Arab Leaders - Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi & Bin Laden Documentary

The man known to history as Saddam Hussein was born on the 28th of April 1937 in the small village of al-Awja near Tikrit to the northwest of the city of Baghdad in Iraq. His father Hussein Abd al-Majid was a peasant sheepherder. Some accounts state that he abandoned his family before Saddam was ever born, though it is more likely that he died from throat cancer in the winter of 1936 or 1937. He was a member of the Albu Nasir tribe, which had migrated to Iraq from Yemen in the south-west of the Arabian Peninsula generations earlier. Saddam’s

mother was Subha Tulfah al-Mussallat. Her family hailed from a more esteemed lineage, an ancestor having been Talfah ibn Musalat, a grandson of the emir Omar Bey III of Tikrit, a former governor of the region. Years before Saddam was born she and Hussein had another son who appears to have also died shortly before Saddam arrived in 1937. Subha subsequently remarried to Ibrahim al-Hassan Muhammad and through this union Saddam had several half-siblings. However, he saw little of them. Saddam’s mother had attempted to terminate her pregnancy when her first husband died and when Saddam was born she never

warmed to her son. Saddam’s youth was troubled by his difficult familial background. His step-father was a tough disciplinarian who physically beat him during his childhood to such an extent that Saddam absconded from his family home as a child and went to live with an uncle who resided in Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. There he attended the al-Karh Secondary School in Baghdad. He was a relatively decent student and he would eventually move on to begin studying law. His uncle, Khairallah Talfah, was a major influence on him during these years, but Saddam never forgot his links to

Tikrit and many years later when he emerged as the ruler of Iraq he would promote his extended family members there to positions of considerable importance and authority. Hussein grew up during a period of immense change, not just in what is now modern day Iraq, but across the Middle East. Most of the region had been ruled since the sixteenth century by a handful of powerful Islamic empires, specifically the Ottoman Empire or the Persians. Iraq and the regions to the north, west and south of it in what are now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan and Saudi

Arabia had been controlled by the Ottomans. Their control over these territories was already declining rapidly by the early twentieth century, but the entry of the Ottoman Empire into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary led to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire by 1918. In the aftermath of the conflict, the victorious powers in the war, Britain and France, effectively divided up the Middle East between themselves and ruled the region through a series of ‘mandates’. These mandates created new nations that incorporated little of the regional differences and identities

that characterized the area. Rather, groups were forced together based on the lines drawn in the desert sands by British and French policy makers. Nominal independence was granted to the Kingdom of Iraq under King Faisal I in 1932, but in reality, Britain retained enormous control over Iraq including management of its large oil fields through the Iraqi Petroleum Company, a largely British controlled entity. This situation still prevailed when the Second World War broke out, when Saddam was two years old. Many political groups within countries like Iraq conspired with the Nazis during the conflict, wishing to end British

involvement in Iraq. They viewed the Iraqi monarchy as effectively complicit with Britain due to their continued support of the British Empire. It is not possible to understand Saddam’s rise and the politics of Iraq in the second half of the twentieth century, without assessing the emergence of the Ba’ath Party, which emerged in Syria in 1947. Its platform of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism meant that it soon spread to other Middle Eastern countries, notably Iraq where a branch was set up in 1951. Saddam’s uncle Khairallah was an early member. From its inception the party was associated primarily with the

Sunni strand of Islam in Iraq, one of the two dominant strands of Islam, the other being Shia. However, Ba’athism was not a religious or theological movement. Indeed in espousing socialism and a new way of running the Arab world, it largely rejected the dominance of religion throughout the region. Instead, Ba’athism espoused the idea that each Muslim state in the Middle East should attempt to rid itself of the vestiges of imperialism and act in conjunction with each other to restore the Arab people to a place of prominence and power in the world such as had been enjoyed

centuries earlier at the height of the Muslim Empires. To this end they were generally opposed to the governments which had been put in place in countries like Iraq and Syria as the British and French ended ‘mandate’ rule in the interwar period. This set the Ba’ath Party in Iraq on a collision course with the Iraqi monarchy and government as it existed in the aftermath of the Second World War. Saddam joined the Iraqi Ba’ath Party in 1957 when he was 20 years of age. At that time the party was a relatively small movement, barely constituting more than

a few hundred members in Baghdad and a few of the other large towns. But events in Iraq were about to take a significant turn around the time that Saddam began taking a major interest in the country’s politics. By the mid-1950s the country had become a hotbed of political dissent, in large part owing to the incompetence of King Faisal II and his ministers, and also as Iraqis looked to the example of countries like Egypt where in 1952 officers within the military had overthrown King Farouk and established a new regime which sought to end British influence in

the country, which like in Iraq had never fully ended, especially around the Suez Canal. In many ways the 14 July Revolution of 1958 in Iraq was a very similar occurrence to the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. During the Iraqi revolution commanders within the Iraqi military such as Abdul Salam Arif and Abd al-Karim Qasim led a coup d’état beginning on the 14th of July 1958 which overthrew the government of King Faisal II. The monarch and several members of his family were murdered, the government was taken over in the space of a few hours and a new Iraqi

