When Saddam Hussein took power in 1979, many Iraqis believed their country was finally heading somewhere.
But behind all the progress, something darker began to emerge.
One by one, the things he did started revealing a pattern so brutal and calculated that the world still has not fully processed.
Saddam was born on April 28, 1937, in Al-Awja, a poor village near Tikrit in central Iraq.
There was no running water or electricity.
His father disappeared before he could remember him, and his mother, Sabha al-Tulfah, reportedly fell into a deep depression and even tried to abort the pregnancy.
Saddam survived.
As a child, he was sent to live with his uncle, Khairallah Talfah, a former Iraqi army officer who had been jailed by the British for supporting a pro-Nazi coup in 1941.
He came out of prison deeply hostile toward the West and spent years passing those views on to Saddam.
When Saddam moved to Baghdad at around sixteen, he was poor, from the countryside, and determined to rise higher.
In 1957, at age twenty, he joined the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party, which promoted Arab nationalism, strong centralized rule, and often used violence to achieve its goals.
Saddam learned that lesson quickly.
By 1959, he was already willing to kill for the Party.
Iraq at the time was ruled by General Abdul Karim Qasim, whose government was moving closer to the Soviet Union.
The Ba’ath Party wanted him removed, and Saddam joined a team assigned to assassinate him.
On October 7, 1959, the group ambushed Qasim’s car in Baghdad.
The attack failed.
Qasim survived, one gunman was killed, and Saddam was wounded in the leg.
He escaped through Syria to Egypt, where he studied law in Cairo but never graduated.
Despite the failed assassination and exile, his position inside the Party continued to grow.
After the Ba’ath Party briefly took power in 1963, Saddam returned to Iraq.
The government soon collapsed, and he was jailed.
He escaped prison in 1967 and quickly returned to Party work.
On July 17, 1968, the Ba’ath Party successfully seized power.
Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr became Iraq’s leader, while Saddam took charge of the state’s internal security apparatus.
It was the perfect position.
He controlled information, identified enemies, and helped build the system that would eventually make him Iraq’s most powerful man.
Between 1968 and 1979, Saddam effectively ran Iraq from behind the scenes.
During those years, he focused on building a surveillance state and, for a while, modernizing the country.
On the security side, Saddam expanded and reorganized the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s secret intelligence service, turning it into a much larger and far more feared organization.
Informants were placed everywhere, including workplaces, universities, mosques, and neighborhood tea houses.
Citizens were encouraged to report suspicious conversations.
Teachers informed on students.
Students informed on teachers.
Even family members often avoided speaking openly.
At the same time, Saddam pushed a policy that would provide the money to support all of this.
In June 1972, he led the nationalization of the Iraq Petroleum Company, which had been largely controlled by British and American interests since the 1920s.
Almost overnight, oil money poured into the Iraqi government.
Between 1972 and 1980, Iraq’s annual oil income rose from around $500 million to more than $26 billion.
Saddam used that money to build schools, hospitals, and roads.
In 1978, the government launched a massive literacy campaign that was so successful that UNESCO awarded Iraq for it.
More women entered the workforce.
Child mortality fell.
For several years, Iraq looked like one of the developing world’s success stories.
But modernization was never the main goal.
It was about control.
A healthier and more educated population could produce more, pay more taxes, and be monitored more effectively.
Whenever educated citizens began questioning the government, the other side of the system, the Mukhabarat, stepped in.
By 1979, Saddam had decided that al-Bakr was no longer needed.
Officially, al-Bakr resigned on July 16, 1979, because of poor health.
Many people close to the government believed he was forced out.
He spent the rest of his life under house arrest and died in 1982 without ever speaking publicly again.
On July 16, 1979, Saddam Hussein became President of Iraq, Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, Prime Minister, and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.
Only thirty-six days after that, he showed exactly what kind of ruler he intended to be.
On July 22, he gathered hundreds of senior Ba’ath Party officials in a large hall in Baghdad.
Saddam walked in, sat at the front of the room, lit a cigar, and calmly announced that a Syrian-backed plot to overthrow the revolution had been uncovered inside the Party.
