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Saddam Hussein
Saddam in 1979, after taking office
5th president of Iraq
In office 16 July 1979 – 9 April 2003
Prime Minister	Himself (1979–1991) Sa'dun Hammadi (1991) Mohammed Hamza Zubeidi (1991–1993) Ahmad Husayn Khudayir as-Samarrai (1993–1994) Himself (1994–2003)
Vice President	Taha Muhie-eldin Marouf Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri Taha Yassin Ramadan
Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council

Saddam Hussein Abdul Majid al-Tikriti, known as Saddam Hussein (28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. Prior to his presidency, he served as Iraq's vice president from 1968 to 1979 and held the position of prime minister twice, from 1979 to 1991 and again from 1994 to 2003.

A Sunni Muslim from Tikrit, Saddam did his schooling from Baghdad and studied from the Cairo University. He joined the Ba'ath Party in 1957 and later its Baghdad based Iraqi Regional Branch. He played a key role in the 1968 revolution, that brought the Ba'ath Party to power. Saddam was appointed as vice president under the presidency of Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. As vice president, he presided over the First and Second Iraqi-Kurdish wars. Saddam introduced free healthcare and education, oversaw nationalization of oil and development of infrastructure. He turned Iraq into one of the most developed countries. Following resignation of al-Bakr in July 1979, Saddam assumed the presidency and chairmanship of the Revolutionary Command Council.

He initiated the Iran–Iraq War, which lasted from 1980 to 1988, ending in a stalemate with a ceasefire. During last stages of the war, he suppressed Kurdish uprisings through the Anfal Campaign. Saddam accused Kuwait of stealing Iraq's oil reserves and invaded the country in 1990, annexing it as Iraq's 19th governorate, which led to the Gulf War. The war ended in 1991 in a victory for the coalition forces led by the United States. Following this, relations between Iraq and the United States deteriorated, leading the U.S. to adopt a policy supporting Saddam's overthrow. Saddam suppressed uprisings in 1991, later attempted to negotiate with Kurdish groups, and intervened in the Kurdish Civil War. Iraq's economy declined due to international sanctions imposed but began improving in 2000 as the country worked to rebuild relations with Arab and Muslim nations.

In 2003, a United States-led coalition invaded Iraq, accusing Saddam of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having links to al-Qaeda, during the September 11 attacks. Within weeks, the coalition forces occupied Baghdad, where Saddam's government was overthrown. He was captured, interrogated, and subsequently handed over to the Tribunal Court. There, he was tried and sentenced to death for the 1982 Dujail massacre. Saddam was executed on December 30, 2006, the eve of Eid al-Adha—a move widely condemned internationally due to its timing on a holy day.

A highly polarizing and controversial figure, Saddam dominated political history of Iraq and was the subject of a cult of personality. Widely criticized for authoritarianism, repression, and injustices, particularly by Shias and Kurds, his regime was responsible for the deaths or disappearances of an estimated 250,000 to 290,000 people, according to Human Rights Watch. His government has been described as authoritarian, totalitarian, and at times fascist, though these labels remain debated. Conversely, many Arabs view Saddam, a leader who opposed Western imperialism, resisted foreign intervention, and supported Palestine. He was also regarded by some Iraqi Christians, Mandaeans and Jews as a protector of their communities. After his overthrow, Iraq descended into instability, and claims linking him to weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda were proven false. This has led many Iraqis to view his rule as preferable to the current situation.

Presidency: 1979–2003

Main article: Presidency of Saddam Hussein

Inauguration and purge

Saddam officially became president after resignation of al-Bakr on 16 July 1979. He was acceded to the chairmanship of the Revolutionary Command Council of Iraq. It was Iraq's then Supreme Executive Body.

Saddam convened an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders on 22 July 1979. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped, Saddam claimed to have found a fifth column within the Ba'ath Party and directed Muhyi Abdel-Hussein to read out a confession and the names of 68 alleged co-conspirators. These members were labelled "disloyal" and were removed from the room one by one and taken into custody. After the list was read, Saddam congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty. The 68 people arrested at the meeting were subsequently tried together and found guilty of treason; 22 were sentenced to execution. Other high-ranking members of the party formed the firing squad. By 1 August 1979, hundreds of high-ranking Ba'ath party members had been executed.

Iran–Iraq War: 1980–1988

Adnan Khairallah, Defense Minister with Saddam, 1982

There had also been bitter enmity between Saddam and Khomeini since the 1970s. Khomeini, having been exiled from Iran in 1964, took up residence in Iraq, at the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf. There he involved himself with Iraqi Shi'ites and developed a strong religious and political following against the Iranian Government, which Saddam tolerated. When Khomeini began to urge the Shi'ites there to overthrow Saddam and under pressure from the Shah, who had agreed to a rapprochement between Iraq and Iran in 1975, Saddam agreed to expel Khomeini in 1978 to France. Here, Khomeini gained media connections and collaborated with a much larger Iranian community, to his advantage. After Khomeini gained power, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for ten months over the sovereignty of the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which divides the two countries. During this period, Saddam publicly maintained that it was in Iraq's interest not to engage with Iran, and that it was in the interests of both nations to maintain peaceful relations.

