Word: kassem
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...Cairo, where Nasser's propagandists worked day and night defaming Kassem, Moslem divines solemnly denounced the Iraqi Premier, and a procession of thousands of students and workers trooped behind a symbolic coffin mourning "the martyrs of Arabism who fell dead from bullets of treacherous, criminal Kassem." In Jordan, where young King Hussein has been half-reconciled to Nasser by Kassem's involvement with the Communists, the state radio broadcast an appeal to all Arabs to "protect Iraq from Communist gangs." Even some erstwhile Kassem defenders turned hostile: in Lebanon a crowd of 3,000 battled police...
Torn between the conflicting demands of Iraq's Arab nationalists and Communists, Iraqi Premier Abdul Karim Kassem is trying to keep a seesaw in balance all by himself. Last week, as the Arab world reacted to his Red-pleasing execution of a score of nationalist Iraqi officers and civilians (TIME, Sept. 28), it became clear that Kassem had stepped just a little too far to the Communist side of the fulcrum...
More ominous yet was the news from Baghdad itself. The once-ubiquitous portraits of Kassem disappeared from many a shop window; on several occasions Baghdad police were obliged to fire over the heads of crowds staging anti-Kassem demonstrations. And rumors persisted that there was grave unrest in the Iraqi army, where there was bitter mourning for the senior officer executed, popular Brigadier Nadhem Tabakchali, former commander of Iraq's 2nd Division...
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...
...Tabakchali's conviction came news that he and 18 other Iraqi officers involved in the Mosul revolt had been executed by a firing squad. Four anti-Communist civilians condemned by Mahdawi's court were hanged the same day. But the Tabakchali trial had seemingly shaken at last Kassem's faith in Colonel Mahdawi and his court as useful propaganda instruments. The same broadcast that told of Tabakchali's execution announced that Mahdawi had left for a six-week trip to Peking. And after that, reported Baghdad's insiders, he would move on to Russia...