Saddam Hussein was Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was born on the 28th of April 1937 in Tikrit, Iraq. Before his birth, his father and older brother both died of cancer. This led Hussein’s mother to say that she was carrying “Satan”, and she even tried to have an abortion and commit suicide. In fact, ‘Saddam’ is a title which means “one who confronts”. Saddam’s mother didn’t want anything to do with him, so the future-leader was raised by his uncle, Khairallah Talfah, a nazi sympahist. It was he who made the statement “Three that God should not have created: Persians, Jews and flies”, which his nephew also lived by. Saddam studied law for three years before dropping out of university at the age of 20 to join the Ba’ath Party in 1957.
Early career
At this time, Iraq was a Kingdom ruled by Faisal II. However, the 14 July Revolution of 1958, led by Generals Abd al-Karim Qasim and Abdul Salam Arif, overthrew the Hashemite Monarchy, which had been established my Faisal I in 1921 under the protection of the British. After the revolution, several members of the monarchy and the primer minister were killed, and the Republic of Iraq was created. Qasim took power as prime minister, and created his own government. Of the 16 members of his cabinet, 12 of them were members of the Ba’ath Party. However, the party turned against the General when he refused to join Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser in a United Arab Republic and for creating an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, which was opposed to any notion of pan-Arabism (unlike the Ba’ath Party).
After this, the Ba’ath Party leadership started planning the assassination of Qasim, and Saddam was one of the leading members of the operation. The assassins planned to ambush Qasim in October 1959, while he was driven in a car. Qasim was hit in the arm and shoulder but survived. The attack was a failure and Saddam had to escape from the police, for which he went to Syria, the spiritual home of Ba’athist ideology. Once there, he was given full membership in the party and secured a seat in the Iraqi Ba’ath leadership. He later moved to Egypt, where he lived until 1963, unsuccessfully pursuing a law degree.
Army officers with ties to the Ba’ath Party overthrew Qasim in the Ramadam Revolution coup of February 1963. Ba’athist leaders were appointed to the cabinet and Abdul Salam Arif, who was not Ba’athist, became president and Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was named prime minister. However, due to internal party divisions, Arif dismissed and arrested the Ba’athist sympathisers of the government, includint al-Bakr, during the November 1963 coup, and a pro-Nasserist government was established.
Saddam played no part in the Ramadam Revolution, but returned to Iraq after it had taken place and took up a small role in the new Ba’athist administration. After the November coup he stayed in the country and became involved in planning to assassinate Arif. Saddam was arrested in October 1964 and spent two years in prison before escaping. in 1966, Hassan al-Bakr appointed Saddam Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command, but quickly moved up the Ba’athist ranks and revitalised the party. His challenge to Syrian domination of the Ba’ath Party resulted into the party’s split into two separate factions.
Rise to power
In 1968, the 17 July Revolution took place, led by the Ba’athist leader General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. Al-Bakr took control of the country, establishing himself as both President and Prime Minister of Iraq, while Saddam Hussein was named Vice-President. However, it was actually Saddam who was the main force of the government. In 1976, he rose to the position of General in the Iraqi armed forces, but he had already been the moving force behind the party force some years and was turning into the main figure behind most of the decisionmaking. Saddam started being critical of the party and the government, and he soon accumulated a powerful circle of inside support.
In 1979, al-Bakr started making treaties with Syria, also under Ba’athist leadership, that would lead to unification between the two countries. This move would have made Syrian President Hafez al-Assad the leader of both countries and driven Saddam to obscurity. However, he acted swiftly and forced al-Bakr to resign on 16 July 1979, the day he formally took over the presidency.
1979 Ba’ath Party Purge
Only six days later, Saddam Hussein convened an assembly of Ba’ath party leaders with the goal to purge the party of internal opposition. Saddam claimed to have discovered a fifth column (a group of people who undermine a larger group from within) which aimed to take him down from power. Muhyi Abdel-Hussein, the alleged leader of the plot, was brought onstage and told to read a list of names of other conspiracy supporters in exchange for his life. In total, 68 people were arrested during the meeting and many of them were subsequently executed, including Abdel-Hussein himself. By August, hundreds of high-ranking party members had been eliminated. This way, Saddam had eliminated all opposition and achieved unlimited powers.
