Mahmud Salman
Colonel Mahmud Salman was the Commanding Officer in the Royal Iraqi Air Force in the late 1930s and as a member of the Golden Square, was one of the four principal instigators of the 1941 Iraqi coup d'état.
Salman was born in Baghdad in 1889 and as a young man served as an officer in the Ottoman, Syrian and Iraqi armies, the latter which he joined in 1925.
In 1937, following the 1936 Iraqi coup d'état when Bakr Sidqi became the de facto rule of Iraq and Commander of the Armed Forces, Salman was one of the small group of officers who planned the execution of Sidqi.
