In 1969 the ICP-CL faced an organizational deadlock as a result of the brutal treatment it had experienced at the hands of the Ba'thist regime. The ICP's split into factions left the CL temporarily rudderless, with the defection of the secretary-general and the submission of the rest of the leadership to the Baʿthists in the National Front. This was further compounded by the ICP-CL's refusal to be reconciled with the ICP-CC. There seemed to be no option left for its cadre except to face annihilation at the hands of the Baʿth security and police apparatus (as had already happened to their leadership) or to abandon political activism altogether. However, a new generation of committed cadre emerged, who concentrated their efforts on rejecting all cooperation, let alone the formation of an official alliance, with the Baʿth, and who aimed for a very tightly knit, secretive organizational structure and more defined ideology. Of course, such an organization took time to develop and when Party activists met for a plenary session in Qaradagh, a mountainous area in the vicinity of Sulaimaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, the regime had detailed knowledge of both the timing and place of the meeting. It dispatched three. MIG fighters and a Badger bomber to fly low-level runs over the location from 2:00 PM to 8:00 PM to signal the regime's ability to destroy the CL if it so desired.

The Tripartite aggression of 20 October 1956 against Egypt polarized politics in the entire Middle East region, including Iraq, with national fervor turning into popular political opposition to the West and its Arab allies. Public outrage in Iraq and the demonstrations that followed brought the major opposition parties closer together, and a committee representing the Baʿth, Istiqlâl, NDP, and ICP, and including some independent democratic personalities, was created to coordinate their activities. They formed a special Field Committee to direct the daily demonstrations that were taking place. However, the members of this committee were almost immediately arrested, forcing the Party representatives to take over the tasks themselves. In addition to forming the sub-committee, they established the Supreme Student Committee to direct and mobilize students, who in fact formed the backbone of the protests and who represented the parties. A representative of the KDP was added to this student committee, although the KDP was not officially part of the initial sub-committee.

In response to these developments, NÛrî al-Saʿîd's defiance of the opposition intensified and his oppression increased, particularly of the communists and their sympathizers. This spurred closer cooperation among many of the opposition groupings, and by early 1957 the opposition's solidarity had become a pre-condition for their survival. With some effort, an alliance structure began to take shape, and in February 1957 an umbrella organization, the United National Front, was born.

When the Central Committee held its Fourth Party Congress in Ziwiah Ka on the Iraq-Iran border from 10 to 15 November 1985, it found itself divided once more over the direction and objectives of the Party. The split in the Central Committee into two distinct groups along ethnic lines had become evident by the plenum of June-July 1984, and crystallized at the 1985 Congress. The Kurds congregated around Secretary-GeneralʿAzîz Muḥammad, while the Arab groups gathered under the leadership of Bâqir Ibrâhîm al-MÛsawî, a member of the Politburo; ʿÂmir ʿAbd-ul-lah; Mahdî al-Ḥâfiẓ, Mahdî ʿAbd-ul-Karîm; NÛrî ʿAbd-ul-Razzâq; Mâjid ʿAbd-ul-Riḍâ; ʿAdnân ʿAbbâs; Muḥammad Ḥasan Mubârakj and ʿAbd-ul-Wahâb Ṭâhir. In addition to personal animosities between the two cliques, there was also a clear split between the leadership inside Iraq and that from outside that exacerbated their political differences.

The two objectives dividing the Party were whether its immediate priority should be the overthrow of the Baʿth or the defence of the country in the ongoing war with Iran. Zâkî Khairî led the faction calling for a concentration of Party activities against the possibility of an Iranian occupation of Iraq. The dispute resulted in the expulsion of many in the Arab faction and in a reduction in the size of the Central Committee from forty-four members, which had been elected by the Third Congress, to only twenty-four, as it was announced that twenty members of the dThird Congress Central Committee would not be running for re-election.

The autumn of 1967 found the Iraqi communist movement in disarray with schisms within the Party over the emergence of the Central Leadership and a decline in the Iraqi Communist Party-Central Committee (ICP-CC). Recognizing the communist movement's weakened condition, the Baʿth regime, which had assumed power in July 1968, expressed an interest in cooperating with the ICP-CC. Such a relationship would provide the Baʿth with an opportunity to consolidate its power domestically, through appearing tolerant to leftists generally and to communists in particular. Moreover, it raised hopes of a possible opening to a relationship with the Soviet Union.

