Iraqi Communist Party
Based on Wikipedia: Iraqi Communist Party
In 1949, three men were publicly hanged in Baghdad. Their crime was organizing workers. Their names were Yusuf Salman Yusuf—better known by his revolutionary alias "Comrade Fahd"—and two fellow members of the Iraqi Communist Party. The government accused them of inciting unrest from behind prison bars, which they almost certainly did. What the executioners couldn't kill was the movement itself, which would spend the next seven decades weaving in and out of Iraqi political life like an unkillable thread.
The Iraqi Communist Party is, quite simply, the oldest continuously active political party in Iraq. Founded in 1934, it has outlasted monarchies, military coups, dictatorships, invasions, and sanctions. It has been banned, brutalized, and brought to the brink of extinction multiple times. And yet here it is, still holding seats in parliament, still publishing newspapers, still organizing.
How does a party survive for ninety years in one of the most politically volatile countries on Earth?
A Law Student and a Mosque
The story begins, as so many revolutionary stories do, with a young person reading dangerous books.
Husain al-Rahhal was a student at the Baghdad School of Law in 1924 when he formed what historians now recognize as Iraq's first Marxist study circle. The location he chose was deliciously ironic: Haidarkhanah Mosque, a site already famous as a meeting place for revolutionaries during the 1920 revolt against British occupation.
Al-Rahhal was a polyglot—someone who speaks many languages fluently—and this skill proved crucial. He could read Communist newspapers from across Europe and translate their ideas for his fellow Iraqis. The group eventually launched a small newspaper called Al-Sahifah, meaning "The Journal," which laid out a distinctly Marxist vision for Iraqi society.
What did they want? The usual things that got people arrested in 1920s Iraq: equal rights for women, the abolition of feudal land practices, and an end to what they saw as the suffocating grip of tradition. After just six issues and several government crackdowns, the paper was permanently shut down in 1927.
But al-Rahhal had planted seeds. Working through a youth organization called Nadi Al-Tadamun—"The Solidarity Club"—he helped inspire Iraq's first student demonstrations. One protest in January 1927 was over the firing of controversial teachers. Another in February 1928 targeted the visit of Alfred Mond, a prominent British Zionist, to Iraq. These might seem like small events, but they were rehearsals for much larger upheavals to come.
Depression Breeds Revolution
The Great Depression didn't just devastate American farmers and German factory workers. In 1929, the collapse of international commodity prices slashed the value of Iraqi exports by more than forty percent. Wages plummeted. Workers grew desperate.
And desperate workers started organizing.
Communist circles sprang up across the country. In Basra, a man named Ghali Zuwayyid led one group. In Nasiriyyah, another was led by the man who would become Comrade Fahd. In Baghdad, young intellectuals who had first met during the student protests of the late 1920s began meeting in secret.
These scattered groups found each other through a remarkably practical act of resistance: boycotting the British-owned Baghdad Electric Light Company. From December 1933 to January 1934, Iraqis refused to pay their electric bills to protest British economic control. The boycott brought the various Communist circles together and gave them a shared sense of purpose.
On March 8, 1935, they formalized their alliance as Jamiyyat Dudd Al-Istimar—"The Association Against Colonialism." Three days later, they issued a manifesto demanding debt cancellation, land redistribution, and an eight-hour workday. They launched an underground newspaper called Kifah Al-Shab, "The Struggle of the People."
The government's response was swift. Police arrested nearly all the major leaders. By December 1935, the newspaper had ceased publication. Its circulation had never exceeded five hundred copies.
This pattern—organize, publish, get crushed, reorganize—would repeat itself many times over the following decades.
The Dangerous 1940s
World War Two put the Iraqi Communist Party in an impossible position.
On one hand, their ideological allies were in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the Soviets were allied with the British Empire—the same British who had occupied Iraq after the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War. To make matters more complicated, Germany had significant historical influence in Iraq dating back to the Ottoman period.