Carlos Cardoen meeting Saddam

Iraq invaded Iran on 22 September 1980, first launching airstrikes on numerous targets in Iran, including the Mehrabad Airport of Tehran, before occupying the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan, which also has a sizable Arab minority. The invasion was initially successful, as Iraq captured more than 25,900 km² of Iranian territory by 5 December 1980. With the support of other Arab states, the United States, and Europe, and heavily financed by the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Saddam had become "the defender of the Arab world" against a revolutionary, fundamentalist and Shia Islamist Iran. The only exception was the Soviet Union, which initially refused to supply Iraq on the basis of neutrality in the conflict, although in his memoirs, Mikhail Gorbachev claimed that Leonid Brezhnev refused to aid Saddam over infuriation of Saddam's treatment of Iraqi communists. Consequently, many viewed Iraq as "an agent of the civilized world." The blatant disregard of international law and violations of international borders were ignored. Instead Iraq received economic and military support from its allies, who overlooked Saddam's use of chemical warfare against the Kurds and the Iranians, in addition to Iraq's efforts to develop nuclear weapons.

In the first days of the war, there was heavy ground fighting around strategic ports as Iraq launched an attack on Khuzestan. After making some initial gains, Iraq's troops began to suffer losses from human wave attacks by Iran. By 1982, Iraq was on the defensive and looking for ways to end the war. Middle East special envoy Donald Rumsfeld met Saddam on 19–20 December 1983.

Anfal Campaign

The campaign takes its name from Qur'anic chapter 8 (al-ʾanfāl), which was used as a code name by the former Iraqi Ba'athist administration for a series of attacks against the peshmerga rebels and the mostly Kurdish civilian population of rural Northern Iraq, conducted between 1986 and 1989 culminating in 1988. This campaign also targeted Shabaks and Yazidis, Assyrians, Turkoman people and Mandeans and many villages belonging to these ethnic groups were also destroyed. Human Rights Watch estimates that between 50,000 and 100,000 people were killed. Some Kurdish sources put the number higher, estimating that 182,000 Kurds were killed.

Gulf War

Kuwait was pumping large amounts of oil, and thus keeping prices low, when Iraq needed to sell high-priced oil from its wells to pay off its huge debt.

Post-war Iraq

Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions, together with the brutality of the conflict that this had engendered, laid the groundwork for postwar rebellions. In the aftermath of the fighting, social and ethnic unrest among Shi'ite Muslims, Kurds, and dissident military units threatened the stability of Saddam's government. Uprisings erupted in the Kurdish north and Shi'a southern and central parts of Iraq, but were ruthlessly repressed. Uprisings in 1991 led to the death of 100,000–180,000 people, mostly civilians.

The United States, which had urged Iraqis to rise up against Saddam, did nothing to assist the rebellions. The Iranians, despite the widespread Shi'ite rebellions, had no interest in provoking another war, while Turkey opposed any prospect of Kurdish independence, and the Saudis and other conservative Arab states feared an Iran-style Shi'ite revolution. Saddam, having survived the immediate crisis in the wake of defeat, was left firmly in control of Iraq, although the country never recovered either economically or militarily from the Gulf War.

The United Nations sanctions placed upon Iraq when it invaded Kuwait were not lifted, blocking Iraqi oil exports. During the late 1990s, the UN considered relaxing the sanctions imposed because of the hardships suffered by ordinary Iraqis. Studies dispute the number of people who died in south and central Iraq during the years of the sanctions. On 9 December 1996, Saddam's government accepted the Oil-for-Food Programme that the UN had first offered in 1992.

Later years: 2000–2003

Saddam continued involvement in politics abroad. Video tapes retrieved after show his intelligence chiefs meeting with Arab journalists, including a meeting with the former managing director of Al-Jazeera, Mohammed Jassem al-Ali, in 2000. In the video Saddam's son Uday advised al-Ali about hires in Al-Jazeera: "During your last visit here along with your colleagues we talked about a number of issues, and it does appear that you indeed were listening to what I was saying since changes took place and new faces came on board such as that lad, Mansour." He was later sacked by Al-Jazeera.

In 2002, Austrian prosecutors investigated Saddam government's transactions with Fritz Edlinger that possibly violated Austrian money laundering and embargo regulations. Fritz Edlinger, president of the General Secretary of the Society for Austro-Arab relations (GÖAB) and a former member of Socialist International's Middle East Committee, was an outspoken supporter of Saddam. In 2005, an Austrian journalist revealed that Fritz Edlinger's GÖAB had received $100,000 from an Iraqi front company as well as donations from Austrian companies soliciting business in Iraq.