Republic was proclaimed. Despite its rather modest size, the Ba’ath Party had sufficient connections within Baghdad’s politics that a handful of its more prominent members were involved in forming a new government under the army colonels in the summer and autumn of 1958. Consequently, while he was an unknown 21 year old at this juncture, Hussein was nevertheless on the fringes of the country’s high politics by the late 1950s. The government which was formed in 1958 was wholly unstable. There were numerous different parties and entities competing for power, many of them rabidly opposed to the others. For instance,

the Iraqi Communist Party quickly emerged as a strong antagonist of the Ba’ath Party, while Qasim, the army commander who had led the 14th July Revolution and who was the effective head of state of the new republic, was unwilling to join the United Arab Republic, an instrument of Pan-Arabism which had been established by Egypt and resulted in a political union with Syria for several years. The Ba’athists were furious at Qasim’s unwillingness in this regard and determined to assassinate him. Saddam was chosen as one of the assassins. They struck on the 7th of October 1959, as Qasim

was travelling in a car through Al-Rashid Street in Baghdad, but despite Qasim being shot twice, the bullets hit him in the arm and shoulder and he survived the attack. It has been speculated that the attack failed because Saddam began firing too early. He was shot in the leg himself by Qasim’s security detail during the assassination attempt, but escaped from the scene. In the aftermath of the failed assassination attempt the would-be assassins were smuggled out of Iraq to Syria where Saddam quickly joined the Syrian branch of the Ba’ath Party. Back home in Iraq several individuals were

arrested in connection with the failed assassination attempt and show trials were carried out. For a time, Saddam relocated to Egypt and continued his law studies at the University of Cairo, though he would never complete his degree. He was there in 1963 when two coups occurred to the east. In March of that year a branch of the military in Syria which was controlled by the Ba’ath Party launched a coup d’état which resulted in the establishment of Ba’athist Syria. Eight years later one of the military officers involved, Hafez al-Assad would rise to rule Ba’athist Syria. The al-Assad

family has continued to control Syria to the present. This was preceded weeks earlier by the Ramadan Revolution in Iraq when elements within the Iraqi army, led by the Ba’athists, overthrew Qasim’s government and seized power. However, they only held power for nine months before one of Qasim’s former allies from the 1958 coup, Abdul Salam Arif, seized power in Baghdad and purged the Ba’athists from the government. By the time the counter-coup of November 1963 occurred, Saddam was back in Iraq, having left Egypt shortly after his party came to power the previous February. Following the November 1963 coup

and the purging of the Ba’athists he elected to remain in Iraq and continued to operate in the capital with cells of the remaining Ba’athist party members. He was duly arrested in 1964 and found guilty of involvement with a prohibited political party, for which he was sent to jail for several years. Saddam was also implicated in a plot to kill Arif and this led to his imprisonment in October 1964. However, his stint in prison would be shorter lived than the Iraqi state had intended. He escaped after just two years of his sentence in 1966. It was

from this juncture that Saddam, now nearing his thirtieth year, began to rise within the Iraqi Ba’athist movement. Shortly after his prison escape, he was appointed as a regional commander of the party, one who was quickly acknowledged to be a good organiser who could grow the party even during a period when schisms were emerging within it concerning the level of involvement which it should continue to have with the Soviet Union and other Marxist-Leninist states. By this time Saddam was also married and starting a family. In 1963, shortly after his return from Egypt but before his arrest

and imprisonment, he had married Sajida Talfah, his first cousin. This was an arranged marriage to his uncle’s daughter. It soon resulted in children. A son named Uday was born in 1964, followed by another boy named Qusay in 1966, and then three daughters, Raghad, Rana and Hala, born in 1968, 1969 and 1972 respectively. These were not Saddam’s only children. Eventually in 1986 he married for a second time to Samira Shahbandar. He is also believed to have had a third and fourth wife, though these remain unconfirmed. Through these liaisons Saddam probably had several other children, yet his

first marriage and the children which resulted from it were the most significant. He was, despite the brutality of his political career, said to have been a devoted father, the first of many contradictions in an individual who was at once somebody who used chemical weapons as conventional weapons of war and engaged in genocide against sections of the Iraqi people, but at the same time was known on occasions for his philanthropy and charity. The ascent of Saddam Hussein to political power in Iraq might best be said to have begun in 1968 with the 17th of July Revolution

which saw the Ba’athists finally seize complete control of the Iraqi state. Widespread instability had been created across the Middle East by the Six Day War between Israel and Egypt, the former allied with several other Arab states including Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. This, combined with the drift of the republican government in Baghdad towards closer ties with the United States led many, including the Ba’athists, to believe that a radical change of the political system in Iraq was needed. Accordingly, on the 17th of July 1968 elements within the Ba’athist movement and the Iraqi military led what

was effectively a bloodless coup and seized control of the government in Baghdad. The country’s growing ties to the US were denounced and a Ba’athist government was then established, one which was led by Ahmed Hassan al’Bakr. Ahmed was Saddam’s cousin and Hussein was quickly appointed as Vice-President of the Republic of Iraq, in part for his role in purging the Ba’athist movement of leading figures who were opposed to Ahmed’s government programme in the late 1960s. It was the beginning of his ascent to become ruler of Iraq. Over the next ten years Saddam made himself indispensable in the

governance of Iraq under the Ba’athist regime. He was an effective administrator, one who oversaw wide-ranging reforms of the Iraqi economy and began transforming the country into one of the richest nations in the Middle East. Much of this was based on Iraq’s oil reserves, the country having some of the largest proven oil fields in the world, ones which continue to make the Iraqi economy overwhelmingly reliant on oil half a century later. Yet when the Ba’athists came to power in 1968 the country’s oil industry was still controlled to a great extent by western interests in the shape

of British and American oil companies. Saddam set about aggressively nationalising the companies in the early 1970s, measures which were aided by the advent of the 1973 Energy Crisis as the Middle East’s largest oil sellers limited supplies to western states such as the US and Britain which had offered support to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, a conflict between Israel and several of its Arab neighbours, notably Egypt and Syria. Oil prices skyrocketed by nearly 300% from roughly $3 a barrel to $12. Due to these outside conflicts and because of Saddam nationalising the Iraqi oil industry at

