At the height of the fighting in Lebanon, Iraqi journalist Yunis Bahri turned to his wife and suggested they leave the turmoil of Beirut for the relative calm of Baghdad. Bahri, a native of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, was an outspoken critic of British imperialism in the Middle East and had been one of many Arab nationalists drawn to Hitler’s Germany. He was renowned in the Arab world as the voice of Radio Berlin’s Arab service in the Second World War. “Hail, Arabs, this is Berlin,” was his famous call sign. After the war he moved between Beirut and Baghdad, writing for the leading Arab newspapers and working as a radio broadcaster. Fatefully, in 1958 he accepted a commission from the Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Sa’id to broadcast a series of reports critical of Nasser. When war broke out in Lebanon, Bahri’s Beirut home was taken over by popular resistance forces. He told his wife they should go to Baghdad to take refuge from the shelling and shooting. “But Baghdad is a burning hell at this time of the summer,” she replied. “The flames of Iraq are more comfortable than the bullets of Beirut,” he insisted.⁴⁸ Little did he know. Bahri and his wife arrived in Baghdad on July 13, 1958, to a warm reception. The local press had covered their return, and their first night in town was spent in a string of engagements thrown in their honor. They awoke the next morning to a revolution.

A group of military conspirators led by Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim and Colonel Abd al-Salam ‘Arif had been plotting since 1956 to overthrow the monarchy in Iraq and establish a military-led republic. They called themselves the Free Officers, inspired by the example of the Nasser and his colleagues in Egypt. Driven by Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism, the Iraqi Free Officers condemned the Hashemite monarchy and the government of Nuri al-Sa’id for being too pro-British—a particularly serious charge in the aftermath of the Suez Crisis. The Free Officers sought to sweep away the old order installed by the British in the 1920s and install a new government created by the Iraqi people themselves. They believed the monarchy could only be overthrown by a singular act of revolutionary violence. The Free Officers’ opportunity came when the Iraqi government ordered the deployment of army units to the Jordanian border to reinforce their Arab Union partner state against further threats from Syria and Egypt, on the night of July 13–14. The route from the army base to the Jordanian border took the rebel officers past the capital city. The conspirators decided to divert their troops to central Baghdad and seize power that very night. After the Free Officers gave instructions to loyal soldiers to divert their trucks from the highway toward the capital, the rebel soldiers took up positions in key points of the city. One detachment made its way to the Royal Palace to execute King Faysal II and all members of the ruling Hashemite family. Others went to the homes of high government officials. Orders were given for the summary execution of Prime Minister Nuri al-Sa‘id. Colonel Abd al-Salam ’Arif led a small detachment to take over the radio station to broadcast word of the revolution and to assert the Free Officers’ control over Iraq. “This is Baghdad,” ‘Arif intoned over the airwaves in the early morning hours of July 14, 1958, “Radio Service of the Iraqi Republic.” To the Iraqi listening public, this was the first indication of the end of the monarchy. The edgy ’Arif paced the room between his broadcasts, anxious for word from his co-conspirators on the success of their revolution. Around 7:00 A.M. an officer in a blood-stained uniform burst into the room holding a submachine gun in his right hand and confirmed the death of the king and royal family. ’Arif began to shout “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar! [God is great!]” at the top of his voice. He then sat at a desk, penned a few lines, and disappeared into the broadcast studio, repeating to himself, “Allahu Akbar, the Revolution was victorious!”⁴⁹ Yunis Bahri followed the first reports of the revolution through ‘Arif’s broadcasts. “We did not know what was happening either inside or outside the capital,” Bahri recalled. “The people of Baghdad crouched in their homes, confused by the sudden shock of events.” Then ’Arif called the people into the streets to support the revolution and track down its enemies. Though ‘Arif knew that the royal family had already been killed, he called on the Iraqis to attack the royal palace, as though he sought to implicate the Iraqi people in the crime of regicide. He also offered a reward of 10,000 Iraqi dinars for the capture of Nuri al-Sa’id, who had managed to escape his assailants at dawn—only to be caught disguised as a woman and lynched the following day. “When the people of Baghdad heard the incitement to attack the royal palace and Nuri al-Sa’id’s palace, they