Bakr Sidqi

Bakr Sidqi, an Iraqi nationalist and general, was born in 1890 in Kirkuk and assassinated on Aug. 12, 1937, at Mosul.

Like many ambitious men who lived in the Ottoman Empire, Sidqi joined the Turkish army as a young man; already an Arab nationalist who favored freeing the Arab lands from Turkish domination, he nonetheless spent formative years in what was essentially the colonial army.

Sidqi was made a general by King Faisal I when Iraq became an independent country after World War I, and spent much of his time crushing tribal rebellions in the 1930s. In 1936, during the reign of Faisal's ineffectual son King Ghazi I, Sidqi led what was probably the first modern coup d'état in the Arab world. As head of a conservative group opposed to democratic reforms, he directed a surprise attack on Baghdad that restored the ousted anti-reform Prime Minister Hikmat Sulayman.

After overthrowing the government, Sidqi essentially ruled Iraq until a relative of defense minister Jafar al-Askari, killed in the coup, assassinated him in revenge at the airport in Mosul.