The party hesitated for a full year after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. They finally declared support for the Allies in May 1942, which temporarily aligned them with the Iraqi monarchy and the wealthy landowners they had spent years opposing.
It was around this time that Yusuf Salman Yusuf—Comrade Fahd—became secretary general. He set about transforming the party from a collection of intellectual circles into a genuine mass movement. He focused on recruiting industrial workers rather than just students and professionals. The strategy worked. By the mid-1940s, the party had become a serious force among Iraq's working class.
Success brought conflict. In 1942, some of Fahd's decisions sparked criticism that split the party into competing factions, each publishing its own newspaper. It took until 1945 for the dissidents to be formally welcomed back into the fold at the party's first congress.
The postwar years saw explosive growth. Between 1944 and 1946, Communist organizers unionized between thirty and sixty percent of Iraq's oil workers, railway workers, and port workers in Basra. These weren't just union members—they had Communist union leaders. Massive strikes swept the country between 1945 and 1947, demanding higher wages and legal recognition for labor organizations.
The government initially gave in on wages but soon reversed course, dismantling unions and arresting their leaders. This contributed to Al-Wathbah—literally "The Leap"—a period of intense urban unrest that began in Baghdad in January 1948.
The Palestinian Question and Its Fallout
Then came a moment that would haunt the party for years.
In July 1948, the Iraqi Communist Party had to decide where it stood on the creation of Israel. For years, they had supported Palestinian self-determination. But Moscow had just recognized the new Israeli state. The party leadership chose to follow the Soviet line.
The backlash was immediate and severe. Many supporters abandoned the party. Members resigned in anger. In a region where the Palestinian cause carried enormous emotional weight, aligning with the Soviet position felt like betrayal.
The timing couldn't have been worse. The government was already hunting Communists with renewed vigor after the Al-Wathbah uprisings. In 1949, Fahd and two comrades were publicly executed. The party was nearly destroyed.
Rebuilding from Kurdistan
The early 1950s saw a remarkable geographic shift in the party's center of gravity.
With most of the old Baghdad leadership imprisoned—including figures like Krikor Badrossian—Kurdish members stepped in to fill the void. For the period from 1949 to 1950, the party was actually led from Kurdistan rather than the capital. This wasn't planned; it was survival.
At the same time, Jewish membership in the party collapsed. This coincided with Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, the massive exodus of approximately 120,000 Jews from Iraq. The Iraqi Jewish community had been one of the oldest in the world, tracing its roots back to the Babylonian exile more than 2,500 years earlier. Now it was essentially gone, taking many Communist organizers with it.
By one estimate, the party had been reduced to roughly five hundred members.
Then came the police massacres. In June and September 1953, riots broke out over prison conditions—first in Baghdad, then in the city of Kut. Police killed many Communist political prisoners. Rather than crushing sympathy for the movement, these killings created national outrage and won new supporters to the Communist cause.
In 1956, at their second party congress, the Communists made another major ideological pivot. They officially adopted a pan-Arabist stance, inspired partly by Egypt's nationalization of the Suez Canal and the subsequent Anglo-French-Israeli attack on Egypt. This brought them closer to the popular currents of the day but would create complications after the 1958 revolution.
The Brief Golden Age
The 1958 revolution overthrew the Iraqi monarchy and brought General Abdul-Karim Qasim to power. For the Communist Party, this was the closest they would ever come to real political influence.
Qasim needed allies. He found them in the Communists, lifting the ban on the party and giving them positions in his government. Most notably, he appointed Naziha al-Dulaimi as Minister of Municipalities in 1959. She was not only the first woman minister in Iraq's modern history but the first woman cabinet minister anywhere in the Arab world.
The relationship was genuinely warm. Qasim improved relations with the Soviet Union. Communists organized openly for the first time in decades. It seemed like the years of hiding, of underground newspapers with circulations of five hundred, of public hangings—all of it might finally be over.
It wasn't.