A man named Muhyi Abd al-Hussein Mashhadi was then brought forward.
Mashhadi had been one of the most senior figures in the government, serving as Secretary-General of the Revolutionary Command Council.
Looking completely broken, he stood at a microphone and began reading names from a list.
Every time a name was called, armed guards escorted that person out of the room.
Some stood up immediately.
Others were so shaken that they had to be helped from their seats.
In total, sixty-eight men were removed.
Twenty-two were later sentenced to death.
Then Saddam took things even further.
He ordered other senior Ba’ath Party members, the men who had just survived the purge, to serve on the firing squads.
Ministers, generals, and top officials were handed rifles and ordered to execute their own colleagues.
Saddam reportedly watched.
Everything that followed was built on the same idea.
First he applied it to his own Party.
Then to neighboring countries.
And eventually to entire groups of people.
On September 22, 1980, Saddam Hussein ordered the Iraqi military to invade Iran along a 650-kilometer front.
He had reasons, or at least what he saw as reasons.
Iraq and Iran had argued for years over the Shatt al-Arab waterway, an important shipping route where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers meet.
Iran was also in the middle of the 1979 Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and was dealing with major internal chaos.
At the same time, Khomeini was broadcasting messages urging Iraq’s Shia Muslim majority, which made up about 60 percent of the population, to rise up against Saddam’s government.
Saddam saw both an opportunity and a danger.
He expected a quick victory.
Iraqi forces made early gains and captured the Iranian oil city of Khorramshahr in October 1980 after brutal house-to-house fighting.
But Iran did not collapse.
The revolution gave many Iranians something they believed was worth fighting for.
By 1982, massive human wave attacks, including children sent across minefields carrying symbolic keys to paradise, had pushed Iraqi forces back.
What followed was a long and bloody war that neither side could win, and neither side wanted to end.
Both armies dug huge trench systems that looked like something from the First World War.
Saddam’s government, which had been developing chemical weapons since the mid-1970s, began using them against Iranian troops as early as 1983.
Mustard gas and the nerve agent tabun were used at the Battle of al-Hawizeh Marshes and in many other battles.
The international reaction was limited.
The United States was deeply concerned about Iran’s Islamic Revolution and the seizure of American hostages.
As a result, Washington leaned toward Iraq.
The U.
S.
provided satellite intelligence showing Iranian troop positions.
American companies sold Iraq chemicals that could be used to make nerve agents.
The Reagan administration knew Iraq was using chemical weapons and continued its relationship with Saddam’s government anyway.
By 1988, a United Nations ceasefire finally brought the war to an end.
Saddam had not gained a single kilometer of territory or achieved any of his main goals.
He declared victory anyway.
And while the world was focused on the ceasefire, Saddam turned his attention north.
The Kurdish people of northern Iraq had been resisting Baghdad’s rule for decades.
Their demands for autonomy or independence existed long before Saddam came to power.
But under his rule, Kurdish peshmerga fighters became a serious military problem, especially after some Kurdish groups worked with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War.
Saddam did not see this as a political issue that could be negotiated.
He saw it as a threat that had to be eliminated.
The campaign he created was called al-Anfal, an Arabic word meaning “the spoils,” taken from the eighth chapter of the Quran, which describes the division of war booty after battle.
Saddam put his cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, in charge.
Al-Majid, who served as Secretary-General of the Ba’ath Party’s Northern Bureau, was given authority to use whatever methods he wanted.
The Anfal Campaign took place in eight phases between February 23 and September 6, 1988.
Iraqi forces, helped by Kurdish collaborators known as jash, moved systematically through Kurdish rural areas.
Villages received no warning.
Aircraft bombed settlements.
Artillery blocked roads to stop people from escaping.
Ground troops followed behind.
Men and boys roughly between the ages of fifteen and fifty were separated from their families at collection centers.
They were tied up, loaded into vehicles, and taken to remote desert areas, mainly in al-Anbar Province, far from their homes.
There they were executed and buried in mass graves.
Women, children, and elderly people were sent to detention camps with almost no food, little medical care, and extreme heat.