Political program and policies
Although he was President from 1979 to 2003, most of his policy-making began while he was Vice-President to al-Bakr from 1968 to 1979. During this time he built a reputation as a progressive and effective politician: he pursued massive repression to solve Iraq’s instability due to its social, ethnic and religious divisions, but also improved living standards.
Funded mainly with the revenue from oil (specially after prices rose during the 1973 oil crisis), Iraq provided unprecedented social services amongst countries of the Middle East. Through the “National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy” and the campaign for “Compulsory Free Education in Iraq”, universal free schooling up to the highest education levels was established and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis learned to read in the following years. The government also gave economic aid to families of soldiers, delivered free universal health care (creating one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East) and offered subsidies to farmers, which even earned Saddam an UNESCO award.
Saddam also diversified the Iraqi economy with a national infrastructure campaign which built new roads, promoted mining and developed other industries; electricity was also provided to almost every city and house. Saddam also supervised the modernisation of the countryside, mechanizing agriculture and distributing land to peasant farmers. Development went forward so fast that up to 2 million people from other Arab countries and regions like Yugoslavia moved to Iraq to meet the growing demand for labour.
However, Saddam saw a potential threat in the Kurdish and Shia population. For this reason, he used the paramilitary and police organisations to repress and achieve a total control of the opposition. The paramilitary force People’s Army was responsible for internal security, and acted with brutality against any coup attempt by the regular armed forces. The Department of General Intelligence was also feared for its use of torture and assassination of Saddam’s perceived opponents. Saddam Hussein was known for using terror against his own people, and his regime brought about the deaths of some 250,00 Iraqis, according to Human Rights Watch. He committed war crimes in Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and Amnesty International issued regular reports of widespread imprisonment and torture.
Personality cult
Saddam Hussein had thousands of portraits, posters and statues erected in his honour all over Iraq. His image was shown on buildings, schools, airports, shops and the national currency. He dressed in varied clothes, like the costumes of the Bedouin, Kurdish clothing, Muslim headdress and robe, or Western-style suits. Saddam also conducted two show elections. In the 1995 vote he received 99.96% of support with a turnout of 99.47%, while in the 2002 vote he received 100% of support with a turnout of 100%.
The Iran-Iraq War
In early 1979, Iranian King Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a US-backed Shah, was overthrown during the Islamic Revolution. He was replaced by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was named Supreme Leader of the newly-formed Islamic Republic of Iran. Saddam disliked Khomeini on a personal level, but he was also aware of the threat the Irani leader could be for his own power: both Iran and Iraq were Shia-Muslim majority countries, but while Khomeini was also Shia, Saddam was Sunni. In July 1979, the Iraqi President gave a speech praising the Iranian Revolution and called for an Iraqi-Iranian friendship based on non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. However, Khomeini rejected Saddam’s message and called for an Islamic revolution in Iraq.
Saddam Hussein’s main interest in attacking Iran may have been as a reaction to the influence Khomeini could’ve had instigating an uprising in Iraq, but it wasn’t the only reason for conflict. Saddam had not been happy with the result of the 1975 Algiers Agreement, which had tried to solve a border dispute regarding the Shatt al-Arab waterway with Iran, and nullified this compromise. He was also interested in taking control of the Khuzestan Province in the south-west of Iran, both because it was rich in oil and because it had a considerable Arab population. With this war, Iraq also aimed at becoming the regional superpower by replacing Egypt as the “leader of the Arab world” and to achieve hegemony over the Persian Gulf.
Tensions slowly escalated throug diplomatic moves. Both sides removed the other’s ambassadors, and Iraq went as far as expropiating the properties of 70,000 civilians believed to be Iranians and expelles them from Iraqi territory. Iraq began planning offensives, and were confident they would succeed. The country’s morale was high, and they were militarily much better prepared than their enemy. Throughout the 1970s, Saddam had armed the country with the latest military hardware from the Soviet Union, and now possessed 200,000 soldiers, 2,000 tanks and 450 aircraft. Meanwhile, Khomeini found himself in a completely different situation. The purge of thousands of army officers, soldiers and aviators, who had been exiled, imprisoned or executed, and the shortages of spare parts for Iran’s US-made and UK-made equipment had crippled Iran’s once-mighty military. In response, paramilitary forces gained power, like the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which was to protect the new regime and assist the decaying army. The ‘Army of 20 Million’, commonly known as the Basij, was also created, and was made up of poorly armed members who’s age ranged from 12 to 70, and were notorious for launching human wave attacks against the Iraqis.
