Coup Attempt, Military Purge Reported in Iraq : As Many as 200 Executed After Move Against President Hussein in January, Dissidents Assert

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein recently survived an attempted coup for which a number of senior army officers have been executed, according to diplomats, Iraqi dissidents and intelligence sources.

Details of the attempted coup are sketchy and, in several instances, contradictory. Kurdish rebel spokesmen and other Iraqi dissident sources have said that as many as 200 army officers and civilians from the ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party have been executed over the last two months.

A senior Arab intelligence official who monitors Iraq closely said the coup attempt occurred around the beginning of January and involved officers from military units “stationed in northern Iraq.”

Three of Iraq’s seven army corps are stationed in the north--the 5th Army Corps, which is deployed along the border with Turkey; the 1st Special Corps, east of Mosul, and the 2nd Corps, around Sulaymaniyah. Both the 1st and the 2nd Corps were involved in Iraq’s recent campaign against Kurdish separatists, which achieved international notoriety both for its scorched-earth brutality and its reported use of chemical weapons.

Some reports circulating in both diplomatic and intelligence circles have indicated that officers from the elite Republican Guards--which is charged with protecting the president--were also involved in the attempted coup. If true, this would indicate that the attempt may have constituted a more serious threat to Hussein’s regime than previous attempts by army units or dissident groups to overthrow or assassinate him.

‘Very Serious Indeed’

“The Republican Guards are the forces that are supposed to protect Saddam from the rest of the army, so if they were involved, it would be very serious indeed,” one Iraq specialist said.

In Damascus, where several Syrian and Iranian-supported Iraqi dissident groups are meeting to try to form a united opposition front, members of Massoud Barzani’s Kurdish Democratic Party last week released a list of dozens of senior military and civilian officials who they said were killed in a wave of executions since Dec. 20. The list included a brigadier general described by the Kurdish sources as a divisional commander of the Republican Guards.

However, a check of the name provided by the Kurdish sources--Brig. Gen. Abdel Ghani Shaneen--failed to confirm either his identity or position. The date they gave for the start of the executions--Dec. 20--also conflicted with other accounts, which indicated that the coup attempt occurred at the beginning of January.

Part of Postwar Purge

A possible explanation for this discrepancy, according to one analyst who monitors events in Iraq, could be that the executions began first, as part of a postwar purge of the armed forces, and that this in turn triggered an attempt by some of the northern military units to move against Hussein.

“Everyone has long suspected that there was a lot of dissent within the army but that it was being held in check by the war (with Iran),” one diplomat familiar with Iraq said. “The question always was what would happen after the war.

“Knowing about the discontent, Saddam may have moved against potential rivals and malcontents first,” the diplomat added. “Anyone familiar with Iraq knows that if Saddam even suspects someone of dissent, then that dissenter is a goner.”

Whatever the explanation, the coup attempt itself appears to have been short-lived and easily suppressed, according to diplomats and other sources.

The senior Arab intelligence official, although supporting the reports of executions, said the figure of 200 cited by dissident sources is almost certainly exaggerated.

The source said there have been some executions but that, according to preliminary intelligence reports, the number of officers arrested and shot in the aftermath of the attempted coup number “only seven or eight,” all generals or colonels.

Army Day Canceled

Army Day, which is celebrated every Jan. 6, was canceled this year without explanation. But apart from that--and the fact that Baghdad is abuzz with rumors of the attempted coup--there have been no outward signs of trouble. “Saddam seems to have contained this. His power is not threatened,” the Arab intelligence source said.

Despite this, the evidence of unrest within the armed forces nevertheless comes at a politically difficult time for Hussein, diplomats and other analysts agree. As the victor in the Persian Gulf War, his position cannot be described as weak. But Hussein still faces what the analyst said is a difficult time as he seeks to rehabilitate Iraq’s heavily indebted economy after nearly eight years of war.

The war built up a $70-billion debt and took the lives of more than 160,000 Iraqis, by official count. While there is enormous relief that it is over, the equally enormous task of reconstruction is already said to have run into snags.

Easing Price Controls

To deal with the war debt, the Baghdad regime is trying to shrug off its socialist constraints through the easing of price controls and the privatization of a number of state-run industries, especially those in the agricultural and service sectors. However, Iraqis long-used to being cowed by their regime have been slow to respond, and privatization so far has resulted only in soaring inflation.

Unemployment is also expected to rise as soldiers are demobilized. During the years that the men were away at the front, women moved into the work force in such large numbers that Iraqi officials often stressed to Western visitors how emancipated their country was on women’s rights, compared to other Muslim nations. Now, however, Iraq faces a dilemma of either forcing these women to return to their homes or of finding jobs for a suddenly enlarged work force, diplomats said. Either choice, they added, is likely to generate discontent.

On top of this, Hussein, a civilian who has no natural power base within the armed forces, must also face the question of “what to do with one of the world’s largest and battle-hardened armies now that the war is over,” a Western military analyst said. “The military has always represented the only viable threat to Hussein’s regime, and controlling that threat has always been his greatest challenge.”