60 years on, Iraqis reflect on the coup that killed King Faisal II

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Iraq’s King Faisal II in 1952, a year before taking the throne. (AFP)
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Faisal takes the oath in Parliament in 1953, watched over by his uncle, Crown Prince Abdallah. (AFP)
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Faisal takes the oath in Parliament in 1953. (AFP)
Updated 15 July 2018
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60 years on, Iraqis reflect on the coup that killed King Faisal II

  • Iraq's monarchy came to a bloody end on July 14, 1958
  • Many look back at the era with a sense of nostalgia

BAGHDAD/LONDON: With Iraq facing its latest security challenge amid growing protests over unemployment, Iraqis could be forgiven for harking back nostalgically to an era of rising prosperity when the country appeared to be on the cusp of a gilded age.

Sixty years ago, Iraq’s monarchy came to an end with a bloody coup that killed the young King Faisal II. Many Iraqis still believe it was the start of a catastrophic slide downhill.

While it lasted less than four decades, the constitutional monarchy is viewed by many as a golden period in the country’s history. That the king’s execution gave way to a tumultuous republic and, ultimately, the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, only adds to the sense of nostalgia.

On the anniversary of the July 14 revolution, Iraqis on Saturday reflected on what might have been had the king managed to survive the swirling and explosive political forces tearing through the Middle East at the time. 

But some also said the era of the monarchy is too often seen through rose-tinted spectacles, and that the reality was a deeply polarized country divided between the elites and the mostly rural poor.

Sadaih Khalid, 45, a Baghdad businessman, described Brig. Abdul Karim Qassim, the nationalist Iraqi army officer who led the coup, as a “crazy man” who killed the king and other royal family members in “cold blood.”

Qassim “opened the gates of blood and released the killing, torturing and looting, since the dawn of that black July 14 until now,” Khalid told Arab News.

“We wouldn’t have passed through all these tragedies if the royal family was still here.”




The king’s tomb in Baghdad. (AFP)

This sentiment is common in Baghdad, even among those born decades after the dynasty ended. It is not only that the demise of the monarchy was the start of the country’s descent toward dictatorship and years of war, but also that the coup — with no mercy shown toward the royal family — set a precedent for how the country’s most powerful figures would come to deal with political opponents. 

That precedent came back to haunt Qassim less than five years later when he, too, was killed during a 1963 coup by the Baath party during Ramadan.

The kingdom of Iraq was founded in 1932 under Faisal I after the fall of the Ottoman empire. Faisal, who was born in Saudi Arabia, was a member of the Hashemite dynasty and fought alongside T.E. Lawrence during World War I.

Faisal ruled for 12 years under a constitutional monarchy imposed by the British until his death from a heart attack, aged 48.

Faisal’s son, King Ghazi, took the throne, but died six years later in a car crash in Baghdad. The title of king fell to Faisal II, who was just 3 years old, and his reign began under the regency of his uncle Crown Prince Abdallah. 

Faisal II was educated in Britain at Harrow, along with his cousin, King Hussein of Jordan.

Highly intelligent, and leading a country blessed with a wealth of natural resources, Faisal seemed destined to build on his father and grandfather’s foundations when he took the throne, aged 18, in 1953.

Iraq at the time was prospering. Oil revenues were flowing in and the country was undergoing rapid industrialization. 

The kingdom was also gaining prominence on the world stage.

Iraq then was “more democratic and cleaner than today,” Saad Mohsen, a professor of modern history at the University of Baghdad, told AFP recently.

“We were far from the blood and fighting that we have come to know,” he said.

But it was also a country of social polarization. While the wealthy and well-connected enjoyed the good life in a thriving capital, resentment was building among the country’s poor, who were more conservative and receptive to complaints that the monarchy was too compliant to the needs of the West.

“The royal system was not as good as people think,” Abdallah Jawad, 53, told Arab News in Baghdad on Sunday. “People are just tired (of insecurity) and because of this they are willing to go back and live under the royal system. 

“They don’t know that most policies adopted by the royal family at that time were sectarian and discriminatory.”

The tide would soon start to turn against the kingdom. Iraq’s close relationship with Britain — a policy Faisal II continued from his grandfather — became the source of increasing hostility that was exacerbated by the Suez crisis in 1956.

On July 13, 1958, when two army brigades were ordered to go to Jordan to help quell a crisis in Lebanon, Qassim, a disaffected officer leading one of the units, saw his chance and sent troops to the Qasr Al Rihab palace. By early the following morning, they had surrounded the palace with tanks and opened fire. 

