Nuri al-Said
Nuri al-Said was prime minister of Iraq fourteen times between 1930 and 1958, the Ottoman officer who had joined Faisal's Arab revolt in 1916 and ridden into Damascus with Lawrence, followed Faisal to Baghdad in 1921. He was for thirty-seven years the man the British relied on and the Iraqi street hated. He was the Pasha in the fez who negotiated the treaty of 1930 that ended the mandate on terms that kept the British bases, brought Iraq into the League of Nations in 1932. After the war he made it the Arab pillar of the West, signing the Baghdad Pact of 1955 with Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan against Nasser's Egypt and the Soviet Union. He broke with Egypt over Suez, and formed in February 1958 the Arab Federation with the Hashemite cousins in Jordan as an answer to Nasser's union with Syria, of which he was the prime minister for five months. On 14 July 1958 the brigade of Abd al-Karim Qasim entered Baghdad on its way to Jordan, shot the young king and the regent in the palace courtyard, and hunted him through the city for a day. They found him the next morning in a woman's abaya in the Kadhimiya district. The crowd shot him, dragged his body through the streets behind a car, and hung what was left from a balcony, which was the republic's first act. He was born in Baghdad in 1888 to a family of minor officials, went through the Ottoman military college and staff college in Constantinople, served in the Balkan war, was captured by the British at Basra in 1914 and turned. He commanded Faisal's regular troops in the revolt. In Iraq he was chief of staff of the army, then defence minister, then from 1930 the prime minister whom every crisis recalled. He put down the Rashid Ali coup's aftermath in 1941 with the British army, the Wathba rising of January 1948 against the Portsmouth treaty with martial law, and the Intifada of 1952 the same way. He spent the oil revenues of the 1950s, seventy per cent of them by law, on the Development Board's dams and roads, which were his defence when the West asked why the country did not love him. The republic that killed him was itself overthrown in 1963, and the Baath in 2003. His grave, restored after 2003, is visited by those who think the monarchy was the country's best time, which is now a considerable number.
- Lived: 1888 CE – 1958 CE
- Nationality: Iraqi
- Roles: prime minister, general, politician
