Iraq's Pre-1950 History Revisited: Part 9

(See below for parts 1- 8)

Nearly 150,000 U.S. military troops and 200,000 private contractors are still in Iraq trying to exercise a special influence on Iraqi history, by waging an imperialist war on behalf of special U.S. corporate interests. Yet most people in the United States probably didn't learn very much about Iraqi history in their high school social studies courses. But some knowledge of pre-1950 Iraqi history may be of use to U.S. anti-war activists when arguing with U.S. opponents of immediate withdrawal from Iraq and U.S. supporters of the Democratic Obama Regime’s war in Iraq, during the next 16 months.

With the help of an ex-candidate member of the Iraq Communist Party’s Central Committee—who turned informer on October 9, 1948—UK imperialism’s puppet Iraqi monarchy’s security services were able to initiate yet another wave of arrests of Iraq Communist Party activists on November 11, 1948. The new wave of arrests set the stage for the final elimination in 1949 of the jailed Iraq Communist Party leader and organizer Fahd from Iraqi political life, along with the elimination of two other imprisoned members of the Iraq Communist Party’s Politburo, Zaki Basim and Muhammad Hussain Ash-Shabibi.

On February 10, 1949, Fahd, Zaki Basim and Muhammad Hussain Ash-Shabibi were now convicted by the UK’s puppet monarchical regime of having “led” the Iraq Communist Party from their prison cells; and the three dissident Iraqi anti-imperialist leftists were given death sentences. The 1978 book The Old Classes and the Revolutionary Movements In Iraq by Hanna Batatu described the final moments of the three executed Iraq Communist Party leaders:

“The sentences were carried out at daybreak on 14 and 15 February [1949]. The three leaders were strung up in different squares of Baghdad city, Ash-Shababi at the gate of al-Mu-adhdham, Basim at the east gate, and Fahd in al-Karich in the open space that is now called the Square of the New Museum. Their bodies were left hanging for several hours so that the common people going to their work would receive the warning…

“Moments before the close of his life, as he was being led up to the gallows, Fahd is said to have exclaimed in a defiant tone: `A people that offers sacrifices will not die!’…” (end of part 9).