Brigadier Abdel Karim Kassem was instrumental in the overthrow of the Iraqi monarchy in 1958, along with Colonel Abdul Salam Arif. He was of Shia/Sunni parentage—his mother being Kurdish. He was a brilliant student at the military academy in Iraq and while on course in the UK. He was well disposed towards Pakistan, bilateral relations progressed, and our ambassador negotiated the first order from POF Wah of artillery shells for some £182,000.
Although the bête noire of Western powers, who had set up the Hashemite kingdoms in Iraq and Jordan to further emasculate the Ottoman Empire, and the author of many miscalculations in foreign affairs, in particular regarding Iran and Egypt, Kassem did much during his tenure to bring real independence and progress to the state and archaic socioeconomic structure of Iraq.
He extricated his country from the Baghdad Pact, nationalised the Iraqi Petroleum Company, instituted land reform and empowered women (both Sunni and Shia) to receive equal shares in inheritance.
Owing to the personality clashes endemic in such cabal-controlled situations however, he was overthrown and executed following a revolution that reportedly killed thousands in February 1963.
One recalls, as pupils at Al-Mansur School in Baghdad, experiencing the terror and tension of sirens and curfews during this and subsequent revolutions that shook Iraq in the 1960s. My elder brother (future ambassador) Tariq Osman, however, then at the Jesuit-run American Al-Hikma College, was able to negotiate with the military authorities the students’ travel during the curfew from the campus outside Baghdad through the Mascar Rashid military camp to their homes. His links with his Iraqi friends remain to this day.