Abdul-Karim Qasim

Qasim graduated from the Military College in 1934 and from the Staff College with honours in 1941, served in the suppression of the tribal revolts of 1935, the Anglo-Iraqi War of 1941 and the Palestine war of 1948, and completed a senior officers' course at Devizes in England. As leader of the Free Officers he directed the coup of 14 July 1958 that killed King Faisal II and ended the monarchy. The republic was headed formally by a three-man Sovereignty Council under Muhammad Najib ar-Ruba'i, while Qasim held the premiership, the defence ministry and the command of the armed forces. ¹

His government dismantled the feudal land structure through the Agrarian Reform Law of September 1958, revised the personal status code in 1959 — outlawing polygamy and giving women equal inheritance rights in Article 74 — and governed by balancing the communists against the pan-Arab nationalists who demanded union with Egypt. Unlike most senior officers he was of mixed parentage from south-eastern Iraq and did not share the pan-Arab enthusiasm of the Sunni north-western officer towns. On 8 February 1963 the Ba'ath Party overthrew him in the Ramadan Revolution; after a short show trial he was shot at the Ministry of Defence in Baghdad on 9 February 1963, and his body was displayed on television to dispel his followers' belief that he had gone into hiding like the Mahdi. ^{1 2}

His faith is recorded as unknown. The sources describe his parents, not his own school: the English article, citing Uriel Dann, calls his father a Sunni Arab and his mother a Shia Kurd, and the Arabic article calls his father a Sunni Muslim and his mother a member of a Shia family. Family background never counts toward a person's own recorded school; Wikidata gives only Islam in general. ^{1 2 3}