just the right time, the Iraqi exchequer benefited exponentially from oil profits. With the oil revenue which began streaming into Iraq in the early-to-mid-1970s the Ba’athists were in a position to begin modernising the country and implementing an ambitious set of social policies which for a time made Iraq the nation with the best standard of living amongst the Muslim nations of the Middle East. Saddam was responsible for overseeing much of this. For instance, he spearheaded an education campaign which led to a very significant increase in literacy levels amongst both men and women in the country. He was

also in charge of the establishment of a system of universal basic healthcare. These efforts earned him formal recognition for his actions from UNESCO. Moreover, Saddam attempted to put the Iraq economy on a more secure long-term footing by using the oil profits made in the 1970s to develop new businesses and a modern infrastructure across the country, the goal being to diversify so that when oil profits declined at some future date, the country would be ready and able to flourish based on its new industries. To this end the country’s agriculture sector was also developed by Hussein, with

an emphasis on introducing mechanisation to agricultural practices to replace antiquated ploughs and primitive pre-industrial, farming methods. The 1970s were also a period of realignment in terms of Iraq’s foreign policy. As a socialist Ba’athist, Hussein was initially committed to drawing Iraq closer to the Soviet Union and away from the US and other western powers, a drift which had been necessitated in any event by the nationalisation of western oil companies in Iraq in the early 1970s. Then in 1972 a fifteen year pact on economic and diplomatic co-operation was signed between Iraq and the Soviet Union. In retaliation

the US administration of President Richard Nixon began channelling aid to the Kurds of northern Iraq, who wished to obtain their own country in the region. Eventually this led in 1974 to the outbreak of the Second Iraqi-Kurdish War, a continuation of a long-running conflict which had been ubiquitous in Iraq during the 1960s, but which had abated as peace negotiations were entered into between the Ba’athist government and the Kurds led by Mustafa Barzani in the early 1970s. Saddam, though, managed to counteract this threat by negotiating the Algiers Accords in 1975 between Iran and Iraq, an agreement mediated

by Houari Boumediene, the leader of Algeria. Through this Iran agreed to stop providing military and logistical assistance to the Kurds of Iraq in return for a small territorial concession to Iran along the Shatt al-Arab River. With this the Kurdish military unrest was quickly suppressed and northern Iraq was taken firmly back under the control of the government in Baghdad, though it would not be the last significant intervention Hussein made in the Kurdish region. The second half of the 1970s saw Saddam move to a position of unprecedented strength in Iraq. Already in the early and mid-1970s he

had emerged as the second in command of the Ba’athist regime, junior only to his cousin, President al-Bakr. During this period he had a deep involvement in managing the Iraqi economy, elements of foreign policy and a wide range of other matters. Then in 1976 Saddam was also promoted to the rank of general within the Iraqi army. Al-Bakr by this time was beginning to suspect Saddam was moving to secure absolute power in Iraq and so he entered in the late 1970s into negotiations with the Ba’athist regime in neighbouring Syria whereby the two countries would enter into a

political union, one in which al-Bakr would act as the senior ruler until his death or retirement, to be succeeded thereafter by President Hafez al-Assad of Syria. This arrangement would have effectively excluded Saddam from succeeding as the next ruler of Iraq once al-Bakr was out of the way. This diplomatic chess move led Saddam to act to secure his position and on the 16th of July 1979, with the support of the military and many of the senior figures within the Ba’athist government, he forced al-Bakr to resign as President of Iraq. Saddam then assumed the role of head

of state that same day in a bloodless coup. He would remain in control of Iraq for the next twenty-four years. One of Saddam’s first acts as the new head of state and of the Ba’athist regime in Iraq was to purge the Ba’athist Party of his opponents or any potential rivals for power. This occurred just six days after he seized power, on the 22nd of July 1979. In line with his assumption of power Saddam convened a meeting of the Ba’athist parties most senior and mid-ranking officials to meet at the Al-Khuld Hall in Baghdad. When they arrived

at the hall, the party’s members were met with an unexpected announcement. Saddam addressed them and claimed that he had discovered a fifth column operating within the Ba’athist Party, one which was trying to undermine their control of the Iraqi state and ultimately pave the way for the Ba’athist party of Syria to assume control over Iraq. Muhyi Abdul-Hussein, the former private secretary to al-Bakr, then came forward to confess that he had been involved in this conspiracy since 1975 and then read out the names of 68 other individuals within the party who were complicit. Whether he had been

tortured or his family threatened in order to ensure this confession remains unclear. What is known is that Abdul-Hussein and the 68 co-conspirators were led away to be detained. A special criminal court was then convened at which show trials were held over the next two weeks. Ultimately 21 individuals were eventually executed, while others were removed from their positions as Saddam rid himself of any and all opposition. The purge of the summer of 1979 also saw a collapse in diplomatic relations between the Ba’athists of Iraq and those in Syria. The purge of the Ba’ath Party and the

manner in which Saddam seized power in the summer of 1979 set the tone for his period as ruler of Iraq. Where in the 1970s Hussein had been an effective politician who introduced many beneficial reforms to Iraqi society and raised the standards of living for a great many Iraqi citizens, after becoming dictator of the country in 1979 Hussein became a more megalomaniacal authoritarian tyrant. Through paramilitary organisations such as the Iraqi Popular Army and secret police bodies such as the Mukhabarat or Iraqi Intelligence Service, Saddam initiated a reign of terror in the early 1980s which continued for

over two decades, with widespread monitoring of society for political dissidents, active persecution of groups such as the Kurds and radical Shia Muslims and the illegal arrest, detention and torture of tens of thousands of Iraqis for suspected opposition to the regime and dissident activity. This even extended beyond the borders of Iraq and during the 1980s the Mukhabarat was responsible for the overseas execution of Iraqi political exiles in countries as disparate as Sweden and Sudan. Saddam oversaw all of this, thus cementing his role in history as a tyrant. Hand in hand with this growing tyranny was the

development of a cult of leadership in the 1980s. Saddam liked to depict himself as a successor to the fabled great king of ancient Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar, and went so far as to have archaeological sites around Iraq dating back thousands of years stamped with his name. Elsewhere statues were erected to Hussein throughout Iraq and his image began to appear everywhere in Iraqi society, from coins and banknotes to murals on the sides of buildings in Baghdad and the other major cities and towns of the nation. Two staged national elections were also held over the years, the first in