In 2002, a resolution sponsored by the European Union was adopted by the Commission for Human Rights, which stated that there had been no improvement in the human rights crisis in Iraq. The statement condemned Saddam's government for its "systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law." The resolution demanded that Iraq immediately put an end to its "summary and arbitrary executions ... the use of rape as a political tool and all enforced and involuntary disappearances."

Domestic Policies

Iraqi society fissures along lines of language, religion and ethnicity. The Ba'ath Party, secular by nature, adopted Pan-Arab ideologies which in turn were problematic for significant parts of the population. To alleviate the threat of revolution, Saddam afforded certain benefits to the potentially hostile population. Membership in the Ba'ath Party remained open to all Iraqi citizens regardless of background. However, repressive measures were taken against its opponents.

Paramilitary and police organizations

Following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iraq faced the prospect of régime change from two Shi'ite factions (Dawa and SCIRI) which aspired to model Iraq on its neighbour Iran as a Shia theocracy. A separate threat to Iraq came from parts of the ethnic Kurdish population of northern Iraq which opposed being part of an Iraqi state and favored independence (an ongoing ideology which had preceded Ba'ath Party rule).

The major instruments for accomplishing this control were the paramilitary and police organizations. Beginning in 1974, Taha Yassin Ramadan (himself a Kurdish Ba'athist), a close associate of Saddam, commanded the People's Army, which had responsibility for internal security. As the Ba'ath Party's paramilitary, the People's Army acted as a counterweight against any coup attempts by the regular armed forces. In addition to the People's Army, the Department of General Intelligence was the most notorious arm of the state-security system, feared for its use of torture and assassination. Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Saddam's younger half-brother, commanded Mukhabarat.

Foreign observers believed that from 1982 this department operated both at home and abroad in its mission to seek out and eliminate Saddam's perceived opponents. Saddam was notable for using terror against his own people. The Economist described Saddam as "one of the last of the 20th century's great dictators, but not the least in terms of egotism, or cruelty, or morbid will to power." Saddam's regime brought about the deaths of at least 250,000 Iraqis and committed war crimes in Iran, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued regular reports of widespread imprisonment and torture.

Religion and ethnicity

Saddam with Ba'ath Party founder Michel Aflaq at Baghdad, 1988

With an Arab Muslim majority, Iraq consist of a multi-religious, multi-ethnic and multi-sectarian population. Saddam, contrary to popular belief, was not inherently sectarian. While he did place his close relatives in key security and military positions, he also promoted individuals from other communities and minorities to the highest levels of power in Iraq. His primary criterion for these appointments was unwavering loyalty to him and his regime. Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf, a Shia Muslim, was Saddam's minister of foreign affairs from 1991 to 2001 and later information minister, until 2003. Taha Yassin Ramadan, Saddam's deputy was from the Shabak community—a small, quasi-Shiite sect. In 1991, Saddam appointed Saadun Hammadi as the prime minister, a Shi'ite. He was later removed from his post due to reformist views, but was returned to his post as Speaker. 80% of the Iraqi Armed Forces were Shia Muslim.

Before 2003, more than 1.2 million Christians lived in Iraq. Tariq Aziz, an ethnic Iraqi Assyrian and member of the Chaldean Catholic minority, was selected by Saddam to serve as Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister from 1979 to 2003 and Foreign Minister from 1983 to 1991. A close advisor to him, Aziz was also appointed as a member of the Revolutionary Command Council and the Regional Command of the Iraqi Branch of the Ba'ath Party. Michel Aflaq, the founder of Ba'athism, was also a Christian. Cardinal Fernando Filoni, who was Vatican's ambassador to Iraq, stated that under his regime, Christians were free to practice their faith in the majority-Muslim country. In 2003, Pope John Paul II visited Saddam in March 2003 and addressed the message for peace.

Armenians in Iraq obeyed the law of the government. As a result of Saddam's modernization efforts, the Armenian community flourished and prospered. Before 2003, there were 100,000 Armenians in Iraq. Saddam's nanny was an Iraqi–Armenian, along with one of his body guards, his jeweler, tailor, and housestaff. During the war with Iran, when the Kurds fled to avoid military service, Armenians went to fight for Iraq. Many Armenians also fought for Saddam during the Gulf War, where three of them were killed.

