Abdul Khaliq al-Samarra'i

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Abdul Khaliq al-Samarra'i (1935–1979) was an Iraqi politician and a leading member of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party in Iraq. Born in Samarra to a wealthy family, he studied in Baghdad. He joined the Ba'ath Party in 1952 and rose through its ranks, becoming part of the Iraqi Regional Command in 1964 and a member of the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) from 1969 to 1973. In 1972 he chaired the RCC’s Cultural Bureau. He was seen as a major rival to Saddam Hussein for leadership of the civilian Ba'ath faction and many observers considered him the third most powerful man in Iraq.

In 1973 he was linked to Nazim Kazzar’s plot to overthrow the government and was arrested. Although some doubted his involvement, he was sentenced to death, but the sentence was not carried out; his death was not ratified by then-President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and he spent years in solitary confinement. Campaigns against the death sentence by Michel Aflaq and Kamal Jumblatt helped delay it. In August 1979, Saddam Hussein ordered al-Samarra'i’s execution along with others accused of conspiracies, and he died at age 44 in Ba'athist Iraq.

Al-Samarra'i had sided with Michel Aflaq during the 1966 Ba'ath split, advocating Ba'athism and opposing blind obedience to Bakr. His life reflects the intense power struggles within the Ba'ath Party as it moved toward dictatorship in Iraq.