Shortly after 8 a.m., King Faisal II, his uncle the crown prince, and other members of the royal family and their staff were ordered from the rear entrance and killed.

The 23-year-old king was engaged to marry.

Saddam Hussein, who became president in 1979, setting the country on its calamitous course of foreign wars and brutal dictatorship, was fascinated by the young king.

He even restored the royal mausoleum where Faisal II’s marble tomb is located next to his father’s.

Their resting place has survived some of the darkest episodes of the nation’s history. But as Iraq looks to recover from its latest calamity — Daesh’s occupation of large parts of the country — many Iraqis will quietly mourn the 60 years since the monarchy’s downfall.




 An Iraqi banknote issued in 1947 and bearing the image of King Faisal II. (AFP)

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Born to rule against a backdrop of turmoil

Faisal II was born as the world prepared for a devastating war, lived through an era of Middle East turmoil and growing pan-Arab nationalism, and died in a revolution that also ended Iraq’s monarchy. 

He became king of Iraq when he was only 3 years old, in April 1939, after his father, King Ghazi, died in a car crash. Faisal’s lineage crossed borders — his mother, Queen Aliya, was the daughter of Ali bin Hussein, King of the Hijaz and Grand Sharif of Makkah, who had fled to Iraq when he was deposed by Ibn Saud in 1925.

During World War II, when Iraq was allied with Britain and the US, the young Faisal lived with his mother in Berkshire. Later, as a teenager, he was educated at Harrow school, along with the future King Hussein of Jordan, his cousin. The two became close friends, and may have considered merging their kingdoms. Before he became king, Faisal also visited the US in 1952, and met President Harry Truman.  

Until Faisal reached the age of 18 in 1953, Iraq was ruled by a regent — his uncle, Abd Al-Ilah. Faisal was an inexperienced boy, plagued by poor health — he suffered from asthma — and his uncle continued to advise him from the sidelines. His advice was that Iraq should continue to have a close relationship with the UK, which resulted in the Baghdad Pact of 1955 — an ill-fated military alliance of Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and the UK, which the US joined in 1958. 

Faisal’s turbulent life came to an end on July 14, 1958, during the revolution that deposed the monarchy. He and other members of his family were rounded up in the palace courtyard in Baghdad, and ordered to face a wall as a machinegun opened fire. The king died on the way to hospital and his body was strung from a lamppost. 

As if that were not undignified enough, Faisal attained an immortality of sorts; he was the model for Prince Abdullah of Khemed, a character in “The Adventures of Tintin” by the Belgian comic writer Herge.  


Syria forces launch security sweep in Homs city: state media

Updated 02 January 2025
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Syria forces launch security sweep in Homs city: state media

  • Syrian security forces are conducting a security sweep in the city of Homs, state media reported on Thursday

DAMASCUS: Syrian security forces are conducting a security sweep in the city of Homs, state media reported on Thursday, with a monitor saying targets include protest organizers from the Alawite minority of the former president.
“The Ministry of Interior, in cooperation with the Military Operations Department, begins a wide-scale combing operation in the neighborhoods of Homs city,” state news agency SANA said quoting a security official.
The statement said the targets were “war criminals and those involved in crimes who refused to hand over their weapons and go to the settlement centers” but also “fugitives from justice, in addition to hidden ammunition and weapons.”
Since Islamist-led rebels seized power in a lightning offensive last month, the transitional government has been registering former conscripts and soldiers and asking them to hand over their weapons.
“The Ministry of Interior calls on the residents of the neighborhoods of Wadi Al-Dhahab, Akrama not to go out to the streets, remain home, and fully cooperate with our forces,” the statement said.
Rami Abdel Rahman, who heads the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitor, told AFP the two districts are majority-Alawite — the community from which ousted President Bashar Assad hails.
“The ongoing campaign aims to search for former Shabiha and those who organized or participated in the Alawite demonstrations last week, which the administration considered as incitement against” its authority, he said.
Shabiha were notorious pro-government militias tasked with helping to crush dissent under Assad.
On December 25, thousands protested in several areas of Syria after a video circulated showing an attack on an Alawite shrine in the country’s north.
AFP was unable to independently verify the footage or the date of the incident but the interior ministry said the video was “old and dates to the time of the liberation” of Aleppo in December.
Since seizing power, Syria’s new leadership has repeatedly tried to reassure minorities that they will not be harmed.
Alawites fear backlash against their community both as a religious minority and because of its long association with the Assad family.
Last week, security forces launched an operation against pro-Assad fighters in the western province of Tartus, in the Alawite heartland, state media had said, a day after 14 security personnel of the new authorities and three gunmen were killed in clashes there.


