and Kaka Ziad Agha as vice-presidents, and Barzani as president-in-exile. The party demanded autonomy for Iraqi Kurdistan, stating that the political and economic situation of the Kurds in Iraq was different from that of Iran. The party programme was not specific about any social or economic content for fear of alienating the highly conservative tribal chiefs and landlords who had agreed to support it. Consolidation After the collapse of the Mahabad republic in early 1947, Ibrahim Ahmad, previously the Sulaymaniyah representative of the Iranian KDP (KDP-I), joined the Iraqi KDP. Ahmad was a highly influential Leftist intellectual, who by 1951 had succeeded in rallying most of the Iraqi Kurdish leftist-nationalists to the KDP, which in turn, took the opportunity to convene a second party congress and duly elect Ahmad as secretary-general (effectively acting chairman). Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, the KDP and the Kurdish members of the Iraqi Communist Party steadily increased their working relationship – in many cases fielding joint candidates. The ICP campaigned directly against the aghas (tribal elders) and won the support of the workers in the cities of Erbil, Duhok, and Sulaymaniyah – while the KDP reassured the aghas that the ICP was ultimately under their control. By 1954 the KDP was advocating the replacement of the Iraqi monarchy with a popular democratic republic – much to the consternation of many of their tribal supporters. Indeed, in 1956, the antagonism between the Kurdish aghas and the KDP-ICP reached such a height that emissaries for the former contacted the British consul in Mosul requesting arms and finance to establish an "anti-Communist and independent Kurdistan" in northern Iraq. Under revolutionary Iraq On July 14, 1958, Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim and his fellow "Free Officers" (modeled after Nasser's Egyptian Free Officers) staged a successful coup that promised a brighter future for the Kurds of Iraq. Although the KDP and ICP were excluded from the new United National Front government, Qasim formed a three-man "Sovereignty Council" of a Sunni, a Shi'i, and a Kurd. The KDP immediately pledged its support for the new regime, in its newspaper hailing a new era of "freedom and equality for the Kurdish and Arab peoples". Ibrahim Ahmad attempted to pressure Qasim into including Kurdish autonomy in the Provisional Constitution. However, Qasim was under much greater pressure from his deputy Abdul Salam Arif and other pan-Arab Nationalists – not least the Ba'ath –