Although his position on Kurdish politics has been debated. Saddam has allowed autonomy for Kurds to an extent, with Kurds being allowed to speak Kurdish in schools, on television, and in newspapers, with textbooks being translated for the Kurdish regions. Kurds in Iraq were also able to elect a Kurdish representative to Baghdad with the KDP being legitimized as a legal progressive party in Iraq. Saddam had already signed a autonomy agreement in 1970, but Mustafa Barzani eventually disagreed with the deal, which incited the Second Iraqi–Kurdish War. In Iraq, especially compared to other middle-eastern countries such as Iran, Turkey, and Syria, Iraqi Kurds were treated well under the regime of Saddam when compared to their conditions in those countries, with the Kurdish language being tolerated under Saddam in education, and media, and spoken as a official language. Saddam had multiple Kurdish ministers and generals, with the highest ranking one being Taha Yassin Ramadan —one of Iraq's three Vice Presidents. He was also made Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command of the Iraqi Branch of the Ba'ath Party and commander of the People's Army. Another Kurd was Taha Muhie-eldin Marouf, one of the vice presidents and served as ambassador to Italy, Malta, and Albania. Saddam himself personally enjoyed Kurdish culture, often wearing traditional Kurdish clothing in state visits to northern Iraq.

During his rule, Iraq retained a substantial Jewish community, numbering around 15,000 people. Saddam took measures to protect Jews in Iraq, appointed a Jewish representative in the government and helped in restoration of Meir Taweig Synagogue and construction a new cemetery for Jews in Baghdad. A Jewish chemist, from Basra, Ibrahim Hesqel was sent by Saddam on a trade mission to China in 1988. Shaul Sassoon, a Jewish engineer, was the Technical Head and Expert of state-owned enterprises under the Ministry of Industry. In 1998, on the day of Jewish festival of Sukkot, a Palestinian entered the Baghdad Jewish Heaquarters and shot four people to death, including two Jews. The attacker was arrested and executed in 1999. A cabinet meeting chaired by Saddam condemned the attack. He also said that: "Anyone who hurt the Jews in Baghdad would pay a heavy price". He reportedly helped an estimated 150 remaining Jews, allowing many to leave the country in early years.

Saddam was also recognized for safeguarding the Mandaean minority in Iraq. Mandaeans were given state protection under his government. As a sign of respect, the Mandaean Book of John's first copy translation into Arabic was given to Saddam. After this he vowed to construct temples for the Mandaeans, with quoting, "Iraqis have religious freedom, whether they are Muslims, Christians or Sabaeans". The Sabian–Mandaean Mandi in Baghdad was built on land donated by the Ministry of Finance. Mandaeans were some of the best goldsmiths and jewelers in Iraq, with Saddam's personal jeweler being of Mandaean background. However, after his downfall, Mandaeans faced severe persecution, and constant kidnappings. They often expressed that they were better under Saddam's rule, and praise him for the protection they received.

Foreign policies

In foreign affairs, Saddam sought to have Iraq play a leading role in the Middle East. Because Saddam rarely left Iraq, Tariq Aziz, one of his aides, traveled abroad extensively and represented Iraq at many diplomatic meetings.

Saddam enjoyed a close relationship with Russian intelligence agent Yevgeny Primakov that dated back to the 1960s; Primakov may have helped Saddam to stay in power in 1991. Saddam visited only two Western countries. The first visit took place in December 1974, when the Caudillo of Spain, Francisco Franco, invited him to Madrid and he visited Granada, Córdoba and Toledo. In September 1975 he met with Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in Paris, France.

Personal life

Saddam developed a reputation for liking expensive goods, such as his diamond-coated Rolex wristwatch, and sent copies of them to his friends around the world. To his ally Kenneth Kaunda Saddam once sent a Boeing 747 full of presents—rugs, televisions, ornaments.

See ==

He initiated the Iran–Iraq War, which lasted from 198o to 1988, until a ceasefire and was ended in stalemate. During the war, he retaliated the Kurdish uprisings in Anfal Campaign at the end of the war. Saddam accused Kuwait of stealing Iraq's oil reserves and invaded it in 1990, annexing as Iraq's 19th governorate, starting the Gulf War. The war ended in coalition forces victory. After that relations between Iraq and U.S deteriorated, who later adopted policy to support overthrow of Saddam in 1998. Saddam suppressed 1991 uprisings. He later attempt to negotiate with Kurds and intervened in Kurdish Civl War. Iraq suffered economic decline as a result of sanctions as a result of invasion of kuwait. the economy began improving in 2000 and iraq was rebuilding relations with arab and muslim countries.

in 2003, united states-led coaltion invaded iraq, accusing saddam of possessing weapons of mass destructions and having links with al-qaeda, who were responsible for september 11 attacks. within weeks of invasion, the coation forces occupied much of iraq and captured baghad, where saddam had overthrown. he was captured and interrogated, after which he was handed over to the iraqi tribual court, where he was tried and sentenced to death of 1982 dujail massacre. he was executed by hanging on 30 december 2006, the eve of eid al adha, a move condemned internationally, as it was on such as holy day.