Word: karim
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Making up for eight weeks spent in the hospital recovering from an assassin's bullets, Iraq's Premier Karim Kassem turned to unfinished business. In his headquarters inside Baghdad's ugly yellow brick Defense Ministry, he put seven committees to work on crash programs, one reorganizing the army (and negotiating with Moscow for arms), a second restudying Iraq's foreign policy, another drafting a new constitution, a fourth drawing up an electoral law to regulate the long-promised return of "normal" political activity on Jan. 6. By that date Kassem himself hopes to reassert his position...
Through his first frenzied months in office, Iraq's lean and ascetic Premier Karim Kassem snatched a few hours sleep nightly on a couch near his office desk. Visitors to his Baghdad Defense Ministry headquarters were impressed by his tightly reined self-control and the masklike grin he wore. But the assassin's bullets that crumpled his left shoulder last October seem to have shattered the mask, and perhaps shattered Kassem's tight self-control as well...
...censorship and tight military control, the noises coming out of Iraq last week nonetheless sounded like the laborings of an untended boiler approaching the point of explosion. Iraq's newspapers triumphantly reported the capture of some of the men who had almost succeeded in killing Premier Abdul Karim Kassem (TIME, Oct. 19)-but gave no names. Scarcely had these good tidings been announced when Radio Baghdad trumpeted that another assassination plot had been uncovered-but gave no details...
Only a few weeks before, Iraq's Premier Abdel Karim Kassem had been the nation's idol, but now the mention of his name drew sneers as well as applause from Baghdad crowds. As his tan Chevrolet station wagon rolled past the coffee shops on teeming Rashid Street, some coffee drinkers propped their legs on the café tables to show Kassem the soles of their feet-an Arab gesture of contempt. Demonstrators protesting last month's execution of 13 popular Iraqi army officers (TIME, Sept. 28) even dared to chant: "Allah is great, Kassem is crazy...
Smelling the kind of trouble that often presages bloody revolt in Araby, ascetic Abdul Karim Kassem began to edge over to the other side of his seesaw. Without fanfare it was announced that Communists involved in last summer's Kirkuk massacre of Iraqi nationalists had been put on trial in an anti-Communist military court; simultaneously hints went out that, if everyone behaved, there might be sweeping amnesties for some of the several hundred nationalists languishing in Iraq's prisons. At week's end, Kassem was still maintaining his equilibrium, but his grisly balancing act lacked some...