Salient. Victoria University Students' Paper. Vol. 26, No. 5. Monday, April 29, 1963
50 Iraqis Quit Red Campuses
50 Iraqis Quit Red Campuses
Some 50 Iraqi students at Soviet universities walked off their campuses on March 31 and demanded to be returned to their own country, in protest against the Soviet Union's continuing propaganda barrage against the new Iraqi regime's purge of Communists.
Iraqi diplomatic sources in Moscow reported that many more of the 1335 Iraqi students now in the Soviet Union had asked to leave; so many that the Iraqi Embassy has had to limit eligibility for tickets home to members of the National Union of Iraqi Students (whose members actively opposed the Kassem dictatorship which the new nationalist regime overthrew in February 8).
The new government maintains that the members of the Communist Party in Iraq exposed themselves as traitors to the country when they acted as police spies and during the revolution, armed defenders of the hated Kassem dictatorship.
The entire Soviet bloc has been conducting a vast propaganda campaign against alleged "persecution" of Communists by the new regime.