Abdul Salam Arif

Biography

Abdul Salam Arif was born in Baghdad in 1921 and joined the Iraqi Army in 1939. He fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, where he took Jenin, and became a member of the clandestine Free Officers alongside Abd al-Karim Qasim. In July 1958, ordered to lead troops to Jordan, he instead marched them into Baghdad and on 14 July launched the coup that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy.

Under the new republic he became deputy prime minister, interior minister and deputy commander-in-chief. A pan-Arabist who wanted Iraq to join Gamal Abdel Nasser's United Arab Republic, he soon clashed with Qasim, who removed him from his posts in September 1958 and named him ambassador to West Germany. Arif refused the posting, was arrested on his return in November, and in February 1959 was sentenced to death; Qasim commuted the sentence and released him in 1961.

After Qasim was overthrown and executed in the coup of 8 February 1963, Arif became president, though real power at first lay with the Ba'ath Party and Prime Minister Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. In November 1963 he used a split in the Ba'ath to expel its members from government with army support, made himself chief of staff and installed Nasserist officers and technocrats. He pursued union plans with Egypt, founded the Arab Socialist Union of Iraq in July 1964 and nationalised banks and major companies, and in 1964 he foiled a Ba'athist plot whose members included Saddam Hussein.

Arif died on 13 April 1966 when his Iraqi Air Force aircraft crashed near Basra. His brother Abdul Rahman Arif succeeded him as president.