1995 and the second in 2002, during which Hussein allegedly received nearly 100% of the vote in a ludicrous showpiece which was the staple of many twentieth-century dictators. It is easy to scoff at such displays of dictatorial power and see them as being over the top and ineffective, but these worked very successfully for many dictators during the twentieth century, effectively convincing people that there was only one plausible leader of their country, such was his prevalence in all aspects of public life. This, combined with the brutal actions of the secret police and other state services, ensured that

Saddam had an iron grip on power in Iraq from 1979 onwards, even as the economy of the country began to deteriorate sharply owing to declining oil revenues and a protracted war with Iran. Much of the first half of Saddam’s reign over Iraq was dominated and shaped by conflict with Iraq’s eastern neighbour, Iran. In 1979 the Iranian Revolution had driven the western-supported tyrannical Shah of Iran from power and brought Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamist followers to power in Iran. This was now a theocracy or religious state, one dominated by Shia Muslims. The majority of Iraq’s Muslims

were also Shias, whereas Saddam and the Ba’ath Party were generally comprised of Sunni Muslims, the two denominations of Muslims which had emerged over a thousand years earlier following a dispute over who should head the Arab Muslim Caliphate. The concern for the Ba’athists in Iraq following the Iranian Revolution was that Khomeini and his followers would attempt to begin undermining their western neighbour by appealing to the Shia majority within Iraq and spreading Islamist ideology into the country at a time when the Ba’athists were aiming for a more secular regime. Hostilities escalated as soon as the revolution occurred,

driven to a large extent by Saddam who was confident of western aid from countries like the United States who wished to see the Iranian Revolution crushed or substantially reversed. Consequently in September 1980 he initiated hostilities. The Iran-Iraq War would last for the next eight years in one of the bloodiest conflicts ever seen in the modern Middle East. The war which followed was broadly a border conflict, with the Iraqi’s launching an invasion of western Iran in late 1980, one which faltered in 1981 and resulted in a subsequent Iranian counter-offensive. By 1982 Saddam was making it clear

that he would consider a ceasefire and peace negotiations as the quick victory he had expected had instead turned into a war of attrition. However, by that time Iran’s military build-up and tactical advances were such that it had obtained the upper-hand and instead of seeking peace terms the revolutionary government took the war onto Iraqi soil nearly taking the region around the city of Basra in Iraq in the mid-1980s. However, the tactical situation changed again after this as Saddam’s government expanded the military draft and as he received increased amounts of aid from foreign powers. By 1985 the

Iraqi’s were able to launch a fresh offensive, but as in 1980 and 1981 it stalled and was followed by another Iranian counter-offensive, one which saw the Iranians capture al-Faw in southern Iraq in 1986 in a move which shocked the Iraqi military command. Yet the government in Tehran could not follow this up with subsequent advances and the war once again entered a period of stalemate. The Iran-Iraq War has been much commented upon over the years for two particular aspects. One was the support which Saddam and the Ba’athists in Iraq received from western governments such as the

United States. There is no denying that this was the case and there was no effort made to disguise it, with regular debates in the US Congress throughout the 1980s about the level of aid being supplied to Hussein. This took the shape of financing and war materiel and was perhaps crucial in stopping an Iranian victory at certain points in the war around 1982 and 1983. However, it must be acknowledged that this did not mean that the US viewed Saddam and Iraq as allies in the 1980s. It was more the case that they perceived Iran as the

greater of the two evils and were willing to supply Iraq with support to avoid an Iranian conquest of Iraq. The second major element of the conflict which has become notorious was the use of chemical weapons by Iraq in the shape of mustard gas and sarin, particularly in situations when it was existentially threatened by Iranian advances. On the other side the Iranian widespread use of child soldiers led to the deaths of tens of thousands of teenagers on the field of battle during the war. Eventually the war came to an end. Although throughout much of the conflict

Iran had had the upper hand and indeed had obtained it again in 1986 and 1987, war weariness was setting in at home and Iran’s resources and sheer manpower were becoming depleted within the army. It also seemed unlikely that a killer blow could be struck against Iraq. It was in this context that Saddam sent a warning to Tehran that he would commence a new bombing campaign and widespread use of chemical weapons in 1988 if Iran did not enter talks. Tehran understood that with western states seemingly unwilling to temper Saddam’s worst instincts, negotiations would have to be

entered into. This was compounded by the US’s shooting down of an Iranian civilian airliner in July 1988, a measure which worried the Ayatollah and others in Iran that more direct US involvement might be eminent. With this in mind, peace terms were agreed to, and the war came to an end in August 1988. It had lasted nearly eight years, had resulted in roughly one million deaths, though the figures are contested, and had achieved absolutely nothing for either side. Both sides claimed victory, but in reality the war had been brought to an end in a stalemate. The

end of the Iraq-Iran war did not result in peace settling over Iraq for any sustained period of time. Indeed Saddam determined to use the closing stages of the war as a smokescreen for what amounted to a campaign of genocide against the Kurdish minority in northern Iraq. The Kurdish people are one of the most unfortunate groups in modern history. They number in the millions and dominate a large stretch of territory in the north of the Middle East around northern Iraq, south-eastern Turkey and adjoining regions. They have never had their own country in the modern era, despite

