The rise and fall of Saddam Hussein
Iraqis will remember the 35-year rule of Saddam as a chronicle of agony, fear, war and destruction, writes Salah Hemeid
In his heyday, Saddam Hussein was called the Victorious Leader, Glory of the Arabs, Grandson of the Prophet Mohamed, Lion of Iraq, Successor of Nebuchadnezzar and the New Saladin. He boasted of being the "builder of modern Iraq". Born to a peasant family on 28 April, 1937, in the village of Al-Ouja near Tikrit, north of Baghdad, Saddam became the unchallenged leader of Iraq, a country that was once one of the richest and most powerful in the Arab world.
Violence was long a part of Saddam's political career: a year after joining the Arab Ba'th Socialist Party in 1957, Saddam spent six months in prison for participating in the killing of Sadoun Al-Tikriti, a cousin, because he was a communist, the Ba'thists regarding communists as among their principal foes. Two years later, Saddam participated in an unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Abdel-Karim Qassim, then the president of Iraq. When the attempt was discovered, Saddam fled to Syria, and then to Egypt, where he spent four years in exile.
Saddam returned to Iraq in 1963 after the Ba'th Party had taken power in the country in a bloody coup during which Qassim was brutally murdered. Eight months later, the party itself in turn lost power to a military junta, and Saddam went underground. In July 1968, the Ba'th returned to power in a coup partly organised by Saddam. Though Ahmed Hassan Al- Bakr was named president of Iraq, Saddam, Al-Bakr's deputy, remained a power behind the scenes, running the army, the state security apparatus and the Ba'th Party itself.
In July 1979, Saddam pushed aside Al-Bakr to take over as president, a move that was accompanied by a purge in which scores of senior party members were executed and hundreds of others imprisoned. Opponents were forced to flee the country, and those that remained were either jailed or executed. Using the country's enormous oil revenues, Saddam then launched a vast national development plan, building housing projects, highways, bridges, airports, universities and modern communication centres.
Saddam's name and the slogan, "Builder of Modern Iraq", soon adorned streets across the country. He even ordered that his name be inscribed in stone at the country's ancient sites, including at ancient cities such as Babylon, alongside those of the ancient kings Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar.
Saddam also spent the earnings from Iraq's oil wealth on building the region's largest army, which he used to quash dissent at home and to try to fulfil his ambitions abroad. In 1980, he launched a war against Iran, hoping for a quick victory over Iraq's largest neighbour, which had been plunged into confusion following the Islamic Revolution a year earlier.
However, the Iran-Iraq war dragged on for eight long years, during which some one million people lost their lives. The war brought Saddam closer to the United States, which provided him with valuable intelligence on Iran, sold his regime arms and gave it other aid as a "bulwark" against Iran. In 1988, the late Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran accepted a cease fire, and Saddam immediately declared Iraqi victory. His propaganda machine now began to call him "Guardian of the Eastern Flank of the Arabs", and Saddam called an Arab summit in Baghdad to assert that claim and to rally support for his anti- Western policies.
Soon afterwards Saddam's fortunes began to fail, as he invaded his southern neighbour, Kuwait, only to spark an international crisis that led a US-led coalition to wage war to force the Iraqi army out of the Gulf emirate in early 1991. Following these dramatic events, Saddam remained defiant for over a decade, despite severe United Nations economic and military sanctions imposed on Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait.
The UN Security Council also imposed a strict weapons inspection regime on the country, with the declared aim of dismantling Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes. However, for nearly a decade the UN inspectors were frustrated in their work, and Saddam continued to deny that he had any such weapons.
As the crisis over the alleged Iraqi weapons of mass destruction mounted earlier this year, the United States warned of war if Saddam did not meet its demands, and some Iraqis, together with the ruler of the United Arab Emirates, Sheikh Zayed Al-Nuhayan, suggested that Saddam should step down in order to save Iraq from a US-led attack.
Instead, Saddam stood fast, and US-led troops invaded Iraq. On 9 April 2003, American troops swept into Baghdad, pulling down any statues of Saddam that they found in their path. The 66-year-old Iraqi leader fled into hiding, while loyalists and other Iraqi guerrillas waged an insurgency campaign against the US-led occupation of the country.
Saddam and his wife Sajida Khairallah Telfah had three daughters and two sons. His sons, Uday and Qusay, were killed by American troops in a July raid on the northern Iraqi town of Mosul. Saddam is also believed to have a third son, Ali, by Samira Shahbandar, daughter of a prominent Iraqi family, who has been described as his second wife.
With his capture by US troops on Saturday, Iraqis are likely to remember Saddam's 35 years in power as a chronicle of agony, fear, war and destruction. Even before the war launched against Iraq in March, the country's economy was in tatters after decades of war and UN sanctions, its people cowed by the dictator's brutality.
Now that Saddam is in US hands, he could be tried for his crimes before an Iraqi or international court and possibly executed if convicted.
