From the early 1960s until his arrest in 2003, Saddam Hussein was heavily involved in the politics and general administration of Iraqi affairs. The “Butcher of Baghdad” has a story that should be written in blood. Under Saddam’s rule, his government was responsible for a cumulative number of about 250,000 Iraqi deaths, a figure that remains moderate.
Saddam was a nationalist and socialist and was also a member of the Ba’ath Party at various levels. After his official accession to power as supreme ruler of Iraq in 1979, he immediately set to work to dispel any suspected upheaval or uprising by the Sh’ias, especially the Kurds.
He also took full control of the country’s oil financial system and held an extreme majority of government positions with his fellow Sunni Arabs, who were effectively a minority group. Saddam Hussein was eventually deposed by the United States and its allies in a 2003 invasion, despite a false accusation that his government was in possession of a weapon of mass destruction. He was tried and sentenced to death three years later, in 2006 by an Iraqi court for his crimes against humanity which included the massacre of 148 Shia Iraqis in 1982.
Saddam Hussein’s Bio
Saddam Hussein Abd al Majid al Tikriti, his mother Subha Tulfah al-Mussallat gave birth to him a few kilometers from the city of Tikrit. Saddam, whose first name means “one who confronts himself”, never knew his father and traveled to Baghdad to stay with his brother, Khairallah Talfah, his mother. Hussein returned to his mother after his remarriage. However, her husband, Hussein’s father-in-law, was unwelcome and treated Saddam with an iron fist. He eventually fled and returned to his uncle when he was 10 years old.
On the advice of his uncle, Saddam Hussein made his secondary education imbued with nationalism. He then spent three years in an Iraqi law school. However, he quit his education in 1957 and joined the pan-Arab Baath Party.
Political career
As a member of the Baath Party, Saddam was inspired by the pan-Arab nationalist ideology of Halal Abdel Nasser. The wave of political revolution that took place across the Middle East at this time saw monarchies overthrown, including the Fasai II of Iraq in July 1958.
Saddam’s Baath Party held a majority in the Cabinet of the next government led by General Qasim. However, they quickly fell out with Iraq’s new leader due to his opposition to Nasser’s pan-Arab ideologies. The party concluded the assassination of Qasim and Saddam was chosen to lead the operation.
The assassination attempt was unsuccessful, only managed to leave Qasim injured. Saddam and a few other authors fled the country to take refuge in Syria, the homeland of Baathist thought and philosophy, where he was fully accepted into the party by Michel Aflaq, the leader of the Baathist movement.
Saddam moved to Egypt in 1960 where he finished high school and tried his hand at a law degree, without success.
He returned to Iraq in 1963 after Qasim was overthrown in favor of Abdul Salam Arif. However, he remained on the sidelines of political affairs until his incarceration in October 1964. He served his sentence until sometime in 1966, when he was released. Shortly after, his organizational skills led him to be given the post of deputy secretary of the regional command by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.
In 1968, Hassan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein Abdul Rahman Arif, brother of Salam Arif (who had succeeded the latter as president), were overthrown and took office as president and deputy respectively. Saddam’s influence within the party and national politics quickly became very evident. More than Al-Bakr, he was the force that held everything in place and pushed the Ba’ath party forward.
As his influence grew within the government’s broader structure and base of support, Saddam created a well-structured and fortified security system to prevent coups. In June 1972, he led efforts to have Iraq seize the oil interests of expatriate entities. This led to a large increase in revenue the following year due to the energy crisis that took place.
The 1970s were a golden period for Iraq and it’s citizens. Saddam Hussein defended many causes, the main one being the fight against illiteracy and the diversification of the country’s economy, largely based on oil. He was also instrumental in signing the fifteen-year-old Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union in 1972. The move undermined the security infrastructure established by the United States in the Middle East. East.
In 1976, Saddam was more or less the leader of Iraq, with his position as a general in the Iraqi armed forces. He finally officially took over in 1979 from Al-Bakr, whose health did not allow him to remain as Supreme Leader.
Within weeks of taking control, Hussein had 68 members of the Ba’ath Party leadership sentenced to death for accusing them of being disloyal. He performed many more in the weeks that followed.
Through Ba’ath Party paramilitaries and the General Intelligence Department, Saddam continued to tighten his grip on the government. These bodies helped track down and quash coup attempts and eliminate apparent opposition inside and outside the shores of Iraq beginning in 1974.
His sway as vice president in the country’s highest seat earned him two dodgy elections in 1995 and 2002, the last of which he won 100% of the votes cast.
In the years following the 1980s, Saddam continued to pit himself against Iran in the Iran-Iraq War with strong allies like the United States and France behind him. He would later turn against the United States after they declared themselves friends and supported Israel under the administration of George HW Bush.
In the early 1990s, his ambition to make Kuwait part of Iraq sparked the Gulf War. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Saddam Hussien continued to struggle to retain his power. There was growing turmoil in Iraq, a growing list of influential enemies, as well as United Nations efforts against his administration.
Capture and Death
On March 20, 2003, a US-led military coalition invaded Iraq, overwhelming its administration and the country’s military within weeks.
Saddam disappeared following the invasion. He was ruled out for months and was finally captured on December 13, 2003 as part of Operation Red Dawn. Loosely called “Vic”, which means “very important criminal”, the ousted president was kept in a detention center in Baghdad. He was then transferred to Camp Cropper, an American base where he was tried by the interim Iraqi government. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity on November 5, 2006 and sentenced to death on December 30 of the same year.
What is Saddam Hussein’s religion?
Basically, Hussein was born, raised, and remained a Muslim until the end of his life. However, among the many sects and factions of the Muslim faith, the former president belonged to the Sunni Muslim sub-tribe and ideology. The Sunnis had a more rationalist and progressive ideology than other major sects like the Shia, which had a more traditional thought.
Sunnis were a minority group of Muslims, a faith that many consider remarkable given the fact that Saddam Hussein took power, populated his administration with Sunnis and survived as long as he did.
Family: wife, sons and daughters
Considering both rumors and reality, the former Supreme Leader of Iraq was married four times from 1963 to 2002. His first wife, Sajidah Talfah, was betrothed to his fiancée since age of five years. Sajidah, who is older than Saddam, is his first cousin and the daughter of his uncle Khairallah who basically raised him and taught him everything.
The couple married in 1963 after Saddam returned from exile in Egypt. They had five children together: two sons, Uday Hussein (1964) and Qusay Hussein (1966), and three daughters Raghdad Hussein (1968), Rana Hussein (1969) and Hala Hussein (1972).
Saddam Hussein’s second wife started out as his mistress. He then reportedly took her from the hands of her very famous husband and married her in 1986. The wife, Samira Shahbandar, reportedly had a child for the chief before escaping to Lebanon.
Hussein reportedly took a scientist, Nidalal-Hamdani as a third wife, then Wafa el-Mullah al-Howeish, daughter of former Iraqi minister Abdul Tawab el-Mullah Howeish in 2002.
Saddam’s Hussein’s Height
Hussein was a man of average height and stands reasonably ranked among the best bullies in the world in terms of height. Taller than Muammar Al Gathafi and much shorter than Osama Bin Laden, he stood at a height of 1.86m (6ft 1in).