On 22 September 1980, Iraq launched a full-scale air and ground invasion of the Iranian province of Khuzestan, on the Persian Gulf, which allowed Saddam to gain some Persian territory during the first weeks of the conflict. However, the Arab population of the region didn’t revolt against Khomeini (as Saddam had expected), and hundreds of thousands of soldiers and volunteers went to help the Iranian forces. The Iraqi forces didn’t get the lightning war they wanted, and for the next several months both sides were on a defensive footing. By mid-1982, Iran had regained all lost territory.
A ceasefire was proposed by Iraq, in which Saddam wanted to sue for peace and withdraw from Iranian territory. But Khomeini responded by saying the war would not end until a new Islamic government was installed in Iraq and reparations were paid. The conflict had by now turned into a trench warfare along the border, and went on for years. Many offensives were launched during this time, but they usually ended up in stalemates. Iran sent poorly-armed human waves, which included children, to attack Iraqi forces. In response, Iraq used strategic terror bombing and chemical weapons to bring the war to the Iranian civilian population.
By 1988, the war was still in a deadlock. However, in the first few months Iraq launched several successful attacks, which took a major toll on Iran’s economy and morale. On 20 July 1988, Khomeini was unwillingly forced to accept the UN-brokered ceasefire. The news was celebrated in Baghdad, but was greeted with a somber mood in Tehran. Soon after, Iraq also accepted the ceasefire.
Al-Anfal Campaign
The al-Anfal campaign was a genocidal campaign during the last years of the Iran-Iraq War (between 1986 and 1989) against Kurdish people and other minorities in the north of Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s government. The Kurdish troops had seen the Iran-Iraq War as an opportunity to break away from Iraq and create their own state, but Saddam fought back. Some 4,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed (around 90% of the total number of villages), including hundreds of schools, hospitals and mosques, while somewhere between 50,000 and 182,000 people were killed. On March 16 1988, the town of Halabja was attacked with chemical weapons, killing 5,000 people and disfiguring thousands more. Iraq blamed Iran for the attack, but it was actually perpetrated by Saddam’s government, making him the first leader to use chemical weapons on his own people.
External support and internal opposition
During the war, Iraq was seen as a counterbalance to post-revolutionary Iran. The United States, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France and most Arab countries provided support for Iraq, while Iran was largely isolated. The USSR, France and China together accounted for over 90% of the value of Iraq’s arms imports during the war, while its main financial backers were the oil-rich Persian Gulf states, with some $47 billion coming from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE. Iran’s largest foreign arms supplier was China, while Libya and Syria broke Arab solidarity and supported Iran with arms and diplomacy. The United States initially lacked meaningful relations with either country (because of Iran’s Islamic revolution and hostage crisis, and Iraq’s alliance with the USSR and hostility towards Israel). However, it soon began to restore diplomatic relations with Iraq and provided it with limited support. The US also supplied weapons to Iran as part of the illegal Iran-Contra affair.
Both countries also suffered internal opposition. In Iraq, the militias of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) both sided with Iran in an aim to achieve independence and were responsible for guerrilla warfare against Saddam’s forces in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Shia political parties of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) and the Islamic Dawa Party also gave their support to Iran with the goal of carrying out an Islamic Revolution led by Shias. Meanwhile, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI), an Islamic and Socialist organization opposed to the Islamic Revolution sided with Iraq.
