Who was the leader of this Guevarist faction?
GA: Khaled Ahmed Zaki. A well-known figure, but he was killed even before the Ba’athists took over. He made the same calculation that Guevara made in Bolivia in ’67. He thought that he could draw a segment of the Communist Party, knowing that it had a real network and apparatus in the country, to radicalize and support his armed struggle, and that would join with the Kurdish liberation struggle, and this combination could lead to a revolutionary seizure of power in Baghdad. That’s the calculation he was making at the time. And you had a split in the Communist Party; you had a left-wing faction which hooked up with the guerilla. But the Ba’athist coup d’etat crushed this wing of the Communist Party, and so the other wing, the majority wing of the Communist Party—the pro-Moscow wing—tried to collaborate with the Ba’athists, and even entered their government for a while in the early ’70’s. This was not only opportunist but, I would say, criminal—how can you join with such a criminal, repr
