the free muslims of Iraq sentence Saddam Hussein to death by hanging

Saddam Hussein's Record Of Infamy Ends
2006-12-30 02:22:33

Over more than two decades of authoritarian rule, Saddam Hussein led his nation toward modernity and then to ruin by invading two neighboring countries, attacking his own citizens with chemical munitions and brutally repressing all who opposed him.

He defied United Nations weapons inspectors, presided over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, pitted his Sunni Muslim Arab minority against the country's majority Shiites and demanded the cultish celebration of his own image.

It was a record of infamy that ended today with his execution by hanging for crimes against humanity - a punishment carried out by Iraq's U.S.-backed, Shiite-led government after a lengthy trial.


From humble origins north of Baghdad, Hussein rose to become a political enforcer in the pan-Arab Baath Socialist Party, a top party official and coup leader, the strongman in a government headed by an older cousin and, ultimately, the president of Iraq - a title he held from July 1979 until April 2003, when he was driven from power by U.S. invasion forces.

By controlling the world's third-largest proven oil reserves, Hussein sought to recapture Iraq's ancient glory and turn the country into a major Middle East power. He launched a devastating war against neighboring Iran, in 1980 in an ill-fated effort to seize an oil-rich region inhabited by a sizable Arab minority, and he occupied Kuwait in 1990 in a similar quest to expand his country's oil reserves.

The bloody eight-year Iran-Iraq war ended in stalemate in 1988, and his annexation of Kuwait was reversed by a U.S.-led assault in early 1991 that routed Hussein's vaunted army - then the world's fourth largest - and restored the Persian Gulf sheikhdom to independence.

Despite the debacles, Hussein kept a firm grip on power, brutally crushing uprisings by ethnic Kurds in northern Iraq and by Shiite Arabs in the south, while also ruthlessly eliminating political rivals. By the end of his rule, human rights groups estimated, he had presided over the killing of at least 300,000 Iraqis and the torture and imprisonment of tens of thousands more.

Although widely reviled, Hussein had a strong following in Iraq among fellow members of the Sunni Muslim Arab minority, especially those from his home area around the town of Tikrit. He also won popularity among many Arabs in other Middle Eastern countries for his implacable opposition to Israel and his resistance to the United States.

During his long rule, Hussein used Iraq's oil money to provide unprecedented social services and infrastructure improvements to his country. He launched literacy and education campaigns, provided free schooling up to the university level and created one of the most modern public health systems in the Middle East, featuring free hospitalization for Iraqi citizens. The government built roads and bridges, developed industries and modernized agriculture.

Yet, despite hardships brought on by the Iran-Iraq war, the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the punitive U.N. sanctions that followed, Hussein also built dozens of opulent palaces and homes for himself and his family, sparing no expense for his comfort and security.

Indeed, Hussein was possessed of a stunning megalomania, and he fostered a pervasive personality cult. He built statues and monuments to himself, his likeness appeared on portraits, posters and murals all over the country, as well as on the national currency. Places such as the country's airport and a sprawling Shiite neighborhood in the capital were named in his honor.

He fancied himself as an heir to Saladin, the Islamic warrior from Tikrit who battled the Crusaders in the 12th century, and to pre-Islamic rulers in ancient Mesopotamia such as Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar.

In the 1980s, Hussein used chemical weapons on Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq war, as well as on his own people in the Kurdish campaign, and he embarked on an ambitious program to develop nuclear arms. Those efforts were disrupted by the Persian Gulf war and the U.N. inspections and sanctions that followed. Such was Hussein's reputation for duplicity and brutality, however, that he was widely suspected of maintaining his chemical, biological and nuclear programs in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of 2003, which was originally predicated on removing the threat of weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion, no significant stores of such weapons were found.

Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in the village of Auja near Tikrit. His father, Hussein al-Majid, was a landless peasant who disappeared before his son was born. Shortly after his birth, his mother, Subha Tulfah al-Mussallat, sent him to live with an uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, a nationalist army officer who opposed the British-backed monarchy then ruling Iraq.