Aftermath
Iraqi casualties are estimated at somewhere between 105,000 or 200,000 killed, while it is believed that between 200,000 and 262,000 Iranians were killed, but some analysts raise the number of combined casualties up to 1 million. The war also wounded several hundreds of thousands of people and tens of thousands of prisoners of war. On the Iranian side, some 95,000 Iranian child soldiers were made casualties during the Iran–Iraq War, while Iraqi use of chemical warfare agents caused some 50,000 injuries. Thousands of civilians on both sides died in air raids and ballistic missile attacks. Cities on both sides had also been considerably damaged.
Both sides claimed victory after the conflict, even though the result of the war was status quo ante bellum, meaning that the borders were left unchanged and neither side achieved their desired goal. The southern provinces of both countries, which were rich in oil, were almost completely destroyed. However, Iraq was left with a large military and was a regional power, albeit with severe debt with many other countries.
Invasion of Kuwait and Gulf War
One of the several countries that Iraq was indebted to because of the Iran-Iraq War was Kuwait. Saddam asked for the Kuwaiti government to waive off the $30 billion debt, but the small Monarchy refused. Saddam also wanted oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices by exporting less so Iraq could too sell high-priced oil and pay off its debt. However, Kuwait refused and kept pumping out large amounts of oil, which kept prices low. Saddam had also argued in various occasions that Kuwait was historically an integral part of Iraq. The oil reserves of the small country, which is roughly equal to that of Iraq, were also of great interest to Saddam. Saddam believed the USA wouldn’t respond to his invasion of Kuwait, as his country had been benefiting from a renewed relationship with America.
On August 2, 1990, Saddam sent over 100,000 troops to invade Kuwait, stating that he was in fact assisting Kuwaiti revolutionaries that wanted to overthrow the monarchy. The puppet-state Republic of Kuwait was established on the 4th of August but it lacked legitimacy and support. Only a few weeks later, on the 28th, Kuwait was established as a part of Iraq and its 19th governorate. Saddam’s officers looted the occupied country, moving the stolen goods to Baghdad.
The US responded cautiously for the first several days. However, the country’s foreign policymakers, experts and firms heavily invested in the region were extremely concerned with stability in the region. The invasion triggered fears that the world’s oil prices would rise, which could damage the world’s economy. Britain also profited heavily from billions of dollars of Kuwaiti investments and bank deposits.
The invasion was largely condemned. The United Nations Security Council gave Iraq a deadline to leave Kuwait and approved the use of force if Saddam did not comply. During the negotiation period, Saddam promised to withdraw his forces from Kuwait if Israel abandoned the occupied territories of the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the Gaza Strip, a proposal which divided the Arab world. The allies ended up rejecting the proposal after rejecting any linkage between the Kuwait crisis and Palestinian issues.
Saddam Hussein ignored the Security Council deadline, prompting the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria and many others to form a coalition against Iraq. Between January 17 and February 28 of 1991, the allies launched missile and aerial attacks on Iraq, and a ground force entered Kuwaiti territory and managed to expel Iraqi forces. After several weeks of war, 175,000 Iraqis made prisoners and over 85,000 casualties, a ceasefire was agreed. Kuwait restored its previous government and Saddam was allowed to stay as leader of Iraq as long as he agreed to scrap all biological warfare. Saddam Hussein publicly claimed victory at the end of the war.
Post-Gulf War period
After the war, carried out a new self-propaganda campaign. With the aim to portray himself as a devout Muslim, he built the Umm al-Qura Mosque in Baghdad, he added the phrase “Allahu Akbar” in his own writing to the national flag and produced a Quran written in his own blood. Saddam cited his survival as “proof that Iraq had in fact won the war against the U.S. This message earned Saddam a great deal of popularity in many sectors of the Arab world.
The UN imposed sanctions on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. Saddam was blocked from exporting oil and importing products and had to prove he was no longer developing weapons of mass destruction. Relations between the United States and Iraq remained tense following the Gulf War. American officials continued to accuse Saddam of violating the terms of the Gulf War’s cease fire and launched several missile attacks on Iraq during this time. The UN considered relaxing sanctions because they were harshly affecting Iraqi civilians (one Unicef report said that 100,000 children had died in a single year because of food and medical aid shortage).
