Thread by @Americas_Crimes

On this day in 1963, the CIA backed a coup against the populist Iraqi leader,
Abd al-Karim Qasim, jailing, torturing & killing thousands of his supporters & paving the way for Saddam Hussein’s rise to power.

Qasim had overthrown Iraq's British-backed monarch in 1958 & seized British-owned Iraq Petroleum Company’s land, redistributing it to poor farmers. Qasim also oversaw the building of 35,000 residential units to house the poor and lower middle classes.

John F. Kennedy ordered the CIA to begin planning to oust Qasim, beginning in 1962. The US hated Qasim for his alliance with communists, his withdrawal from the anti-Soviet ‘Baghdad Pact’ & for nationalizing the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum Company.

The Iraqi Communist Party tried to resist the Ba’athist coup, but their leaders were arrested & executed. The Ba’athists followed the coup w/ a decade-long campaign of hunting down & murdering Iraqi communists, which destroyed Iraq’s communist party (the largest in Middle East).

The CIA gave the Ba’ath Party a list of suspected communists it had compiled, which they used to systematically hunt down, arrest, torture & kill Iraqi communists. Journalist Patrick Cockburn gives the details:

The Ba'athists killed both elderly men & pregnant woman, some tortured to death in front of their children. Saddam Hussein even rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to personally help with the torture of leftists.

On the morning of 9 February, Gen Kassem surrendered as the defense ministry came under air attack. He was tied to a chair & executed shouting "Long live the people." His supporters refused to believe he was dead until coup leaders showed pictures of his body on TV.

Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Minister of the Interior of the regime which replaced Gen. Kassem admitted, “We came to power on a CIA train.”