Abdul Rahman Arif
On Tuesday, November 12, al-Sadi and 18 of his Ba'ath Party colleagues were seized at gunpoint and flown to Madrid. The next day, without mentioning al-Sadi, Radio Baghdad announced that the ruling Ba'athist Party was now led by a 15-member council headed by al-Bakr. A few minutes before 11:00, the radio went off the air and fighter jets strafed the Presidential Palace in Baghdad; large crowds of al-Sadi supporters demonstrated in Baghdad. By the afternoon, Prime Minister al-Bakr's forces had reclaimed control. The next evening in Madrid, al-Sadi announced that eight of the new Ba'ath leaders had been ousted and flown to Beirut, and that al-Sadi would return to Baghdad with Syrian Ba'athists. By Monday, November 18, Iraqi president Abdul Salam Arif, his brother, Brigade General Abdul Rahman Arif and their Iraqi Army supporters suppressed the Ba'ath National Guard Militia (which had increased in size from 5,000 to 34,000 between February and August 1963) and bombed the Ba'ath National Guard Militia headquarters while other senior officers and supporters of Abdul Salam Arif, such as Khaleel Jassim AlDabbagh, Saeed Hamo, Abdul Aziz Al Aqili and Younis Atar Bashi took control of the fourth and third divisions and suppressed the Ba'ath National Guard Militia in Mosul and Karkuk. Then he removed al-Bakr as Premier; al-Sadi was not included in the new council and remained in exile.