Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein rose through the Ba'ath Party to become the dominant figure in Iraq in the 1970s and its president from 1979 until the American-led invasion of 2003. He used oil wealth to modernise Iraq while ruling through feared security services, and led it into two ruinous wars, against Iran and over Kuwait. His rule is estimated to have caused at least 250,000 arbitrary deaths and disappearances. He was captured in 2003, tried by an Iraqi court and hanged in 2006.

Saddam was born on 28 April 1937 in al-Awja, a village near Tikrit, into a poor Sunni Arab family; his father died before he was born. As a boy he went to live with his uncle Khairallah Talfah in Baghdad, his mentor. In 1957 he joined the pan-Arab Ba'ath Party. Two years later he took part in a failed attempt to assassinate the prime minister, Abdul-Karim Qasim, and fled to Syria and then Egypt. He returned after 1963 and, despite two years in prison, became a leading party organiser.

After the Ba'athist coup of July 1968, Saddam became deputy to President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and built up the party's security apparatus. In 1972 he oversaw the nationalisation of foreign oil interests, and the oil price rise of 1973 funded roads, electrification, free schooling, a large literacy campaign and expanded opportunities for women. The government also fought Kurdish rebels and, after their defeat in 1975, forcibly moved hundreds of thousands of Kurds. By the mid-1970s Saddam was effectively running the country, and on 16 July 1979 he pushed the ailing al-Bakr aside and became president. Days later, at a videotaped party meeting, 68 members were named as traitors; 22 were sentenced to death.

Fearing the spread of Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamic revolution among Iraq's Shia majority, and seeking advantage over a weakened neighbour, Saddam invaded Iran on 22 September 1980. The Iran–Iraq War became a long, costly stalemate. Iraq received support from Gulf Arab states, the Soviet Union and Western countries, and used chemical weapons against Iranian troops. Late in the war the Anfal campaign against the Kurds killed between 50,000 and 100,000 people according to Human Rights Watch, which calls it genocide; on 16 March 1988 a gas attack on the town of Halabja killed between 3,200 and 5,000. The war ended in August 1988 with borders almost unchanged and perhaps half a million dead on both sides.

Heavily in debt, Saddam demanded that Kuwait cancel its loans and stop depressing oil prices. On 2 August 1990 Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait, soon declared an Iraqi province. A coalition led by the United States and authorised by the United Nations began air attacks on 16 January 1991 and drove Iraq out of Kuwait in February in the Gulf War. Saddam then crushed Shia and Kurdish uprisings, in which an estimated 100,000 to 180,000 people died.

Through the 1990s UN sanctions blocked Iraq's oil exports and caused severe hardship until an oil-for-food programme was accepted in 1996. Saddam launched a "Faith Campaign" that gave religion a larger public role. Disputes over weapons inspections led to repeated American and British air strikes, notably in December 1998.

In 2002 the United States under George W. Bush accused Iraq of building weapons of mass destruction and of links to al-Qaeda. UN inspectors who returned in late 2002 found no stockpiles, and neither charge was borne out. American-led forces invaded on 20 March 2003 and took Baghdad on 9 April in the Iraq War. Saddam went into hiding but was found near Tikrit on 13 December 2003. An Iraqi tribunal convicted him of crimes against humanity for the killing of 148 Shia residents of the town of Dujail after an attempt on his life in 1982, and he was hanged on 30 December 2006. A leaked phone video of onlookers taunting him caused international controversy.

Our 1985 map shows Iraq under Saddam during the war with Iran, and the 1994 map shows it after the Gulf War, with Kuwait restored.