left their homes overcome with the desire to kill, murder, rob and plunder,” Bahri recalled. The urban poor leaped at the opportunity to plunder the fabled riches of Baghdad’s palaces and to kill anyone who got in their way. Yunis Bahri took to the streets to witness the Iraqi Revolution firsthand. He was appalled by the carnage that greeted him. “Blood flowed in a violent stream down al-Rashid Street. The people applauded and cheered when they saw men dragged to death behind cars. I saw the mob drag the remains of the body of ’Abd al-Ilah after they had made an example of him, gratifying their thirst for revenge upon him. Then they hanged his body from the gate of the Ministry of Defence.” The crowd pulled down the statues of King Faysal I and General Maude, the British commander who first occupied Baghdad in 1917, and set fire to the British Chancellery in Baghdad. In the atmosphere of mass hysteria, anyone could be mistaken for a man of the ancient regime and lynched. ?It was sufficient for anyone to point a finger, saying ?That?s [cabinet minister] Fadhil al-Jamali!? for the crowd to seize and bind the man?s legs and drag him to death without hesitation or mercy, while he screamed in vain and called upon God, the prophets and all the angels and devils protesting [the mistaken identity].? Baghdad was unrecognizable, ?ablaze in fires and drenched in blood, the corpses of the victims scattered in the streets.?⁵⁰ While the violence raged in the streets of Baghdad, Colonel ‘Arif continued to issue statements and orders throughout the day over the national radio station. He ordered the arrest of all former Iraqi cabinet ministers, as well as the ministers of the Arab Union, both Iraqi and Jordanian. As the day wore on, lower-level figures were singled out for arrest, from the mayor of Baghdad to the chief of police. By the afternoon they were calling for broadcasters and journalists who were considered sympathetic to the monarchy. Yunis Bahri, who had assisted Nuri al-Sa’id, was named as a sympathizer of the fallen government and was arrested the following day. He reached the Ministry of Defence just as al-Sa’id’s mangled corpse arrived in the back of a jeep. The men of the old order were rounded up like sheep and led off to a new prison converted from an old hospital in a suburb of Baghdad known as Abu Ghurayb. The prison of Abu Ghurayb would gain notoriety as the torture chamber of Saddam Hussein and, later yet, of U.S. forces following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Bahri was detained in Abu Ghurayb for seven months before being released without charge. He and his wife returned to Beirut early in 1959 to find a new government and the civil war at an end.

In Lebanon, the opposition forces celebrated the fall of the monarchy in Iraq. They believed the Hashemite monarchy was a British puppet state and that the Free Officers were Arab nationalists in Nasser’s mold. They took comfort in the fall of the pro-Western government in Iraq and redoubled their efforts against the Chamoun government in Lebanon. As Chamoun recorded in his memoirs, “In rebel neighbourhoods, men and women had gone into the streets, filled cafes and public places, joyful, dancing with a frenetic joy, threatening legal authority with the fate that had been that of Baghdad leaders. On the other hand, a great fear had spread to those Lebanese committed to a peaceful and independent Lebanon.”⁵¹ The Lebanese state, shaken by civil war, was now threatened with collapse. Chamoun invoked the Eisenhower Doctrine two hours after receiving news of the violent revolution in Iraq (Lebanon had the distinction to be the only country ever to invoke the doctrine). With the U.S. Sixth Fleet on hand in the Eastern Mediterranean, Marines landed in Beirut the very next day. The United States intervened in Lebanon to prevent the fall of a pro-Western government to Nasserist forces. The American show of force on behalf of its Lebanese ally included 15,000 troops on the ground, dozens of naval vessels off the coast, and 11,000 sorties by naval aircraft that made frequent low-level flights over Beirut to intimidate the warring Lebanese. U.S. troops remained only three months in Beirut (the last American forces were withdrawn on October 25) and left without firing a shot. Political stability returned to Lebanon under the brief American occupation. The commander of the Lebanese army, General Fuad Shihab, was elected president on July 31, 1958, putting to rest the opposition’s concerns of an unconstitutional extension of Chamoun’s rule. President Chamoun’s term of office ended on schedule, on September 22. That October, President Shihab oversaw the creation of a coalition government combining loyalist and opposition members. Arab nationalist hopes that Lebanon would throw in its lot with Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic were dashed, as the new Lebanese government called for national reconciliation under the slogan “no vanquished and no victor.”