IRAQ: Three Against the Communists

All week long, as Baghdad celebrated the Iraq Republic’s first anniversary, taut, tireless Premier Karim Kassem was man of the hour 24 hours a day, taking salutes at parades, laying cornerstones, playing host at enormous public receptions, receiving scores of delegations. Friday evening he orated steadily from 10 o’clock to 5 a.m. Finally on Sunday afternoon, ashen-faced with fatigue but crisp and erect as ever, Moslem Kassem strode into Baghdad’s Roman Catholic Church of St. Joseph.

Assembled in St. Joseph’s for a patriotic thanksgiving service were Iraqi prelates of the Chaldean, Syrian, Armenian and Greek Catholic churches in dazzling crimson, black and gold vestments. The crowded congregation was almost equally divided between Christians and Moslems; there was even one rabbi. In the Middle East, tense home of three great religions that command the faith of 1.3 billion people around the world, it was a rare moment. After listening to hymns, Kassem rose and said: “Brothers … I call on each of you, of all communities and sects composing this noble Iraqi people, to lay aside feuds and grudges and to be armed with the spirit of cooperation.”

Class Dismissed. Even as Kassem spoke, the Iraqi army was quelling bloody street fighting between Turks and Kurds in the oil-rich city of Kirkuk to the north. Before the rioting was over, some 30 Iraqi were dead, 100 wounded, and large numbers of soldiers had deserted their units to help out the pro-Communist Kurds. Alarmed by the defections, Kassem arrested six officers and 250 men, and sorrowfully took a more painful step. He ordered 800 reserve officers—an entire graduating class commissioned by Kassem himself last April—out of uniform and back to civilian life. The reason: they had been heavily influenced by Communists during their training period last winter, the peak of Red influence in Kassem’s shaky regime.

Kassem’s Collaborators. As Iraq’s militant Communists slipped from Kassem’s favor three solid citizens took their places as the Premier’s closest collaborators:

Foreign Minister Hashim Jawad, 50, a balding, urbane diplomat fluent in Arabic, French and English, is a graduate of the American University of Beirut, later studied under Leftist Harold Laski at the University of London in the ’30s, is married to a Swiss wife. Socialist-leaning himself, Jawad is staunchly antiCommunist, and was fiercely attacked by the Communist press when he was appointed Foreign Minister.

Finance Minister Mohammed Hadid also studied under and was deeply influenced by that heady English socialist, Laski. Hadid insists that he is “not a dogmatic socialist now,” but says: “We aim to pursue the progressive policy of the welfare state … to level out incomes by means of taxation and social services.”

Military Governor General Ahmad Saleh al-Abdi, who is entrusted with maintaining order, seems to have no well-defined political ideology of his own, but his job has made him a committed antiCommunist. Last week, in the stiffest blow yet at the street-prowling Communist gangs who stir up sporadic violence, Abdi forbade all civilians to carry firearms—even licensed weapons.

The future in Iraq is still anybody’s guess, but with these three men beside him, harried, bone-weary Kassem is in better position to lead his country farther to the left—but not toward Moscow.