their efforts following the First World War, but because of their desire for self-determination they have regularly been persecuted by governments in Iraq and Turkey. In the course of the Iran-Iraq War many Kurds and Kurdish political organisations had sided with Iran and had engaged in an insurgency war against the Iraqi government. Now, early in 1988, as the conflict with Iran drew to a conclusion, Saddam ordered divisions of Iraqi troops into northern Iraq to launch a counter-insurgency campaign against the Kurds. The Al-Anfal campaign, as it is known, a term which translates as ‘the spoils of war’, lasted

from February 1988 through to the late autumn of that year. In the course of it between 50,000 and 100,000 Kurds were killed, while tens of thousands more were displaced or forcibly deported from their places of residence. Detention camps were also set up and a forced programme of Arabisation was initiated. There is little doubt that Saddam effectively implemented a programme of genocide against the Kurds in 1988. Saddam was soon to engender the opposition of his reluctant allies from the Iran-Iraq War, the United States and the other western powers. In the course of the war with Iran

Hussein’s government had borrowed billions of dollars from its near neighbour, the small but oil rich Gulf state of Kuwait. It was possibly owing to Iraq’s complete inability to repay this money that Saddam determined not long after the war with Iran ended to invade Kuwait. There were other extenuating circumstances. Kuwait had ruffled many feathers within OPEC, the cartel of the world’s major oil-exporting nations which is heavily centred on the Middle East, by refusing to lower production and the amount of barrels it was exporting, Kuwait was driving down world oil prices and impacting the profits of countries

like Iraq. Finally, the Iraqis also claimed that Kuwait had been slant drilling into Iraqi fields illegally. For these multiple reasons Iraq invaded Kuwait on the 2nd of August 1990. The ensuing conflict cannot be called a war. Kuwait had no major military to speak of and was confronted by a country whose military had swelled to become the fourth largest army in the world during the 1980s. By the 3rd of August, just a day into the invasion, most of Kuwait was under the control of Saddam’s military. Just 24 hours later the country was entirely in Iraqi possession

and Saddam declared Kuwait to now be the nineteenth province of Iraq, at once freeing Iraq from its debt to Kuwait and bringing it a new oil rich region. Saddam seems to have decided to invade Kuwait based on the mistaken belief that his allies in the west would not react as they still viewed him as a bulwark against Iran in the Middle East. He was entirely wrong in this assessment. Within days the United States and its allies, who by the summer of 1990 were effectively in charge of the world order as the Soviet Union collapsed and

the Cold War came to an end, were placing economic and diplomatic sanctions on Iraq. A naval blockade of the Persian Gulf followed which crippled Iraq’s ability to export the oil on which Saddam depended to run the country and support its huge military machine. Diplomatic tensions were ratcheted up by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who convinced the US President George Bush to take a strong stance against Saddam. For his part, Saddam claimed that he would be willing to consider withdrawing from Kuwait if other territorial issues in the Middle East such as the Israeli occupation of

Palestinian territory were resolved in tandem, a dispensation which he knew would not be acceptable to Washington. He further inflamed tensions in mid-to-late August by refusing to allow westerners who were in Iraq to leave the country and even appearing on television broadcasts with what were effectively British prisoners. All of this was sufficient for the US, Britain and others to begin formulating plans for a counter-invasion of Kuwait in response to Iraqi aggression. Saudi Arabia, an oil rich kingdom and rival to the south, would be used as a staging ground for the campaign. The First Gulf War got

underway after months of planning in January 1991. An aerial bombing campaign was undertaken on the 16th of January and a land invasion followed. As American and British troops streamed into Kuwait in early February, Saddam ordered the country’s oil fields to be set alight. In total, out of some 730 oil wells located across Kuwait, approximately 600 were set alight in January and February 1991. Although the environmental damage was less than had been predicted by some scientists the resulting plumes of smoke still absorbed upwards of 80% of the sun’s radiation throughout 1991 in the Middle East, with

some regions being pitch black at noon and temperatures falling by an average of five degrees Celsius. It would take until the autumn to extinguish all of the fires. By then Saddam’s armies had been easily vanquished from Kuwait with Operation Desert Storm finishing on the 28th of February 1991. The US and its allies took the decision to stop once the Iraqis had been driven out of Kuwait. President Bush had no desire to extend the war into Iraqi territory or to try to depose Saddam as leader of Iraq. That particular task would be undertaken by his son

over a decade later. While Saddam had managed to survive his spectacularly ill-judged decision to invade Kuwait and remained in power through the 1990s, the end of the Gulf War saw Iraq hit with a wide range of sanctions by the international community. Many of these were imposed immediately following the invasion of Kuwait and were never lifted. Others were intended to cripple any efforts by the country to continue producing chemical weapons or to further its nuclear weapons programme which it had initiated many years earlier. The most crippling element of this was the US-led embargo on Iraqi oil.

Iraq’s economy and with it much of Saddam’s power was based on the export of oil, as Iraq, then as now, has some of the world’s largest proven oil fields and reserves. Although an Oil-for-Food Programme was agreed upon in 1996 in order to aid the deteriorating Iraqi economy, the country was still very limited in what it could or could not import and export for the remainder of Saddam’s tenure as the country’s dictator. Much of this negatively impacted the Iraqi population and by the end of the twentieth century metrics like average salaries and child mortality in Iraq

were falling below where they had been half a century earlier when the region was still a monarchical state influenced by Britain. While the Iraqi economy was in a shambles in the 1990s after the Gulf War, Saddam was never more entrenched in power than he was from 1991 onwards. The US had effectively signalled its unwillingness to remove him from power by not pressing on from Kuwait into Iraq itself in the spring of 1991. Moreover, Saddam also did not face a threat from any of Iraq’s immediate neighbours for the first time in over a decade. The chastening

