80 Facts About Saddam

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was an Iraqi politician who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003.

Saddam formally took power in 1979, although he had already been the de facto head of Iraq for several years.

Saddam suppressed several movements, particularly Shi'a and Kurdish movements which sought to overthrow the government or gain independence, respectively, and maintained power during the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War.

Saddam ran a repressive authoritarian government, which several analysts have described as totalitarian, although the applicability of that label has been contested.

On 5 November 2006, Saddam was convicted by an Iraqi court of crimes against humanity related to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'a and sentenced to death by hanging.

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When her son Saddam was born on 28 April 1937 in Awja, a small village near Tikrit, Subha "would have nothing to do with him, " and Saddam was taken in by an uncle.

Saddam's mother remarried, and Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage.

At about age 10, Saddam fled the family and returned to live in Baghdad with his uncle Khairallah Talfah, who became a fatherly figure to Saddam.

Talfah, the father of Saddam's future wife, was a devout Sunni Muslim and a veteran of the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War between Iraqi nationalists and the United Kingdom, which remained a major colonial power in the region.

In 1958, a year after Saddam had joined the Ba'ath party, army officers led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew Faisal II of Iraq in the 14 July Revolution.

Saddam moved from Syria to Egypt itself in February 1960, and he continued to live there until 1963, graduating from high school in 1961 and unsuccessfully pursuing a law degree.

Unlike during the Qasim years, Saddam remained in Iraq following Arif's anti-Ba'athist purge in November 1963, and became involved in planning to assassinate Arif.

Saddam was arrested in October 1964 and served approximately two years in prison before escaping in 1966.

Saddam was elected to the Regional Command, as the story goes, with help from Michel Aflaq—the founder of Ba'athist thought.

In September 1966, Saddam initiated an extraordinary challenge to Syrian domination of the Ba'ath Party in response to the Marxist takeover of the Syrian Ba'ath earlier that year, resulting in the Party's formalized split into two separate factions.

Saddam then created a Ba'athist security service, which he alone controlled.

In July 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr that overthrew Abdul Rahman Arif, Salam Arif's brother and successor.

Al-Bakr was named president and Saddam was named his deputy, and deputy chairman of the Ba'athist Revolutionary Command Council.

Al-Bakr was the older and more prestigious of the two, but by 1969 Saddam clearly had become the moving force behind the party.

Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, nomad versus peasant.

The desire for stable rule in a country rife with factionalism led Saddam to pursue both massive repression and the improvement of living standards.

Saddam actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy along with the creation of a strong security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and insurrections apart from it.

On 1 June 1972, Saddam oversaw the seizure of international oil interests, which, at the time, dominated the country's oil sector.

Saddam established and controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq, " and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program.

Saddam implemented a national infrastructure campaign that made great progress in building roads, promoting mining, and developing other industries.

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Saddam had a good instinct for what the "Arab street" demanded, following the decline in Egyptian leadership brought about by the trauma of Israel's six-day victory in the 1967 war, the death of the pan-Arabist hero, Gamal Abdul Nasser, in 1970, and the "traitorous" drive by his successor, Anwar Sadat, to sue for peace with the Jewish state.

In 1972, Saddam signed a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union.

Saddam focused on fostering loyalty to the Ba'athists in the rural areas.

In 1976, Saddam rose to the position of general in the Iraqi armed forces, and rapidly became the strongman of the government.

Saddam soon became the architect of Iraq's foreign policy and represented the nation in all diplomatic situations.

Saddam was the de facto leader of Iraq some years before he formally came to power in 1979.

Saddam slowly began to consolidate his power over Iraq's government and the Ba'ath party.

Relationships with fellow party members were carefully cultivated, and Saddam soon accumulated a powerful circle of support within the party.

Saddam forced the ailing al-Bakr to resign on 16 July 1979, and formally assumed the presidency.

Saddam convened an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders on 22 July 1979.

Saddam was notable for using terror against his own people.

Conversely, Saddam used Iraq's oil wealth to develop an extensive patronage system for the regime's supporters.

Saddam Hussein believed that the recognition of the ancient Mesopotamian origins and heritage of Iraqi Arabs was complementary to supporting Arab nationalism.

Saddam had thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals erected in his honor all over Iraq.

Saddam erected statues around the country, which Iraqis toppled after his fall.

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.

In foreign affairs, Saddam sought to have Iraq play a leading role in the Middle East.