When Hussein was 3, his uncle was imprisoned for joining a failed coup attempt, and the boy was sent back to his mother, who had remarried. But his stepfather treated him harshly, and he fled when he was around 10 to rejoin his uncle in Tikrit. Tulfah, who was released from prison in 1947, sent the boy to school for the first time. After finishing his primary schooling in 1955 at age 18, Hussein accompanied his uncle to Baghdad and enrolled in high school.

Under his uncle's guidance, Hussein joined the Baath Party in 1956, embracing the secular Arab nationalist movement that had been formed in Syria in the late 1940s. One of the party's leaders in Iraq was a relative, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, a top army general. The recruit became a street enforcer for the party and was soon accused of his first murder. He was jailed in 1958 for the killing of a government official in Tikrit but was released after six months for lack of evidence.

Bakr participated that year in an army coup led by Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem against Iraqi King Faisal II, but Qassem later spurned the Baathists, who began hatching their own plot to take power. In October 1959, Hussein participated in a failed assassination attempt against Qassem, an ambush that left the young Baathist with a gunshot wound in the leg. Hussein fled to Syria and later moved to Egypt, where he studied law and rose in Baath Party ranks. He was sentenced to death in absentia in February 1960.

While in exile in Egypt in 1963, Hussein married a cousin, Sajida Tulfah, the daughter of his uncle and mentor. They later had two sons - Uday and Qusay - and three daughters: Rana, Raghad and Hala.

Hussein returned to Iraq in 1963 after Bakr, having helped lead a successful coup against Qassem, was installed as prime minister by the new president, Abdul Salam Arif. But Arif soon turned against the Baathists, and Hussein, by then a member of the Baath Party leadership, was arrested again in October 1964 for plotting against the government. He spent the next three years behind bars before escaping from prison in 1967.

When the Baathists launched a coup that succeeded in ousting Arif on July 17, 1968, Hussein was on the lead tank that besieged the presidential palace and played a key role "in carrying out the revolution that day," according to an official biography issued while he was in power. Bakr became president, and Hussein effectively became his deputy. He assumed control over Iraq's intelligence and security agencies, purged government ranks of people deemed unreliable and gradually consolidated power as the strongman behind an increasingly frail and ailing Bakr.

When Bakr moved to unite Iraq with Syria, which was also under Baathist leadership, Hussein stepped in to thwart a development he perceived would marginalize him and forced Bakr to resign. On July 16, 1979, at the age of 42, he succeeded his relative as chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and president of Iraq.

Hussein quickly demonstrated his ruthlessness - and symbolized his rule - by gathering the party leadership at an assembly in which he read out the names of more than 60 alleged plotters backed by Syria. As cameras rolled, guards escorted the alleged conspirators out of the conference hall one by one. Many of those arrested at the meeting were later executed.

The new president began spending heavily in pursuit of his dreams of making Iraq the political, economic and cultural center of the Middle East, as well as the Arab world's leading military power. But the attack he launched in 1980 against Iran, his neighbor to the east, soon bogged down, becoming a bloody and costly war of attrition. By the war's end, estimates of the death toll on both sides ranged up to 1.5 million. Iraq put its own its dead at 500,000, while Iran said it lost 300,000.

Hussein's nuclear ambitions were also set back when Israeli bombers destroyed Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.

Saddled with a war debt estimated at $75 billion and angered by Kuwait's oil policies, including alleged slant drilling to tap reserves under the two countries' disputed border, Hussein invaded the emirate on Aug. 2, 1990, and declared it a province of Iraq. When he ignored subsequent withdrawal demands by the U.N. Security Council, President George H.W. Bush formed a broad coalition - including several Arab states - to evict him. In January 1991, the coalition launched an assault dubbed Operation Desert Storm.

During more than a month of intense aerial bombardment, mostly by U.S. and British planes and missiles, Hussein ordered the firing of Iraqi missiles at Israel, hoping to break the coalition by provoking Israeli retaliation, but Israel heeded U.S. calls to refrain from striking back, and the coalition held together.

