Only a handful of officers hatched the plot,
only an hour was necessary to carry it out, and only three key
assassinations made it complete. So swiftly last week fell Iraq, long
celebrated as the West's strongest Arab bastion in the Middle East. The
details of this remarkable coup, whose success surprised even the
plotters, became clear only little by little last week, as the facts
were slowly disentangled from impassioned propaganda and confused
accounts.
The revolt burst on Iraq at 5 o'clock Monday morning. Major General
Abdul Kareem el-Kassim, 42, who had been ordered to lead his men into
Jordan to bolster King Hussein against a coup, led them instead into
sleeping Baghdad. Silently, and without firing a shot, his soldiers
took over the key points of the city. One by one the railroad station,
the main intersections, the post and telegraph offices and the radio
station were surrounded. By the time the troops began heading for the
palace of 23-year-old King Feisal, an excited mob was at their heels.
The unsuspecting young King and his uncle, Crown Prince Abdul Illah, 46,
were getting ready to fly to Istanbul for an emergency meeting of the
Moslem members of the Baghdad Pact. Seeing the gathering crowd, they
went outside the palace. According to the rebels, the palace guard
fired into the crowd, killed 14. The soldiers returned the fire. Feisal
was killed, along with Crown Prince Abdul Illah, the Crown Prince's
mother, two nurses and two palace guardsmen.
The Republic Is Here! The rebels later said they had not wanted to kill
the young Hashemite King, descendant of the Prophet. Fearing public
revulsion against his murder, the killers kept his death a secret,
wrapped him in a carpet and smuggled his body away to be buried. But
the Crown Prince, who had ruled the country for 14 years as Regent, and
was widely disliked, was another matter. His assassins threw his body
out a window, let the mobs drag him through the streets and string his
body up in public. Then the plotters began systematically rounding up
government ministers.
They proclaimed a three-man Council of State and a 13-man Cabinet (nine
of them civilians), with the whole show headed by El-Kassim, a tough
and idealistic soldier who became Premier as well as Minister of
Defense and the Interior. The man who became President of the Council
of State, General Najeeb el-Rubaiya, was out of the country at the
time; he was Iraq's Ambassador to Saudi Arabia. By 6 a.m. the radio was
trumpeting: "Citizens of Baghdad, the Monarchy is dead! The Republic is
here!" Only one thing remained to be done: find Iraq's old strongman,
pro-Western Nuri asSaid, 70, who had lived up to his nickname of "The
Fox" by managing to escape.
"The Man Has Yet to Be Born." Next day, in the suburbs of Baghdad, the
rebels caught Premier Nuri asSaid, accompanied by two women, and
himself veiled and disguised as a woman. The old man, veteran of dozens
of battles and revolutionary skirmishes, fired on an Iraqi air force
sergeant who seemed to recognize him. Then, according to the former
chef of the royal household, who escaped to Ankara with the story, Nuri
was stripped of his disguise, impaled alive, and left on public view in
the rotting sunlight.