experience of invading Kuwait had also reconciled him to the fact that Iraq could not attempt to wage any further wars on its neighbours. Instead he concentrated in the years following the Gulf War on using the state apparatus in Iraq to galvanise the population in support of his regime against what were portrayed as the aggressive westerners who had declared war on Iraq in 1990. There was also a notable drift towards a more religious dictatorship. The Ba’ath Party had been founded on the principle of establishing a more secular Middle East and Saddam had been largely areligious in

his policies throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, but the 1990s witnessed efforts to utilise Islam to enforce a greater form of despotism across Iraq at a time when religious extremism across the Middle East was increasing markedly. As the Iraqi economy deteriorated in the 1990s and Iraq turned into a shell of the country which it had aspired to be in the 1960s and 1970s the Hussein family dictatorship became even more entrenched. This was most clearly seen in the actions of Saddam’s two sons from his first marriage, Uday and Qusay. Qusay was the younger of the pair,

though after a certain point it seems clear that he was Saddam’s probable successor had the dictatorship survived long enough. He was also the head of the Republican Guard. In the early 1990s directly after the Gulf War he was responsible for crushing a Shiite Muslim rising in the marsh lands of southern Iraq and thereafter initiated a demographic and ecological disaster in the region by flooding these marsh lands to destroy the traditional way of life of the Shiite Arabs who had lived there for many centuries. Yet as problematic as Qusay’s behaviour was, it paled by comparison with

that of his older brother Uday. Uday was a notorious alcoholic, rapist, murderer and psychopath, one who held parties in Baghdad where he would encourage the other guests to get extremely drunk before engaging in all manner of sadistic acts. Amongst some of the more bizarre activities in his reign of terror are reports that he frequently tortured members of the Iraqi football team, if they lost matches. By the mid-1990s his behaviour had become so erratic, often showing up to parties in Baghdad wielding and using firearms, that close family members felt threatened enough to defect to nearby Jordan

for fear of their lives. There were also many, many allegations that Uday regularly tortured his own employees by having their feet whipped by his bodyguards, while he became known as a serial rapist during the 1990s often prowling the streets of Baghdad in his collection of sports cars looking for women that he wanted brought to one of his palaces. A failed assassination attempt left him partially disabled in one leg in late 1996, a development which did nothing to temper his most excessive behaviour. There is evidence that Saddam was fully aware of his eldest son’s egregious actions

as late as the late 1980s, but he did very little to regulate his conduct. As a result, Uday visited horrors on the people of Baghdad in the 1990s and early 2000s. Perhaps one of the least well-known but most curious points concerning Saddam was his written output in the early 2000s. In these years Hussein wrote four novels and several poems, often with the aid of ghost-writers, which were either published in Iraq before his fall from power or else later with the encouragement of his daughters from his first marriage. The first of these was Zabidah and the

King, the story of a medieval woman named Zabidah who becomes involved with a king of Iraq during the early stages of Arab and Muslim rule here in the seventh and eighth centuries. The novel is based around Tikrit, Saddam’s home region, and generally is seen as an allegory of the alleged destruction of Iraq by the US-led sanctions against the country in the aftermath of the First Gulf War. Although the author of this was given only as ‘Written by He who Wrote it’, it is generally agreed that this was Hussein’s work. Further books followed in 2001 and

2002, notably Men and the City, an account of the Hussein family’s role in overthrowing Ottoman rule in Iraq during the early twentieth century and the subsequent rise of the Ba’ath Party in the region. It is generally agreed that this was written almost entirely by Saddam, as a manuscript in his own idiosyncratic handwriting was located after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. Saddam’s imaginings of the US as being the power which had undermined Iraq and its potential were not far off the mark. There can be little doubt that western sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s

and into the early 2000s led to declining living standards in Iraq as people were unable to acquire some goods entirely or found them to be incredibly expensive owing to the restrictions imposed on the Iraq import economy. But there is also little doubt that Saddam and his corrupt family regime also brought this upon Iraq through their failure to be transparent about their efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction. The degree to which economic and political sanctions were to be imposed on Iraq after the First Gulf War was always tied to whether Saddam and his regime would

divest the country of all such weapons. Admittedly, in 1991 Hussein’s government effectively gave up all of its chemical weapons, but there were lingering efforts throughout the 1990s to produce new weapons of mass destruction, notably biological and chemical weapons such as mustard gas, sarin gas and anthrax. UN inspectors in the mid-1990s discovered that chemicals and compounds like this had been produced in Iraq in the years after the Gulf War and most likely tested on prisoners from Abu Ghraib Prison near Baghdad. Yet subsequent UN inspections were clear that Saddam’s regime had no major effective way of deploying

weapons of mass destruction of any kind against foreign nations. What would perhaps tip the balance against Saddam in this respect, though, was that following a new UN inspection in 1998 the regime simply became uncooperative with the UN inspectors. Ultimately whether or not Saddam continued to have any designs on developing a nuclear programme or chemical and biological weapons in the 1990s and early 2000s would become a major issue which would lead to the end of his regime and his life in the mid-2000s. On the 11th of September 2001 the Islamic terrorist organisation Al-Qaeda, led by Osama

bin Laden, launched a series of attacks on the United States, most notably by hijacking two commercial airliners on the East Coast of America and flying them into the Twin Towers in Downtown Manhattan in New York. In response, the administration of President George W. Bush, the son of the President Bush who had overseen the expulsion of Saddam’s armies from Kuwait a decade earlier, launched the War on Terror, a campaign to overthrow regimes in the Middle East and Islamic world which had supported Al-Qaeda. This began quite reasonably with an invasion of Afghanistan where bin Laden was being

protected at that time. No sooner had Afghanistan been occupied than Bush’s senior officials turned their attentions towards Iraq. While there was zero evidence to suggest that bin Laden had been in any way supported by Saddam, US justification for intervention in Iraq would focus on the illusory notion that Saddam was close to acquiring a nuclear weapon. The evidence was insubstantial and would later be proved to be non-existent, a factor which divided the western world in its support or opposition to the proposed invasion of Iraq, but in the end the Bush administration, supported by Prime Minister Tony

