IRAQ: The Coed & the Communists

Iraq last week counted the consequences of a coed’s tears: a fallen cabinet, 15 to 20 dead, hundreds wounded, $200,000 worth of damage, troops in the streets.

It all began when the coed, Siham Salih of Baghdad’s Royal College of Pharmacy & Chemistry, refused to join fellow students in a walkout. She had a good reason: the dean of the pharmacy school, against whom they were striking, is her brother-in-law. When the strike was over, a few of Siham’s classmates cornered her in a classroom and berated her. She fled in tears. Soon she had reinforcements. Gallant students from the law school, enlisting in Siham’s cause, pummeled her tormentors. That sent the pharmacy students out on strike again.

So far, all this was hardly more than high-spirited collegiate hijinks, and it might have remained so but for two other factors: Iraq’s fumbling caretaker government, which didn’t know what to do, and the Communists, who did. Iraq’s 5,000 Reds turned the drive for the dean’s resignation into a drive against “Foreign Imperialism” and for the “Partisans of Peace.” The caretaker cabinet (supposed to maintain order through the coming general election) could not even agree on arming the police, dithered itself into disagreement and resigned, leaving Iraq without a government (TIME, Dec. 1).

Burning Oil. Next morning a sullen mob, recruited from Baghdad’s slums and with scarcely a student in it, gathered at one end of squalid, narrow Rashid Street, in the heart of the city. Reds raced up & down like cheerleaders, whipping up the mob; one agitator showed the approved method of handling opposition by leaping at a parked bus and slashing its tires with a huge knife.

The mob started down Rashid Street. As it passed the U.S. Information Service Building, a group, led by a known Communist and carrying oil, crowbars and battering rams, broke ranks and headed straight for the USIS. The men battered down steel shutters (it was Sunday), climbed inside and methodically began pitching everything out of the windows—books, typewriters, files, cabinets, papers, a safe. Then they doused the thousands of jumbled books and magazines with oil and fired them. The building was also set afire. Within an hour the USIS establishment in Baghdad, valued at $125,000, an important weapon in the cold war against Russia, had been captured and destroyed.

The mob tore on, paused before the English-language Iraq Times, and rolled paraffin under the steel doors (the Reds came well prepared), setting it afire. An automatic weapon chattered at the rioters from atop the police station. The mob, roaring like a wounded beast, rolled massively to the police station, set it in flames, tore apart three policemen as they scuttled out, and beheaded one of the bodies. A comparative handful of Reds, commanding an army of malcontents, had all but taken over ancient Baghdad, a city of 400,000.

The next day, which might have brought revolution, did not. By that time Regent Abdul Illah had summoned up his nerve and named a new Premier: Iraq’s aggressive, muscular Lieut. General Nurid-din Mahmoud, 53, the army chief of staff. In a few hours armored cars and cavalry began pouring into the city; the Communists slithered away, and Baghdad quieted.

Tough Authority. Mahmoud, a Kurd, son of a Turkish army colonel and himself a World War I Turkish soldier, wins no popularity prizes in the Arab world. He is tagged as a friend of the British; he attended British and Indian staff colleges, served as military attache in London in the ’30s. He is tough as nails, ruthless with inept subordinates, contemptuous of nepotism. Named chief of staff in 1951 to straighten up the sloppy Iraqi army, he put his troops through five punishing maneuvers, and each time marched with them, carrying full combat pack. Mahmoud has the professional soldier’s contempt for conniving politicians, is unswervingly loyal to the crown (which 17-year-old Feisal II, recently a student at England’s Harrow, will put on next May if all goes well).

Premier Mahmoud, who seems to have no desire to take power in his own right, as had Syria’s Shishekly and Egypt’s Naguib, nonetheless acted quickly, once given authority. He clamped on a curfew, arrested 500 Reds, jailed all opposition leaders, dissolved all parties, suspended 17 newspapers. He promised reform of the rigged electoral law (which favors landowners), slashed taxes on food and textiles.

American and British onlookers were generally pleased. But one Mahmoud move disturbed them. He suspended the best single law in Iraq, the U.S.-inspired Development Board Law requiring 70% of all oil revenues ($6 billion in the next five years) to be reserved for long-term capital improvements. With this money, Mahmoud will be able to give his restless people fast, visible relief—but he will be doing it at the expense of the long pull.