of the Baath high command decided upon a plague-on-both-your-houses gesture: Shabib, Jawad and five aides were hustled into another plane and sent into exile...
Broadcast over the Baghdad and Damascus radios, the statement claimed that the agreement signed in Cairo last April promised collective leadership but that Nasser, to preserve his "dictatorial existence," had tried to grab control of the new union-even inciting the "criminal" July 18 abortive coup in Syria, which was crushed at a cost of scores of dead. Calling themselves the true leaders of Arab federation, the Baathists declared that Egypt was still welcome to join, urged "popular forces in the Egyptian region" to indulge in an "upsurge and smashing of barriers in order to join with the other revolutionary...
Nonexistent Ally. While his nation suffered, Yemen's President Sallal was on a triumphal tour of the Middle East. Though plagued by conspiracies at home-he crushed two "imperialist" plots in his own regime before leaving-Sallal got tremendous ovations from street crowds in Damascus and Baghdad. In lordly style, he urged the Baathist leaders of Syria and Iraq to disperse the "summer cloud" of their differences with Egypt's Nasser, and grandly offered the virtually nonexistent Yemen republican army as an ally in repulsing "Zionist and imperialist aggressors...
...Baghdad, the ruling Baath (Renaissance) Party announced the unmasking of a "black plot to plunge Iraq into a sea of blood," proceeded to round up leading Nasser sympathizers. Among those arrested were three generals, five colonels, two ex-Cabinet ministers, and the organizer of the pro-Nasser Arab Socialist Union Party, Abdel Razzak Shabib. By week's end, 180 Iraqi Nasserites were behind bars and facing trial...