The Ba'athist Terror
On February 8, 1963, the Ba'ath Party launched a coup against Qasim. Communist activists took to the streets to resist. Fighting in Baghdad continued for three days, concentrated in the party's strongholds.
When the Ba'athists consolidated power, they launched what can only be described as a campaign of extermination. Leading figures were hunted down and killed, including Husain al-Radi. The exact number of Communists murdered is unknown, but it was certainly in the dozens, possibly much higher.
The party never fully recovered its previous strength. By the mid-1960s, American intelligence estimated party membership at around 15,000—less than half a percent of Iraq's working-age population.
A split occurred in 1967 when Aziz al-Hajj broke away to form the Iraqi Communist Party – Central Command and launched an armed struggle. The main party opposed this turn to violence.
The Devil's Bargain
In 1973, the Communists made a deal with the devil.
Party secretary Aziz Muhammad signed a National Action Pact with President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, forming a National Progressive Front alongside the Ba'ath Party. The Communists were allowed to operate legally, publish newspapers, and revive their affiliated organizations. Two party members even received cabinet positions.
This was, of course, too good to be true.
Elements of repression continued throughout the supposed alliance. By autumn 1974, the party had retreated back into clandestine operations, trying to increase its security. In 1978, Saddam Hussein—who had been steadily accumulating power—launched a devastating new campaign against the Communists, including mass executions of party members.
By 1979, the party had formally broken all ties with the Iraqi government. They would spend the next two decades in opposition, first to Saddam's dictatorship, then to the international sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War.
After the Invasion
The Iraqi Communist Party opposed the American invasion of 2003. This was consistent with their history—they had always opposed foreign intervention in Iraqi affairs, whether British, American, or otherwise.
But once the invasion happened, they made a pragmatic choice. Rather than remain pure in opposition, they decided to participate in the new political institutions. Party secretary Hamid Majid Mousa accepted a position on the Iraqi Governing Council established by the American occupation.
Electoral success proved elusive. The party received little support in the 2005 elections. They tried various alliances—first with secular groups, then with the list of Ayad Allawi, which brought together socialists, moderate Sunnis, and moderate Shiites.
The breakthrough came in 2018, when the Communists joined the Sairoun Alliance led by the populist cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. This partnership—between secular Marxists and a Shia religious movement—struck many observers as bizarre. But it worked. Sairoun won the most votes of any coalition and fifty-four seats in parliament.
One of those seats went to Suhad al-Khateeb, a Communist woman elected to represent Najaf—one of the holiest cities in Shia Islam and among the most religiously conservative places in Iraq. Al-Khateeb, a teacher and activist for women's rights and poverty reduction, said upon her victory: "The Communist party have a long history of honesty—we were not agents for foreign occupations. We want social justice, citizenship, and are against sectarianism, and this is also what Iraqis want."
The Thread Continues
When massive protests erupted across Iraq in 2019, demanding an end to corruption and sectarian politics, the Communist Party was there supporting them. When parliamentary elections were held in 2021, the party boycotted them, issuing a statement about the "deepening political and social crisis" and "widespread corruption."
Ninety years after a law student started a reading group in a Baghdad mosque, the Iraqi Communist Party endures. It has been banned and legalized and banned again. It has watched its leaders hanged in public squares. It has been decimated by Ba'athist terror and rebuilt from Kurdistan. It has made alliances with dictators and broken those alliances when the dictators turned on them. It has opposed American invasion and then joined American-backed governments.
Through all of this, the party has maintained one consistent position: opposition to foreign domination of Iraq, whether Ottoman, British, or American. And it has maintained one consistent base: workers, especially in the oil fields and ports of Basra, who have seen decades of wealth extracted from their labor while they remain poor.
Is the Communist Party still relevant in twenty-first century Iraq? Its electoral numbers suggest marginal influence at best. But the issues it has championed for ninety years—workers' rights, women's equality, opposition to sectarianism, resistance to corruption—remain as urgent as ever. The thread, however frayed, continues.