Many died there.
Around 4,000 Kurdish villages were destroyed.
Homes were bulldozed.
Wells were poisoned or filled with concrete.
Orchards were cut down.
The goal was not only to kill people but to make sure they could never return.
Estimates of the death toll range from 50,000 to 182,000 people.
Then came Halabja, and the campaign entered a category of crime for which history has a specific name.
On March 16, 1988, while Iraqi forces were fighting Iranian troops and Kurdish peshmerga near the town of Halabja in Sulaymaniyah Governorate, Iraqi aircraft were ordered to fly over the town itself.
Halabja had about 80,000 civilians.
The planes dropped bombs containing a mix of mustard gas, sarin, tabun, and possibly VX nerve agent.
Mustard gas burns the skin and destroys the lungs.
Sarin and tabun attack the nervous system and can kill within minutes.
People collapsed where they stood.
Entire families were found dead inside their homes, still sitting around tables.
Birds fell from the sky.
Animals died in the streets.
One photograph taken by Iranian journalist Kaveh Golestan showed a dead father lying on a road with his infant child curled against his chest.
The image spread around the world and became one of the most famous photographs of the twentieth century.
Between 3,200 and 5,000 civilians died within hours.
Another 7,000 to 10,000 were injured, many permanently.
Some were blinded.
Others suffered severe nerve damage and lifelong breathing problems.
Rates of cancer and birth defects in the area remained unusually high for decades afterward.
The United States, which was still maintaining ties with Saddam’s government, initially suggested that Iran might have been responsible.
The claim was widely doubted and was later contradicted by investigations conducted by the U.
S.
government itself.
Ali Hassan al-Majid earned his infamous nickname during this campaign.
The world came to know him as “Chemical Ali.
” By 1990, Iraq was broke.
Along with the $80 billion in debt, oil prices had fallen sharply, reducing the income Iraq needed to pay the debts.
Saddam blamed Kuwait for part of the problem.
Kuwait was producing more oil than its OPEC quota allowed, increasing supply and pushing prices down.
Saddam also accused Kuwait of drilling into the Rumaila oil field, which sits along the Iraq-Kuwait border, and stealing Iraqi oil.
There was another argument as well, though many saw it as an excuse.
Saddam claimed Kuwait had historically been part of Iraq and had only been separated by British colonial officials in the early twentieth century.
Most historians and legal experts rejected that claim.
On August 2, 1990, at around 2:00 in the morning, roughly 100,000 Iraqi troops supported by 700 tanks crossed into Kuwait.
Kuwait’s military had only about 16,000 personnel.
The country was conquered in less than two days.
Kuwait’s ruler, Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, fled to Saudi Arabia.
Iraqi troops looted hospitals, government offices, and private homes.
Kuwaiti civilians and foreign nationals were detained.
Documented crimes included murder, torture, and rape.
The United Nations Security Council condemned the invasion the same day through Resolution 660.
Economic sanctions followed within days.
The United States, led by President George H.
W.
Bush, began building a coalition of 34 countries and deploying troops to Saudi Arabia in an operation called Desert Shield.
Iraq was ordered to withdraw by January 15, 1991.
Saddam ignored the deadline.
At 2:38 a.
m.
on January 17, 1991, American cruise missiles struck Baghdad.
Operation Desert Storm had begun.
For the next 38 days, coalition aircraft flew more than 100,000 missions against Iraqi military targets, including command centers, airfields, artillery positions, and supply routes.
On February 24, coalition ground forces entered Kuwait and southern Iraq.
The ground war lasted exactly 100 hours.
Large numbers of Iraqi troops surrendered or fled north as their equipment failed and supply lines collapsed.
As his forces retreated, Saddam ordered the destruction of Kuwait’s oil facilities.
Iraqi troops set fire to around 700 oil wells.
The fires burned for nine months.
Thick black smoke covered the sky.
Oil spread across the desert.
It served no military purpose.
It was destruction for the sake of destruction.
On February 28, President Bush announced a ceasefire.
Kuwait was free again.
But coalition forces stopped at Iraq’s border.