In response to these overtures from the new regime in Baghdad, the ICP-CC invited representatives of the Baʿth Party into leadership positions within some International Front communist organizations, such as the Majlis al-Silm al-Waṭanî (Council of National Peace). To accommodate the Baʿth, and to distinguish the organization from its communist origins, which dated back to the 1950s, the council's name was altered to Al-Majlis al-Waṭanî lil Silm wa al-Taḍâmun (National Council for Peace and Solidarity). The Baʿthists responded favourably and accepted seats on the the National Council for Peace executive board. Their strategy was to reduce the influence the communists had acquired through their leadership of these mass organizations. In addition, the ICP-CC facilitated the Baʿth's move into the Afro-Asian Solidarity Council, which the communists had been involved with for almost two decades.

The introduction of Marxist thought in Iraq must be accredited to Ḥusain al-Raḥḥâl (1901–1981), who, though he never became a communist himself, was the first to introduce Marxist thought into intellectual circles in Baghdad. Al-Raḥḥâl was a high school student in Berlin in 1919 when the Spartacist uprising, an attempt by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) to seize control of Berlin, took place; this event left a deep impression on him, and kindled his interest in socialism and Marxism. Returning to Iraq a year later, and profoundly affected by the unstable conditions of the country, under British occupation, he gradually started to teach Marxist and socialist thought. However, in his last days he expressed deep disappointment:

Iraq Before the First World War

The history of modern Iraq can be traced back to 1749 when the Ottoman Sultan appointed Sulimân Aghâ AbÛ-lailah, a Georgian Mamluk officer who was the governor of Basra (1749–1761), to the position of Wâlî (governor) of Baghdad. This appointment initiated the establishment of a semi-autonomous state in Iraq under Mamluk suzerainty.

This book has a story for me. As a young boy in February 1949, in my first year of grammar school, on a sunny morning in Baghdad, I passed by some bodies of communists who had been hanged. Later, my father and I had the following conversation:

I went home and clipped the newspapers that day, and have done so every day since. And since that day, I have been trying to understand.

Though I have never joined any political party, nor been actively involved in one, from my undergraduate years on I have felt driven to understand, and eventually as an academician to explain, but never as an apologist, the communist movement in Iraq. I wanted to write my first book on this topic but had to wait a quarter of a century to see the conclusion of the Cold War. I felt that to understand a movement, one had to have the writings of the participants and their official literature and be able to study their experiences from their own perspectives.

Vanguard activism and rearguard opportunism represent signposts in the ICP's journey through Iraq's political development from a backwater outpost of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century to what is effectively a US mandate in the twenty-first century. The purpose of this chapter is to retrace the main pathways of this journey as it unfolded in the previous chapters.

Vanguard Activism

The story of the ICP's journey began in the inner recesses of Iraq's semi-feudal class structure. The last decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the growth of a land-owning aristocracy composed mainly of tribal chiefs, wealthy city merchants, upper-level bureaucrats, and religious leaders. Semi-feudal relations prevailed, but with the introduction of modern communications and transport, internal markets opened up to private financial institutions that were closely connected to the international capitalist markets. This process became more prominent following the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. European goods began to flood Iraqi markets, almost wiping out indigenous production and transforming the traditional agricultural barter system into a market economy. The British occupation of Iraq in 1917 accelerated this process, as railways, electrical companies, and waterways were opened, and the port of Basra was expanded to serve the economic demands of the British Empire. However, perhaps the most important development in this change was the introduction and development of the oil industry, which tied Iraq inextricably to the international oil monopolies.

A second significant change was the wholesale expansion of semi-feudal relations.

The Iraqi Communist Party remained popular with the Iraqi people despite the elimination of virtually its entire leadership and organization following the failed 1963 revolt. This allowed several attempts to rejuvenate the Party to take place. During the first few weeks after the 1963 Baʿthist coup, the remnants of the Central Committee and Politburo – Jamâl al-Ḥaidarî, Muḥammad Ṣâliḥ al-ʿAblî, and ʿAbd-ul-Jabbâr Wahbî – continued running Party affairs in Baghdad under the name the Bureau of Central Organization. They attempted to re-establish communication with the scattered membership of the embattled Party and began to rebuild the Party's apparatus. But, on 21 July 1963, they too were arrested and summarily executed.

To fill the vacuum that resulted and direct what was left of the Party, a replacement leadership was hastily constituted, led by Bâqir Ibrâhîm al-MÛsawî, the only surviving member of the Politburo in Iraq, who had been the Politburo official in charge of the Party's Middle Euphrates section. This state of confusion, however, did not extend to the Kurdish branch of the ICP, which, being located in the rebellious northern Kurdish areas, was left virtually intact. The branch had established good working relations with other Kurdish groups, particularly with the KDP and its leader Mullah Muṣṭafâ Bârzânî, who had initiated a rebellion against the Qâsim regime in 1961. After the Party's 1962 plenary session, Salâm ʿÂdil's Central Committee instructed the Kurdish branch to replace the Central Committee in case of an emergency or if for any reason it ceased to function normally.