Palestinian Authority suspends broadcast of Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV temporarily

Updated 02 January 2025
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Palestinian Authority suspends broadcast of Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV temporarily

  • The authority accuses the broadcaster of sowing division in the Middle East and Palestine
  • The authority says Al-Jazeera was airing 'inciting material' from Jenin camp in the West Bank

CAIRO: The Palestinian Authority suspended the broadcast of Qatar’s Al-Jazeera TV temporarily over “inciting material,” Palestinian official news agency WAFA reported on Wednesday.
A ministerial committee that includes the culture, interior and communications ministries decided to suspend the broadcaster’s operations over what they described as broadcasting “inciting material and reports that were deceiving and stirring strife” in the country.
The decision isn’t expected to be implemented in Hamas-run Gaza where the Palestinian Authority does not exercise power.
Al-Jazeera TV last week came under criticism by the Palestinian Authority over its coverage of the weeks-long standoff between Palestinian security forces and militant fighters in the Jenin camp in the occupied West Bank.
Fatah, the faction which controls the Palestinian Authority, said the broadcaster was sowing division in “our Arab homeland in general and in Palestine in particular.” It encouraged Palestinians not to cooperate with the network.
Israeli forces in September issued Al-Jazeera with a military order to shut down operations, after they raided the outlet’s bureau in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

 


10 killed as Israeli airstrike targets shelter for displaced families in Gaza, medics say

Updated 02 January 2025
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10 killed as Israeli airstrike targets shelter for displaced families in Gaza, medics say

  • Israel has killed more than 45,500 Palestinians in the war in Gaza, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave

CAIRO: An Israeli airstrike killed at least 10 Palestinians in a tent encampment sheltering displaced families in southern Gaza Strip early on Thursday, medics said.
The 10 people, including women and children, were killed in a tent in Al-Mawasi, designated as a humanitarian area in western Khan Younis, according to the medics.
Fifteen people were also wounded, the medics added. The Israeli military has not immediately commented.
Israel has killed more than 45,500 Palestinians in the war in Gaza, according to health officials in the Hamas-run enclave. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been displaced and much of the tiny coastal strip is in ruins.
The war was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, in which 1,200 people were killed and another 251 taken hostage to Gaza, according to Israeli tallies.


11 years on, Syria protesters demand answers on abducted activists

Updated 02 January 2025
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11 years on, Syria protesters demand answers on abducted activists

  • No group has claimed the four activists’ abduction and they have not been heard from since

DOUMA, Syria: A few dozen protesters gathered in the Syrian city of Douma on Wednesday demanding answers about the fate of four prominent activists abducted more than a decade ago.
Holding up photographs of the missing activists, the demonstrators called on Syria’s new rulers — the Islamist-led rebels who seized power last month — to investigate what happened to them.
“We are here because we want to know the whole truth about two women and two men who were disappeared from this place 11 years and 22 days ago,” said activist Yassin Al-Hajj Saleh, whose wife Samira Khalil was among those abducted.
In December 2013, Khalil, Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada and Nazem Al-Hammadi were kidnapped by unidentified gunmen from the office of a human rights group they ran together in the then rebel-held city outside Damascus.
The four played an active role in the 2011 uprising against Bashar Assad’s rule and also documented violations, including by the Islamist rebel group Jaish Al-Islam that controlled the Douma area in the early stages of the ensuing civil war.
No group has claimed the four activists’ abduction and they have not been heard from since.
Many in Douma blame Jaish Al-Islam but the rebel group has denied involvement.
“We have enough evidence to incriminate Jaish Al-Islam, and we have the names of suspects we would like to see investigated,” Hajj Saleh said.
He said he wanted “the perpetrators to be tried by the Syrian courts.”
The fate of tens of thousands of people who disappeared under the Assads’ rule is a key question for Syria’s interim rulers after more than 13 years of devastating civil war that saw upwards of half a million people killed.
“We are here because we want the truth. The truth about their fate and justice for them, so that we may heal our wounds,” said Alaa Al-Merhi, 33, Khalil’s niece.
Khalil was a renowned activist hailing from the Assads’ Alawite minority who was jailed from 1987 to 1991 for opposing their iron-fisted rule.
Her husband is also a renowned human rights activist who was detained in 1980 and forced to live abroad for years.
“We as a family seek justice, to know their fate and to hold those resposible accountable for their actions,” she added.
Zeitouneh was among the 2011 winners of the European parliament’s human rights prize, A lawyer, she had received threats from both the government and the rebels before she went missing. Her husband Hamada was abducted with her.
Protesting was unthinkable just a month ago in Douma, a former rebel stronghold that paid a heavy price for rising up against the Assads.
Douma is located in Eastern Ghouta, an area controlled by rebel and jihadist factions for around six years until government forces retook it in 2018 after a long and bloody siege.
The siege of Eastern Ghouta culminated in a devastating offensive by the army that saw at least 1,700 civilians killed before a deal was struck that saw fighters and civilians evacuated to northern Syria.
Douma still bears the scars of the civil war, with many bombed out buildings.
During the conflict, all sides were accused of abducting and summarily executing opponents.