Blair in Britain, pressed ahead with its agenda and began preparing to invade Iraq in the spring of 2003. Saddam’s time as the country’s leader was drawing to a close after a quarter of a century. The US Invasion of Iraq or Second Gulf War, as it is sometimes referred to, was initially a very successful military intervention against Hussein’s regime. The conventional war lasted a period of just a few weeks in the spring of 2003. This saw a joint US-British force invade Iraq from the south, along with small contingents of allied troops from varying allies of the

US, though significantly traditional allies of Washington and London such as the French and Germans condemned the invasion as a war of adventure and refused to take part in it. A bombing campaign commenced in mid-March 2003 codenamed ‘Shock and Awe’ before the coalition forces consisting of upwards of half a million men, plus the Peshmerga Kurds and other disaffected groups within Iraq itself which allied with the US as part of the campaign, moved into southern Iraq. What followed over the next three weeks can scarcely be called a war. The Iraqi Armed Forces, though nominally quite strong and

numerous, utterly collapsed when confronted by the forces of the world’s foremost military power. After the initial incursion US and allied troops quickly made for Baghdad, seizing and occupying the Iraqi capital on the 9th of April. By that time, Saddam and his family and Iraqi government had fled from Baghdad. Final defences were mounted around the Tikrit region, Saddam’s homeland, before that too fell to the US and their allies in mid-April. On the 1st of May, just six weeks after the initiation of the campaign, President George W. Bush visited Iraq and declared an end to the major

combat and victory in the campaign. This, though, was wildly premature and while the Ba’athists might have been defeated in the spring of 2003, the ensuing military occupation of Iraq by the US and British stirred up such an array of political and religious discontents that there would be no peace in Iraq thereafter. As the allied forces headed for Baghdad, Saddam, his family, and many leading members of the Ba’athist regime fled from the capital and went into hiding. This even led the US army to issue marines in Iraq with decks of playing cards which had images of

the 52 most wanted Iraqis. In this Saddam was the Ace of Spades, while his sons, Uday and Qusay featured as the Ace of Clubs and Ace of Hearts. The latter two individuals would soon be found. Uday and Qusay were tracked down by American soldiers on the 9th of April 2003 and killed in a military standoff in the city of Mosul, having tried to make it over the border to Syria. Saddam was probably already in the Tikrit region by then where despite one of the largest manhunts in history he managed to remain in hiding for over

half a year. He was not finally captured until Operation Red Dawn resulted in his capture on the 13th of December 2003 after an acquaintance of Hussein’s had divulged his location. It was a humbling last hiding place for the former dictator, with him pulled in a dishevelled state from what was little more than a hole in the ground by American troops that day. Four days prior to Saddam’s capture the US occupation government had already created the Iraqi Special Tribunal to prosecute leading members of the Iraqi regime and the Iraqi military who were deemed to have committed

crimes against humanity or been involved in the attempted genocide of Iraq’s Kurds. Hussein would now be tried before this tribunal. As he awaited trial he was transferred to Camp Cropper in Baghdad and held there with nearly a dozen other senior Ba’athists. They would remain there for over a year and a half before Saddam’s trial finally commenced on the 19th of October 2005. When it finally commenced after this long delay Saddam refused to recognise the legitimacy of the court, claiming that he could not be tried by what he viewed to be a kangaroo court controlled by

foreign invaders of Iraq. Over the next several months he refused to cooperate with the proceedings, alleging that he had been tortured by his captors and the fact that one of his lawyers was killed during the trial. As a result, Saddam went on a hunger strike for a time in 2006, but none of his objections met with any success. The trial proceeded without his cooperation and on the 6th of November 2006, more than a year after the trial commenced, Saddam was found guilty of having committed crimes against humanity amongst other misdeeds during his long time as

dictator of Iraq. He was sentenced to death by hanging. After he was found guilty and sentenced to death Saddam’s legal team entered an appeal, but this was rejected within a few weeks and an order was issued that the sentence of execution was to be carried out within thirty days. As related since by some of those who were charged with guarding the former dictator, his last days were highly unusual. Those involved were a group of a dozen members of the 551st Military Police Company. Members recounted how Saddam spent his final days eating muffins and listening to

Mary J. Blige records, while intermittently regaling his captors with stories about his time as ruler of Iraq. He was also provided with a small garden plot which he weeded regularly. Some of his old traits as dictator were still evident. When he requested an omelette for breakfast he insisted on sending it back if the outside was torn in any fashion while removing it from the pan. Other than this he spent much time on an exercise bike which he insisted on calling his pony. It was a peculiar last chapter to his life. On the 30th of December

2006 the sentence of execution was carried out when Saddam was hanged at Camp Justice in Baghdad, which led certain sections of the Iraqi populace to celebrate. The dictator’s final meal was of chicken and rice with some hot water and honey. His request to be executed by firing squad was rejected. His body was subsequently sent back to his home region and buried in a family plot at Tikrit. Despite the best hopes of many within the US administration that the execution of Saddam and the full dismantling of the Ba’athist regime would bring about a transformation of the

country into a fully functioning democracy, no such metamorphosis was to occur. Indeed even during the months of Saddam’s imprisonment and trial Iraq had been descending into anarchy. A caretaker government was established in June 2004 and the country’s first legitimate parliamentary elections were held in January 2005, but even as these were being held civil war was breaking out across the country as religious radicals like the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr effectively established their own militias throughout the country and even within Baghdad itself. Attacks on US military personnel were rampant and the administration was reliant on creating a Green

