Bakr Sidqi

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Bakr Sidqi (Arabic: بكر صدقي‎), an Iraqi nationalist and general, was born 1890 in Kirkuk and assassinated in August 12, 1937, at Mosul.

Sidqi was Kurdish by birth, but like many ambitious men who lived in the Ottoman Empire, he 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 WW I, and spent much of his time crushing Assyrian tribal rebellions in the 1930s. In August 1933 Sidqi ordered the Iraqi Army to march to the north to crush militant Assyrians separatists in town of Shemail, near Mosul, which lead to 5,000 Assyrian civilians dead.

In October 1936, during the reign of Faisal's ineffectual son King Ghazi I, Sidqi, then acting commander of Iraqi Army, staged a military coup, which was probably the first modern military coup d'état in the Arab world. As head of a conservative group opposed to democratic reforms, he directed a surprise attack on Baghdad, overthrowing government of Yasin al-Hashimi and restored the ousted anti-reform Prime Minister Hikmat Sulayman.

After overthrowing the government, Sidqi essentially ruled Iraq until he was assassinated in Mosul after the nationalist military officers withdrew their support from him. As a result Hikmat Sulayman resigned as PM and Jamil al-Midfai took over as PM.

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