On this date in 1958, the aptly named 14 July Revolution deposed the ruling Hashemite dynasty of Iraq — with the summary execution of the royal family and its chief ministers.
Iraq emerged from the World War I Ottoman breakup as a kingdom ruled by Faisal I.*
Independent in name, this kingdom in reality was a British client and its statecraft congenial to Anglo objectives in the Gulf grew increasingly obnoxious to its subjects. The reliably pro-British premier Nuri al-Said dominated Iraqi politics from the late 1940s, while Faisal’s teenaged grandson Faisal II “reigned” from a London boarding school.**
For an average Iraqi moved by the era’s stirring spirit of nationalism, the situation compounded grievance upon grievance: the suspicious “car crash” death of nationalist-minded inter-Faisal King Ghazi in 1939; the 1941 British invasion to block a nationalist coup, and the continuous British occupation that continued thereafter until 1947; and Iraq’s headline enrollment in the western-sponsored regional alliance meant to counter Soviet influence. Official Baghdad stood foursquare against the tide of Arab nationalism embodied by Nasser‘s Egypt, and very much many Iraqis’ similar aspirations.
Major protests rocked Iraq in 1948, in 1952, and especially when Britain, France, and Israel tried to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956; each time Iraq’s pro-British elites managed to suppress the immediate threat, but also proved constitutionally incapable of adapting the Iraqi state to the shifting world.
So, on the 14th of July in 1958, the shifting world adapted the state.
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July 14, 1958: King Faisal II and his family
July 15, 1958: Nuri al-Said
* The Alec Guinness character in Lawrence of Arabia.
** Faisal II schooled with Jordan’s King Hussein, his cousin; the two dreamed of combining their countries into an enlarged Hashemite state and had just begun such a project when Iraq’s revolution aborted the plan. Hussein was much the more fortunate ruler, dying in bed in 1999 after a 47-year reign; his son remains the king of Jordan to this day.
On this day..
- 2020: Daniel Lewis Lee
- 1958: King Faisal II of Iraq and his family
- 1683: Two lynched during the Ottoman siege of Vienna
- 1852: Louis Lullier, wife in a cask
- 1813: John McDonald and James Black, Edinburgh robbers
- 1909: Garry Richard Barrett
- 1455: Kunz von Kauffungen, Altenburg Prince-Robber
- 1584: Balthasar Gerard, assassin of William the Silent
- 1949: Jake Bird
- 1994: Glenn Ashby, abruptly
- 1926: Ziya Hursit and others for a plot against Ataturk
- 1939: Howard Long, New Hampshire's most recent hanging
- 1989: Horace Franklin Dunkins, Jr., "just hope that he was not conscious"