Zone within Baghdad, a heavily fortified and defended district which became the only major part of the country where US personnel were fully free from fear of attack. By 2006 when Saddam was killed, US army personnel were reporting that they had effectively lost control over parts of the country. A troop surge the following year led to a revitalization of the American position, but ultimately Iraq was never transformed in the way which had been envisaged in 2003. As the US gradually pulled out of the country from 2011 it became a hotbed of insurrections and instability, most notably

as the Islamic State secured control over large parts of the north in the mid-2010s whilst fresh political unrest has characterised the early 2020s. Thus, while Saddam has been gone a long time, the political chaos which he and the Ba’athists sewed there remains. Saddam Hussein was unquestionably one of the most brutal dictators of the twentieth century. He rose on the back of the Ba’athist movement in the 1960s and 1970s, a political movement which for all its sins at least originally had some ideological basis to it in its pan-Arab and socialist outlook. Saddam, by way of contrast,

had no ideological grounding other than the attainment of power. In the course of the 1970s he began monopolising it and from the late 1970s onwards he was the de-facto dictator of Iraq. His tenure of that position was disastrous for the Iraqi people and for the people of several neighbouring countries. He plunged Iraq and Iran into one of the bloodiest conflicts of the post-Second World War period, one which lasted for much of the 1980s, killed hundreds of thousands of people and ordered the widespread use of chemical weapons. Then he engaged in genocide against the Kurds of

Iraq before invading Kuwait. All of these actions led to an immense series of international sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s which undermined the quality of life of the average Iraqi even further. The last ten years of his tenure were characterised by a growing despotism personified in the brutal behaviour of his sons and other members of the regime. While many people questioned what the motives of the Bush administration really were in invading Iraq in 2003 and whether it was a war of adventure to secure control of the country’s vast oil reserves, a claim many scholars dispute,

there can be no doubt that it did achieve the successful end of a brutal tyrant and regime. What do you think of Saddam Hussein? Was he truly one of the twentieth century’s most brutal dictators amongst the ranks of Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, and Adolf Hitler? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching. The man known to history as Muammar Gaddafi was born, Muammar Mohammed Abu Minya al-Gaddafi, though many use the name Muammar Qaddafi. He was born most likely sometime in 1941, though some scholars suggest he

was born in the 1930s or in 1943, to a Bedouin family in the Qadhaafa tribe that claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed, near the desert village of Qasr Bu Hadi, south of the city of Sirte in the western deserts of Libya. His father Mohammad Abdul Salam bin Hamed bin Mohammad, simply known as Abu Meniar, was a subsistence goat and camel herder. His mother was named Aisha bin Niran. Both were Arab descendants and were part of the rural poor communities that made up the majority of Italian Libya. Gaddafi was born in a land that had for

millennia been occupied by various invaders. He later wrote that men from his tribe feared the sea, refusing to go near it because of the legacy of seaborn invaders. The most recent invasions had occurred following the decline of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. Libya, then known as Tripoli, had long been a semi-autonomous region of the Ottoman Empire, at times functioning more as an independent state than a part of the Turkish led empire. This independence came under threat in 1902 when European powers “divided” Africa into spheres of influence. In their discussions, European leaders concluded

that Italy had a legitimate claim to the territory known as Libya. Italians saw Libya as rightfully their own, claiming ownership based on their descent from the Romans who had previously conquered the territory over a thousand years earlier. As Italian interest in conquering Libya grew, the territory was racked by divisions as the “Young Turk” Revolution rocked the Ottoman Empire. The Young Turk Revolution was a series of constitutional reforms forced by Turkish nationalists beginning in 1908 that divided elites across the empire, even in far off provinces such as Libya, where supporters of the revolutionaries sought to oust

political appointees of the Ottoman Sultan. In the chaos following the revolution, many Libyans threw their support behind the invading Italians, who in September of 1911 launched a major invasion of Libya. The Italians soon seized many coastal cities, however they were unable to penetrate deeper into the hinterlands of Libya, leading to a long and bloody war between supporters of the Ottoman Empire and the Italian forces and their allies. Increasingly however, as the Ottoman Empire found itself embroiled in World War I, the Libyans were forced to fend for themselves, helping to further fracture the Libyan resistance into

smaller bickering factions. Fighting and protracted negotiations lasted between the Libyans and Italians until 1923, when Benito Mussolini, the new Fascist leader of Italy, launched an all-out invasion of the territory. By 1926 over 20,000 Italian troops were stationed in Libya and the dictator used all available means including modern weaponry, such as tanks, airplanes, and poison gas. Gaddafi’s father fought against these invaders along with thousands of other Libyans. However, their efforts were largely unsuccessful. Not only did the Italians bring modern weaponry to bear against the people of Libya, but they also created concentration camps that held likely

over 100,000 Libyans, or two-thirds of the population. Perhaps as many as 70,000 people died in these camps. The Italians also engaged in all-out warfare, destroying local wells and killing livestock in order to subdue resistance fighters. They even constructed a tall, four-meter thick, barbed wire fence from the city of Bardia to the town of Jaghbub in an effort to halt supplies flowing in from British occupied Egypt. As Italians gained control of larger swathes of Libya, officials encouraged large numbers of immigrants from the Italian mainland to migrate to the newly conquered territory, particularly as Mussolini’s policies of

vast public works began coming to Libya. Roads, new settlements, and other modern conveniences were all part of the Italian government’s efforts to increase the European presence in Libya. However, they also actively discouraged local political participation, instead favoring an Italian-controlled government that frequently clashed with local Libyan tribes.