Blackwell Reference Online

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Fahd, whose real name was Yusuf Salman Yusuf, led the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) from 1941 until his death in 1949. Fahd devoted his life to the Iraqi national movement and has generally been credited with transforming the ICP from a small party of urban intellectuals in the beginning of the 1940s to a well-oiled oppositional party. He was born in Baghdad on June 19, 1901, but when he was 7 years old, the family moved to Basra. He enrolled at the American Mission School at al-'Ashshar at age 13, but was unable to finish because his father became ill and was unable to pay his tuition. Fahd then had to take up employment to support the family, working as a clerk with the British occupational forces at Basra. After the 1920 revolt against the British, Fahd began to feel a sense of nationalism. In 1927, Fahd met Pyotr Vasili, an Assyrian from Tiflis (Tbilisi) in Georgia, who two years earlier secretly entered Iraq to travel around the country spreading revolutionary ideas. Vasili was also an undercover emissary for the Communist International (Comintern). The meeting proved decisive in Fahd's life. Soon after he traveled to Khuzestan, Kuwait, Syria, and Palestine. In June 1930, he returned to Iraq after hearing that an Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was to be signed, and a year later he became involved in strikes protesting new municipal taxes that resulted from the treaty. Simultaneously, communist ... log in or subscribe to read full text