How two civilian deaths highlighted the tragic toll of Middle East conflict

Updated 02 January 2025
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How two civilian deaths highlighted the tragic toll of Middle East conflict

  • Mohamad Nasrallah, 18, died in an Israeli airstrike on Beirut while Gevara Ebraheem, 11, died in a Hezbollah rocket attack on Majdal Shams
  • The death of these two young people has come to symbolize the loss of a generation’s potential amid the Israel-Hezbollah conflict

LONDON: As Israeli air attacks on Beirut’s southern suburbs intensified, 18-year-old university student Mohamad Nasrallah left his home and sought refuge in the more northerly neighborhood of Hamra, near the Lebanese American University where he was studying.

On Sept. 26, Mohamad and his sister, Mirna, made the fatal decision to return briefly to their home to collect some belongings.

Later, it emerged they had returned to collect some items to donate to the many displaced Lebanese who had fled north to escape the anticipated Israeli ground invasion, which would begin on Oct. 1.

While they were there, their building was hit by an Israeli airstrike, killing Mohamad and seriously injuring his sister.

Israeli security forces and medics transport casualties along with local residents, at a site where a Hezbollah rocket from Lebanon fell in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 27, 2024. (AFP file)

Two months earlier, on July 27, an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket with a 50 kg warhead had struck the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-annexed Golan Heights.

The rocket landed on a soccer pitch, killing 12 children enjoying a Saturday evening game and injuring dozens more.

Hezbollah has always denied its role in the attack, although it seems certain that the missile was fired from southern Lebanon and had overshot its intended target — an Israeli military base a few kilometers north of Majdal Shams.

The following day, 11 of the 12 victims, aged 11 to 16, were buried in their white coffins.

Druze women mourn near the coffin of a loved one in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 28, 2024, a day after a Hezbollah strike from Lebanon. (AFP file photo)

Initially, there had been hopes that the twelfth victim, 11-year-old Gevara Ebraheem, had somehow survived the blast.

For 24 hours he had been considered missing, even after the family discovered that he had not, as they were at first told, been taken alive to Ziv Medical Center in nearby Safed.

In fact, as Israeli authorities revealed that Sunday evening, after a painstaking examination of the scene, forensic investigators had concluded that the small child had been virtually obliterated by the blast.

Hundreds of mourners attended Gevara’s funeral the following day, when Majdal Shams received a visit from Israel’s then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who pledged the children’s deaths would be avenged.

Druze women mourn near the coffins of young people in Majdal Shams village in the Israeli-annexed Golan area on July 28, 2024, a day after a Hezbollah strike from Lebanon. (AFP file photo)

“There’s no difference between a Jewish child who was murdered in the south of Israel on Oct. 7 and a Druze child who was murdered in the Golan Heights,” he told mourners at Gevara’s funeral.

He added: “It’s the same thing, these are our children … Hezbollah will pay a price for this.”

Not everyone shared Gallant’s wish for vengeance. Nabeeh Abu Saleh, a paramedic who had rushed to the scene of the attack to find his nephew among the dead, told the Associated Press: “We buried our children. We don’t want retaliation.

“We have families in Lebanon, in Syria, and we have brothers here.”

Nevertheless, just three days later, senior Hezbollah member Fuad Shukr, deemed responsible for the Majdal Shams attack, was killed, along with an Iranian military adviser, in a targeted Israeli airstrike on his residential building in Beirut.

