 Complete the following phrase:  Army officers with ties to the Baath Party overthrew Qasim in the Ramadan Revolution coup of February 1963. Baathist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif became president. Arif dismissed and arrested the Baathist leaders later that year in the November 1963 Iraqi coup détat. Being exiled in Egypt at the time, Saddam played no role in the 1963 coup or the brutal anti-communist purge that followed; although he returned to Iraq after the coup, Saddam remained on the fringes of the newly installed Bathi administration and had to content himself with the minor position of a member of the Partys central bureau for peasants, in the words of Efraim Karsh and Inari Rautsi. Unlike during the Qasim years, Saddam remained in Iraq following Arifs anti-Baathist purge in November 1963, and became involved in planning to assassinate Arif. In marked contrast to Qasim, Saddam knew that he faced no death penalty from Arifs government and knowingly accepted the risk of being arrested rather than fleeing to Syria again. Saddam was arrested in October 1964 and served approximately two years in prison before escaping in 1966. In 1966, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr appointed him Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command. Saddam, who would prove to be a skilled organizer, revitalized the party. He was elected to the Regional Command, as the story goes, with help from Michel Aflaqthe founder of Baathist thought. In September 1966, Saddam initiated an extraordinary challenge to Syrian domination of the Baath Party in response to the 