In February 1991, a U.S.-led ground force drove Hussein's army out of Kuwait and occupied southern Iraq. As they were withdrawing, the Iraqis carried out Hussein's orders to torch Kuwait's oil wells, leaving behind a looted country choking under a pall of thick black smoke. The fires burned out of control for months, causing widespread pollution.

Following his defeat, Hussein accepted a peace deal that required him to dismantle any banned weapons programs and submit to "no fly zones" in the southern and northern parts of the country. U.N. sanctions also restricted imports, and oil exports were put under the control of a U.N. "oil-for-food" program.

Nevertheless, Hussein claimed victory in what he dubbed "the mother of all battles." He moved to mercilessly crush rebellions by Iraqi Kurds and Shiites, who had been encouraged by Bush to rise up against the Iraqi dictator. U.S. forces refrained from intervening militarily, and thousands of Shiites were killed in the south, while large numbers of Kurds were forced to flee their homes in the north.

After Bush lost his bid for reelection, Hussein allegedly attempted to have him assassinated during a private visit to Kuwait in April 1993. President Bill Clinton retaliated with a missile strike on the Iraqi intelligence headquarters.

More U.S. strikes followed in late 1998 when Hussein barred U.N. weapons inspectors from visiting certain sites.

In the meantime, Hussein kept a tight grip on power, reportedly putting down several attempts to depose him. Two of his sons-in-law, both top military officers, defected to Jordan in 1995 and were later killed when they were persuaded to return to Iraq.

Among the leading participants in Hussein's reign of terror were his two sons, Uday and Qusay. In particular, Uday, the eldest of Hussein's children, earned a reputation as a sadist and a psychopath who committed murders and rapes with impunity. However, he crossed the line when, in a drunken rage, he bludgeoned his father's personal valet to death at a 1988 party, allegedly for having introduced Hussein to a younger woman, Samira Shahbandar, who became his second wife. Hussein briefly imprisoned his son for the murder before dispatching him to the Iraqi Embassy in Switzerland, which later expelled him.

Shahbandar was married at the time she and Hussein met, but her husband was persuaded to divorce her. She and Hussein had one son, Ali.

Hussein was also linked with two other women. There were unconfirmed reports that he married one or both of them, but neither is known to have borne him any children.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush soon turned his attention to Iraq, suspecting Hussein of harboring weapons of mass destruction that could one day be used in an even more devastating strike on U.S. soil. He declared the country part of an "axis of evil" and renewed a push for Iraqi disarmament.

On Bush's orders, U.S. forces invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. Hussein's army - including his once-powerful Republican Guard - quickly crumbled. By April 7, American troops were in the heart of Baghdad, and Hussein fled as his government folded. Two days later, jubilant Iraqis, aided by U.S. Marines, pulled his statue down from a central plaza.

Hussein went into hiding, growing a bushy beard and moving from place to place, often by ordinary taxi.

In July 2003, his two sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed when U.S. troops raided their hideout in the northern city of Mosul.

Five months later, on Dec. 13, 2003, Hussein himself was captured by U.S. troops on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit.

Haggard and disheveled, his beard streaked with gray, he was found in a hole in the ground near a farmhouse in the village of Dawr, about nine miles south of Tikrit. Although he was wearing a pistol when he was caught, he did not try to resist, and he appeared "disoriented" and "bewildered" as he was taken into custody, U.S. officers said. One general described him as being "caught like a rat."

Discovered in a farmhouse where Hussein had been staying nearby were two AK-47 assault rifles, as well as $750,000 in U.S. $100 bills, a U.S. commander said. A white-and-orange taxi was parked nearby.

Although U.S. search teams never found the suspected stockpiles of banned weapons of mass destruction or evidence of a continuing nuclear weapons program, President Bush insisted that he had been right to remove Hussein from power.

Denouncing him as a "madman" who committed atrocities against his own people and constituted a "clear threat" to the United States, Bush asserted repeatedly, "The world is better off without Saddam Hussein."