1991 Uprisings in Iraq
Taking advantage of the recently concluded Gulf War, which had left the Iraqi government looking vulnerable and weak, both Shia rebels in the south of the country and the Kurd nationalists in the north revolted against Saddam Hussein. The US urged Iraqis to rise against Saddam but didn’t assist the rebels, while other countries in the Middle East also kept a distance from the conflict: Iran didn’t want another war with Iraq, Turkey was afraid of Kurds in its own country wanting independence and Saudi Arabia feared a Shia revolution nearby.
During the first weeks, many Iraqi cities and provinces fell to rebel control. However, lack of American support and internal divisions (participants of the uprising were a diverse mix of ethnic, religious and political affiliations) held back the revolution and allowed Saddam to suppress the rebels with brutality. Between 25,000 and 180,000 people were killed, most of them civilians, while almost 2 million were displaced and had to leave the country. The result was a victory for Saddam Hussein in the south, while the Kurds established the Kurdish Autonomous Republic in the north – what is now the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan. The US also established two no-fly zones over the north and south of the country.
2003 Invasion of Iraq
After the September 11 attacks in New York, Vladimir Putin started telling George Bush that Iraq was preparing terrorist attacks against the US. Bush responded by saying he might take action to topple the Iraqi government, blaming Iraq for its development of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), its support of terrorists and human rights abuses.
Pretext of the invasion
The UN passed a Security Council Resolution which demanded that Iraq allowed inspection to look for WMD. Hans Blix led the investigation after Saddam accepted it with “proactive” but not “immediate” cooperation. In Blix’s report on the 14 February 2003, he claimed no WMD had been found, only a small number of empty chemical munitions. In 2004, he stated that there were 700 inspections and no WMD had been found. The Iraq Survey Group, a force made up of multiple nations, replaced Blix’s UN inspection team, and in its final report stated that only small stockpiles of chemical WMD had been found, which didn’t pose any significant threat. It also said Iraq had destroyed all major stockpiles of WMD and ceased its production in 1991, when sanctions had been imposed. On 24 February 2003, Saddam Hussein denied possessing any WMD on a CBS News interview. He also wished to have a debate with George Bush, which was declined. Saddam later told an FBI interviewer that in the past he had left unclear whether he had WMD or not to appear strong against Iran.
The CIA, the Defence Intelligence Agency and the Defence Department’s Inspector General’s Office discredited the existence of ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. The 9/11 Commission and the Defence Department also reported that there had never been an operational relationship between both groups.
As the ‘WMD’ and ‘al-Qaeda links’ justifications were found to be false and illegitimate, George Bush focused on Saddam’s human rights violations, which many critics believe was just an excuse to cover the first to discredited reasons. It is also believed that Bush had interest in Iraq’s oil fields. In 2008, he issued a statement in which he stated he would ignore any law that prohibited using federal funds to “exercise US control of the oil resources of Iraq”. Paul O’Neill, Bush’s Treasury Secretary said the US President had discussed invading Iraq before 9/11 and had been handed a “Plan for post-Saddam Iraq” by Bush which envisioned dividing up Iraq’s oil wealth. A Pentagon document dated 5 March 2001 was titled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts” and included a map of potential areas for exploitation.
Saddam’s imprisonment, trial and death
The United States-led invasion of Iraq Began on 20 March 2003, and by mid-April Baghdad had fallen from Saddam Hussein’s power. However, Saddam wasn’t found until 13 December 2003, hiding in a hole in the ground near his hometown of Tikrit. He was subsequently imprisoned and nicknamed ‘Vic’, meaning ‘Very Important Criminal’, but still believed to be the just leader of Iraq. During his time in prison he kept a journal, wrote poetry and kept a small garden near his cell.
His trial began on 30 June 2004, and on 5 November 2006 Saddam was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging, despite his wish to be shot. He was hanged on 30 December 2006, the first day of Eid ul-Adha, a holy day for Islam, in a decision that was highly criticised. Video footage of the execution was leaked, and his captors can be heard insulting Saddam. It was also later claimed that his body was stabbed six times.
Saddam Hussein was buried in Tikrit. His tomb was reported to have been destroyed in March 2015, but it is believed a Sunni tribal group had previously removed his body and placed it in a secret location, for fear that such a thing could happen.
Lyle Hausman 