Accused of fomenting the Mosul rising, which had the bad luck to fail, Gamal Abdel Nasser appeared a very nervous man. He responded recklessly.
His first reaction was to accuse Iraqi Communists of trying to split Arab brotherhood. The man who only last month insisted that there was no connection between the "friendly" Soviet Union and the local Communist troublemakers of Syria and Egypt now proclaimed from his Damascus balcony that "the Communist Party works for foreigners. Nobody in the Arab world will respond to them because they are agents of a foreign power." Next day, under the sting of Kassem's accusations of conspiracy, Nasser dropped all pretense of soldierly comradeship with Kassem and attacked him in person as a man who fights against Arab unity. Punning on Kassem's name, which in Arabic means "splitter," he shouted that "Iraq's splitter" had fought Arab brotherhood more viciously than the hated Nuri asSaid himself. Iraqi planes, firing on the thousands of defeated rebels and tribesmen fleeing for their lives, had bombed a Syrian border village. His own air force, Nasser said righteously, could have retaliated with blows twice as strong but refrained "because the villages we would have hit are Arab villages."
Red Crescent. On the third day, still stung by the discovery that an Arab street mob could jeer his name, Nasser in Damascus ordered up what his press unblinkingly called "the largest Arab anti-Communist demonstration ever seen." The crowd had been whipped up by Friday sermons in the mosques. It was given a martyr's pageant of its own, similar to the one in Baghdad: a lugubrious cortege for a wounded Iraqi captain who had fled Mosul when the revolt failed, and died in a Damascus hospital. Nasser crowed that "the banners of Arab nationalism" would fly one day over the land now ruled by Kassem: Mosul would "not be the last rebellion so long as there remain in Iraq dictatorship, atheism and terrorism." Nasser's mob chanted: "Death to Kassem! Death to Kassem!"