Word: kassem
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...Enemies of Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, the man who is strategic Iraq's chief bulwark against a Communist takeover, charge that he himself flirted with Communism in his youth. Kassem himself recently told a TIME correspondent: "I don't care about parties . . . They can call us Communists or anything else if they like." Incidentally, the main reason Kassem rides through Baghdad every afternoon is not to receive the applause of the crowds, but to visit his suburban home for a bath: the Defense Ministry, where Kassem sleeps, has no bathroom...
...Mideast, too, one of the torchbearers of neutralism showed further signs of awakening. The U.A.R.'s Gamal Abdel Nasser, ranging himself against the Reds who surround Iraq's Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, admitted that he once thought that Arab Communists were independent of Moscow. "But they were not," said Nasser; they were trying to sow dissension and "put us into spheres of influence...
...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...
...Snake Charmer. The man who stands between Iraq and all-out Communism is a lean, hard-muscled and ascetic professional soldier with a fixed, snaggle-toothed smile. His name 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...
...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...