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Blue-eyed Nuri asSaid ("Nuri the Happy One"), born in Baghdad in 1888, was the only son of Lowlow's descendant, Said Effendi al-Mudakikchi ("Mr. Said the Auditor"). For a boy of good family growing up in Ottoman Baghdad, the army was the only fit career, and Nuri went to a local Turkish military school that prepared candidates for the military academy in Constantinople. At twelve he nearly died of typhoid, but Baghdad's only doctor nursed him through, and in 1903 he was ready to make the hard trip to Constantinople and the three-year course at the academy. In a mule-team caravan with 72 other boys bound for the academy, he traveled 27 days across bandit-infested desert to Alexandretta and caught the boat for Constantinople. In all it was a 40-day trip that Nuri now makes in less than four hours by Iraqi-piloted Viscount.
The Covenanter. Commissioned a sublieutenant, Nuri rode back to Baghdad, slim, handsome in the mustache sprouted in Constantinople, and fiercely proud of his uniform. He became a platoon commander at a Persian border town, and fell in with Jafar al-Askari, a husky, bull-necked Arab a few years his senior. The two became fast friends, and in 1910, as one member of the family puts it, "they gave each other their sisters." Though in accordance with Arab custom Nuri was not introduced to his bride Naima till the wedding day, Jafar arranged for her to catch a glimpse of Nuri from a window a few weeks beforehand. "He was handsome —just as he is today," says Naima, who has borne him two sons (one of them, an R.A.F.-trained pilot, is chief of Iraq's rail system and airlines).
After the wedding the two young officers, their wives and mothers, set off by mule caravan for Constantinople, this time to attend staff college. Shortly after their arrival war broke out in the Balkans, and Nuri went off to the front, but he and Jafar became convinced that advancement was being systematically denied them because they were Arabs. "If we are foreigners, then let's be foreigners," said Nuri. He took over leadership of a cell in the secret Covenant society plotting Arab independence from the decadent and dying Ottoman empire. All cell members wore hooded red gowns at meetings to keep their identity secret from each other —except Nuri whose identity had to be known. Once one of the officers sent word to Nuri that he could not attend because of illness. Because his illness was known and his absence would betray his identity, Nuri dressed his own mother in the hooded robe, and she sat silently through the meeting to make the group add up to the right number.