1958: King Faisal II of Iraq and his family

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On this date in 1958, Iraq’s Hashemite dynasty got the Romanov treatment from coup-making nationalist officers.

Having already overstayed their welcome as agents of British-American control in the oil-rich Gulf State, the Hashemites were doubly burdened to be led by the inexperienced King Faisal II, who was all of 23 years old.

For much of the recent past, while this underaged grandson of the Arab Revolt hero matriculated at an English boarding school, his sovereignty had been exercised by his uncle and regent ‘Abd al-Ilah — a practitioner, like all of Iraq’s leadership, of a staunchly pro-British and -American policy that increasingly rankled Iraqis.

On July 14, 1958, a swift coup d’etat led by Abd al-Karim Qasim — and explicitly modeled on the Free Officers Movement that had raised the Arab nationalist Gamal Abdel Nasser to power in Egypt — overturned the Hashemites, and made sure that it was for good.

Captured royal family members — including not only King Faisal but the aforementioned ‘Abd al-Ilah and al-Ilah’s wife and mother, plus a number of royal servants — were all summarily machine-gunned in the palace courtyard, after which the royal corpse was given over to public abuse.

“His legs and arms were decapitated, stomach disemboweled with his intestine gushing outside” recalled one of the king’s helpless royal guards of the late king. “His corpse was later suspended from a building until one came with a dagger in his hand to try to divide it into two pieces. The corpse was burned, cut many times until it was thrown in the Tigris river when night came.”

Today there’s an honorable tomb in Baghdad where Faisal reposes, and considering the many terrors that have befallen Iraq in the intervening decades, one can even find pockets of nostalgia for the monarchy.

Cold comfort that Faisal II lives immortally in the classic Belgian comic series The Adventures of Tintin as the inspiration for the puckish and spoiled Prince Abdullah of Khemed.

On this day..

Possibly related executions:

One thought on “1958: King Faisal II of Iraq and his family”

  1. Looking at a few of the linked stories, it appears that it was actually his uncle Abd Al-Ilah (the regent) who was decapitated, disemboweled, hung from a tower, etc. … Not sure if I’m reading the attachments correctly, though.

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