Word: kassem
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...prosperous farming family in Tikrit, a small town 100 miles northwest of Baghdad, Saddam as a student eagerly joined the nationalist ferment against Iraq's pro-Western monarchy. In 1959, under sentence of death in absentia for his involvement in an assassination attempt against President Abdul Karim Kassem, a general who had seized power the year before, Saddam fled to Syria and Egypt. In Cairo he studied law and joined the Baath Party, a revolutionary group of Arab nationalists. He returned to Iraq in 1963, and by the time the Baathists staged their 1968 coup under General Bakr, Saddam...
...Muslims; to the area's Christian minority of 33,000, Haddad is nothing short of a hero. In Marjayoun, several young militiamen gathered around pinball machines to talk about their leader. "We are so thankful for Major Haddad's presence here," said Chaamoun Abou Kassem, 18, a Greek Orthodox Christian...
...shot. The curfew was announced at 4:30, leaving little time to warn the populace. In particular, many villagers worked outside the village, and there was no way to inform them of the new security measures. During the first hour of the curfew, 47 Arab residents of Kfar Kassem were shot as they returned to the village on bicycles and in lorries after work. The number included seven children and nine women. The killing continued until after a group of fourteen women, one boy and four men, was shot, when the unit commander finally ordered "more moderate procedures...
GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS tried to keep the Kfar Kassem incident from public knowledge, but they were unsuccessful and a military trial was held. Eleven officers and soldiers were convicted of "carrying out illegal orders"--and given extraordinarily light sentences, which were subsequently shortened still more. After continued public recrimination, the commander responsible for the original orders was put on trial--and fined one piastre for a "technical error." Yet, the press was largely silent about Israel's "My Lai." Neither Deir Yassin nor Kfar Kassim was an isolated incident; Juryis documents numerous similar, if less dramatic incidents...
...disgusted Arab diplomat once noted that few nations can match Iraq at staging "fiestas of madmen dancing around corpses." In the 1958 revolution, they dismembered Premier Nuri as-Said's corpse. In 1963 they displayed the bullet-riddled body of President Abdul Karim Kassem on television. Last year they hanged eleven "Israeli spies" and mounted their bodies on ceremonial gallows in Baghdad's Liberation Square...