Word: kassem
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...Chance to Strike. Up to the day when the riddled body of King Feisal slumped down before Baghdad's royal palace, Kassem had the reputation of being the King's most loyal soldier. But in fact he had been quietly nursing plans of revolution for 24 years, had skillfully used his official position to recruit younger officers-notably, mercurial Abdul Salam Aref, who became his closest "brother in revolt" and took to proclaiming, "I am Kassem's son." In 1956, at a meeting in his bachelor house on the outskirts of Baghdad, Kassem merged his network with...
...chance to strike came on the night of last July 13. Kassem's 19th and Aref's 20th brigades received orders to move through Baghdad on their way to friendly Jordan, then beset by fear of revolt within its own borders. Following Kassem's plan, Aref's men instead rolled into Baghdad at 4:30 a.m., seized the radio station, pulled all switches at the telephone exchange, and, lobbing a mortar shell through a back wall of the royal palace, mowed down the King and members of the royal household as they stumbled in confusion...
...Kassem and his fellow plotters were obsessed with the need to change all this. Their prime task, Kassem repeatedly declared, was "improving the living standards of our population and saving them from dwelling in slums." Aside from this vague expression of good intentions, the new military rulers had no political program at all. But, because the tide of Arab nationalism was running high everywhere, Colonel Aref had a somewhat hazy idea for closer relations with Nasser's United Arab Republic. In Kassem's mind was a similarly muddled idea for setting up a neutralist Iraqi state...
...Bargain. In this planlessness and confusion of purposes lay the seeds of Iraq's present chaos. When Aref flew off to Damascus for a much-publicized meeting with Nasser, and Egyptian MIGs began operating on Iraqi airfields, Kassem recoiled, began looking for allies against the eloquent Aref and his Nasserite followers. The Communists, who, alone among Iraqi political parties, had emerged from Nuri's police state lean, hard and well organized, were only too ready to give Kassem the help he wanted-for a price...
Anti-Communists charge that the Communist bargain was urged on Kassem by his chief aide, burly, Red-lining Colonel Wasfi Tahir (who, incredibly, held the same job under Nuri). Kassem himself may have failed to see the dangers in the bargain; his enemies charge that he himself flirted with Communism in his youth, and not long ago he was still capable of declaring: "I don't care about parties . . . They can call us Communists or anything else, if they like...