Abd al-Karim Qasim
Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the monarchy, refused to join anybody, and was shot in a television studio. He was a brigadier of modest origins, the son of a carpenter, and he led the officers who took Baghdad in July 1958. He governed as prime minister rather than taking a presidency, and he did not build a party. That was deliberate. Iraq in 1958 was pulled between Arab nationalists who wanted union with Egypt and communists who wanted a social revolution, and Qasim balanced between them rather than choosing. His domestic record is the part his opponents did not undo. He passed a land reform that broke the great estates. He legalised political parties briefly, gave women a personal status law more generous than anything in the region, and built housing for the migrants who had come into Baghdad from the south. He took Iraq out of the Western military pact, restored relations with the Soviet Union, and in 1961 passed the law that reclaimed ninety-nine per cent of the concession territory from the foreign oil companies. Iraq was a founder member of OPEC the year before, and Baghdad hosted the meeting that created it. The balancing failed. He claimed Kuwait on its independence in 1961 and was faced down by British troops. He went to war with the Kurds in the north the same year, beginning an insurgency that outlasted him by decades. He alienated the nationalists by refusing union and the communists by suppressing them. In February 1963 a Ba'athist coup took the capital, and Qasim was tried in a few minutes and shot. His body was shown on television so that people would believe it.
- Lived: 1914 CE – 1963 CE
- Nationality: Iraqi
- Roles: head_of_state, politician