They did not march on Baghdad or remove Saddam.
The decision was intentional.
The coalition’s mission had been to liberate Kuwait, not overthrow Iraq’s government.
American leaders also feared the chaos that might follow if Saddam was removed.
So they left him in power.
Even before the ceasefire was finalized, Iraq was already beginning to explode from within.
In the south, Iraq’s Shia Muslim majority, which had long faced discrimination under Saddam’s Sunni-dominated government, launched an uprising on March 1, 1991.
The rebellion began in Basra, Iraq’s second-largest city, when a retreating Iraqi soldier fired a tank shell at a giant portrait of Saddam.
Within days, the revolt had spread across fourteen of Iraq’s eighteen governorates.
Cities such as Najaf, Karbala, Nasiriyah, and Hillah briefly fell into rebel control.
Government buildings were attacked, and senior Ba’ath Party officials were hunted down.
Many rebels believed outside help was coming.
American broadcasts from Voice of America and Radio Free Europe had encouraged Iraqis to rise up and “take matters into their own hands.
” But the support never arrived.
The Bush administration, concerned about Iranian influence over Iraq’s Shia population and unwilling to go beyond its UN mandate, chose not to intervene.
Saddam responded with the Republican Guard, six divisions of his most loyal and best-equipped troops.
Backed by helicopter gunships, tanks, and artillery, they moved south.
Basra was retaken on March 7, 1991.
Karbala fell on March 14.
Fighting in Najaf and Karbala, two of the holiest cities in Shia Islam and home to the shrines of Imam Ali and Imam Hussein, was especially brutal.
Executions took place inside shrine areas, and bodies were left in the streets.
Estimates of those killed in the south between March and April 1991 range from 25,000 to 100,000 people.
Many of the mass graves discovered after 2003 dated back to this period.
At the same time, the Kurds launched their own uprising in the north.
Kurdish peshmerga forces seized Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah, Dohuk, and Erbil.
Then the Republican Guard moved north as well.
As Iraqi forces advanced, nearly 2 million Kurds fled toward the borders of Turkey and Iran during the freezing temperatures of early spring.
Thousands died from hunger, disease, and exposure in the mountains.
Images of the refugees were broadcast around the world and created intense international pressure.
In April 1991, the United States, Britain, and France established a no-fly zone north of the 36th parallel.
The Kurdish regions gained a level of protection from Baghdad’s air force.
But Saddam had already sent his message.
After years of the brutal reign, on March 20, 2003, the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Poland invaded Iraq, claiming Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed an immediate threat.
Later investigations found that much of the intelligence behind those claims was flawed and, in some cases, misrepresented.
The campaign moved quickly.
Coalition forces entered from Kuwait and the west, and Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003.
In Firdos Square, a large statue of Saddam was pulled down as television cameras broadcast the scene worldwide.
Saddam himself had vanished and stayed hidden for months.
Then on December 13, 2003, U.S.
soldiers searched a farm near ad-Dawr, about fifteen kilometers from Tikrit.
Beneath a small hut was a hidden hole in the ground, only six to eight feet deep and barely large enough for one person.
Inside was Saddam Hussein.
He had a pistol and about $750,000 in cash.
He surrendered without resistance.
Saddam was then handed over to Iraq’s Interim Government, and his trial began on October 19, 2005, before the Iraqi Special Tribunal.
The first case focused on the 1982 massacre in Dujail, a Shia town where gunmen had attacked Saddam’s convoy.
In retaliation, Saddam ordered a crackdown that led to the execution of around 148 residents.
The evidence was overwhelming.
On November 5, 2006, he was found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging.
The execution took place on December 30, 2006, at Camp Justice in Baghdad.
Saddam wore a black coat and white shirt, carried prayer beads, and was not blindfolded.
As the rope was placed around his neck, people in the room shouted taunts linked to Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr.
The trapdoor opened.
A mobile phone video of the execution leaked within hours and spread around the world.
The footage, especially the taunts, sparked controversy, with some critics arguing that the execution looked more like revenge than justice.
Saddam Hussein was sixty-nine years old, and his reign of terror was finally over.