Also reported killed were his wife, two other women, and two children.

A banner bearing the image of slain Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr is seen at the site of an Israeli airstrike that targeted the Haret Hreik neighborhood in Beirut's southern suburbs on November 21, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah. (AFP)

In one sense, it might seem invidious to highlight just two deaths out of the tens of thousands that have occurred in Israel, Palestine, and Lebanon since the Hamas-led attack of Oct. 7, 2023.

But in the face of so much death, there is a danger of succumbing to the proverb attributed to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin — that one death is a tragedy, but thousands merely a statistic — and losing sight of the individual suffering behind each number.

Although they lived lives separated by birth, borders, and beliefs, Mohamad Nasrallah and Gevara Ebraheem share one thing in common — in death, they were mourned as individuals by families, friends, and communities.

What is more, as young people whose hopes, dreams, and potential have been violently cut short, they must also be grieved as representatives of a lost future.

While Gevara meant everything to his surviving parents and younger brother, few details have emerged about his life.

Residents of the Druze town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-annexed Golan carry the coffin of 11-year-old Guevara Ibrahim on July 29, 2024, two days after a Hebollah rocket attack that killed him and 11 others. (AFP file photo)

A photograph released by his family shows a happy boy, as mad about soccer as any child his age. In it, he sports Real Madrid’s 23-24 home kit. In another photograph, held aloft by mourners at his funeral, Gevara, smiling broadly, is wearing a red Zeus club football top.

But like all children in the region whose futures hang daily in the balance, it is clear that Gevara was both aware of the precarious and volatile nature of the world around him, and yearned desperately for better days ahead.

IN NUMBERS

$8.5 billion Cost of Lebanon’s physical damage and economic losses caused by conflict.

6.6% Reduction’s of Lebanon real GDP growth in 2024 due to conflict.

According to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, just days after the start of the Gaza war, the 10-year-old posted a simple but moving plea on Facebook: “We don’t want war,” he wrote. “We want to live in peace.”

Gevara would be granted only the peace of the grave. The path in life that he might have taken, and the light he might have been able to bring to the world, will now never be known.

But his death is no less poignant than that of Mohamad Nasrallah, whose future was already more clearly defined.

On Dec. 10, Mohamad’s friends and family gathered on the Beirut campus of the Lebanese American University to pay tribute to one of its brightest students, as he was described in a report on the memorial published on the university’s website on Dec. 17.

Residents in the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights celebrate on December 9, 2024, after fighters declared that they have taken the Syrian capital in a lightning offensive, sending President Bashar al-Assad fleeing and ending five decades of Baath rule in Syria. (AFP file)

Mohamad, a business student with dreams of establishing a startup, “had already accomplished so much” and “had built strong friendships at LAU and everywhere he went.”

The memorial was attended by Mohamad’s father Ali, mother Fadia, and sisters Dana, Sally, and Mirna, who was still recovering from her injuries.

Dana, Mohamad’s eldest sister, 10 years his senior, recalled how her brother had been determined to graduate top of his class and be selected as his year’s commencement speaker.

“Our brother and his ambitions were larger than life,” she said. That she was addressing his classmates instead at his memorial “brought her to tears,” the LAU reporter wrote.

Some of Mohamad’s many friends also spoke at the memorial. Angelina El Zaghir beseeched her fellow classmates to “speak his name and carry forward his life, dreams, and love, because Mohamad would have wanted us to.”

Dani Taan pledged to make his best friend proud.

A woman from the Druze village of Majdal Shams in the Israel-annexed Golan Heights waves to her relative across the fence in the UN-patrolled buffer zone separating Israeli and Syrian forces on December 17, 2024. (AFP file photo)

Mohammad Shouman said he took strength from “looking around and seeing that my tears are part of a collective well, which pours water from your martyrdom and hope from your existence.”

It fell to Dr. Raed Mohsen, the university’s dean of students and co-founder of the Lebanese Association for Mediation and Conciliation, to urge Mohamad’s fellow students to embrace that hope and reject despair.

“Witnessing your resolve to strive for a better future offers us some consolation,” he said. “We can see Mohamad’s unfaltering spirit in every one of you.”

As 2024 draws to a close, it is a message that will resonate with thousands of families across the region, each one mourning their own Mohameds and Gevaras and hoping against hope that 2025 will mark the beginning of that better future.