Saddam made a state visit to France in 1975, cementing close ties with some French business and ruling political circles.

In 1975 Saddam negotiated an accord with Iran that contained Iraqi concessions on border disputes.

Saddam led Arab opposition to the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel .

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Saddam initiated Iraq's nuclear enrichment project in the 1980s, with French assistance.

Saddam did negotiate an agreement in 1970 with separatist Kurdish leaders, giving them autonomy, but the agreement broke down.

Saddam feared that radical Islamic ideas—hostile to his secular rule—were rapidly spreading inside his country among the majority Shi'ite population.

Saddam reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political support during the war, particularly after Iraq's oil industry severely suffered at the hands of the Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf.

Saddam borrowed tens of billions of dollars from other Arab states and a few billions from elsewhere during the 1980s to fight Iran, mainly to prevent the expansion of Shi'a radicalism.

Saddam urged the Kuwaitis to waive the Iraqi debt accumulated in the war, some $30 billion, but they refused.

Saddam pushed oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices by cutting back production; Kuwait refused, then led the opposition in OPEC to the cuts that Saddam had requested.

Saddam had consistently argued that Kuwait had historically been an integral part of Iraq, and had only come into being as a result of interference from the British government; echoing a belief that Iraqi nationalists had supported for the past fifty years.

Saddam still had an experienced and well-equipped army, which he used to influence regional affairs.

Reacting to Western criticism in April 1990, Saddam threatened to destroy half of Israel with chemical weapons if it moved against Iraq.

On 2 August 1990, Saddam invaded Kuwait, initially claiming assistance to "Kuwaiti revolutionaries, " thus sparking an international crisis.

Saddam's officers looted Kuwait, stripping even the marble from its palaces to move it to Saddam's own palace.

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.

Saddam routinely cited his survival as "proof" that Iraq had in fact won the war against the US.

Saddam commissioned the production of a "Blood Qur'an, " written using 27 litres of his own blood, to thank God for saving him from various dangers and conspiracies.

On 9 December 1996, Saddam's government accepted the Oil-for-Food Programme that the UN had first offered in 1992.

US officials continued to accuse Saddam of violating the terms of the Gulf War's cease fire, by developing weapons of mass destruction and other banned weaponry, and violating the UN-imposed sanctions.

Also during the 1990s, President Bill Clinton maintained sanctions and ordered air strikes in the "Iraqi no-fly zones", in the hope that Saddam would be overthrown by political enemies inside Iraq.

Many members of the international community, especially the US, continued to view Saddam as a bellicose tyrant who was a threat to the stability of the region.

Saddam expressed a wish to have a live televised debate with George W Bush, which was declined.

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Saddam was last seen in a video which purported to show him in the Baghdad suburbs surrounded by supporters.

Various sightings of Saddam were reported in the weeks following the war, but none was authenticated.

At various times Saddam released audio tapes promoting popular resistance to his ousting.

On 13 December 2003, in Operation Red Dawn, Saddam Hussein was captured by American forces after being found hiding in a hole in the ground near a farmhouse in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit.

Saddam was shown with a full beard and hair longer than his familiar appearance.

Saddam was described by US officials as being in good health.

British tabloid newspaper The Sun posted a picture of Saddam wearing white briefs on the front cover of a newspaper.

The nickname and the garden are among the details about the former Iraqi leader that emerged during a March 2008 tour of the Baghdad prison and cell where Saddam slept, bathed, and kept a journal and wrote poetry in the final days before his execution; he was concerned to ensure his legacy and how the history would be told.

On 30 June 2004, Saddam Hussein, held in custody by US forces at the US base "Camp Cropper, " along with 11 other senior Ba'athist leaders, were handed over to the interim Iraqi government to stand trial for crimes against humanity and other offences.

On 5 November 2006, Saddam Hussein was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging.

Saddam was hanged on the first day of Eid ul-Adha, 30 December 2006, despite his wish to be executed by firing squad .

The accounts of the two witnesses are contradictory as Haddad describes Saddam as being strong in his final moments whereas al-Rubaie says Saddam was clearly afraid.

Saddam recited the shahada one and a half times, as while he was about to say 'Muhammad' on the second shahada, the trapdoor opened, cutting him off mid-sentence.

Saddam was buried at his birthplace of Al-Awja in Tikrit, Iraq, on 31 December 2006.

Saddam's tomb was reported to have been destroyed in March 2015.