As vice president under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and at a time when many groups were seen as capable of overthrowing the government, Saddam created security forces through which he tightly controlled conflicts between the government and the armed forces. In the early 1970s, Saddam nationalized oil and foreign banks, largely due to the Iran – Iraq Conflict, the Gulf War, and UN sanctions, ultimately making the economy insolvent.Saddam cemented his authority over the government apparatus through the 1970s, as oil money helped Iraq 's economy grow at a rapid pace. The country's positions of power were mostly filled with Sunni Arabs, a minority that only made up a fifth of the population.
Before he was born, both Saddam's father and brother died of cancer. These deaths so devastated Saddam's mother, Sabha, that she tried to abort her pregnancy and commit suicide. By the time her son was born, Sabha "would have nothing to do with him," and an uncle took Saddam in.
His mother remarried and through this marriage, Saddam acquired three half-brothers. Upon his return his stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, harshly treated Saddam. At about the age of 10, Saddam fled the family and returned to live in Baghdad with his uncle Kharaillah Talfah, who became Saddam's father figure. Talfah, the father of Saddam's future wife, was a devout Sunni Muslim and veteran of the Anglo-Iraqi War of 1941 between Iraqi nationalists and the United Kingdom, which remained a major colonial power in the area. Talfah later became Baghdad 's mayor during Saddam's reign of power, until Saddam's notorious corruption forced him out of office.
Later in his life relatives were some of his closest friends and supporters from his native Tikrit. He attended a nationalistic high school in Baghdad, under the supervision of his uncle. After high school Saddam studied for three years at an Iraqi law school, dropping out at the age of 20 in 1957 to join the radical pan-Arab Ba'ath Movement, whose supporter was his uncle. Saddam apparently supported himself as a secondary school teacher during this period.Ba'athist ideology originated in Syria and the Ba'ath Party followed a great deal in Syria at the time, but in 1955 there were fewer than 300 members of the Ba'ath Party in Iraq and it is believed that Saddam's primary reason for joining the party was his family connection with Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr and other leading Ba'athists through his uncle.
Revolutionary sentiment was characteristic of the Iraq era and of the Middle East as a whole. Progressive people and socialists in Iraq have attacked traditional political elites. Additionally, Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism in Egypt had a profound impact on young Ba'athists like Saddam. Nasser 's rise foreshadowed a wave of revolutions across the Middle East during the 1950s and 1960s, with the collapse of Iraq, Egypt, and Libya monarchies. Nasser motivated nationalists across the Middle East by battling against the British and the French during the 1956 Suez Crisis, modernizing Egypt and politically uniting the Arab world.
In 1963, when the so-called Ramadan Revolution overthrew Qasim 's government, Saddam returned to Iraq but was arrested the following year as a result of in-fighting within the Ba'ath Party. He remained engaged in politics while in prison, however, and was appointed Deputy Secretary of the Regional Command in 1966. Shortly thereafter he managed to escape from prison, and continued to strengthen his political power in the years that followed.
Saddam participated in a bloodless but successful Ba'athist coup in 1968 which resulted in Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr becoming the president of Iraq and his deputy, Saddam. Saddam proved himself to be an effective and progressive politician during al-Bakr 's presidency, albeit a decidedly ruthless one. He has done much to modernize Iraq's infrastructure, industry, and health-care system, raising social services , education, and farming subsidies to levels unparalleled in the region's other Arab nations. He also nationalized Iraq's oil industry, just before the 1973 energy crisis, resulting in the nation 's huge revenues.At the same time, however, Saddam helped develop Iraq's first chemical weapons program and created a powerful security apparatus to guard against coups, which included both Ba'athist paramilitary groups and the People's Army, and which frequently used torture, rape and assassination to achieve its objectives.
In 1979, when al-Bakr tried to unite Iraq and Syria, in a move that would have effectively left Saddam impotent, Saddam forced al-Bakr to resign, and on 16 July 1979, Saddam became Iraq 's president. Less than a week later, he called up a Ba'ath Party assembly. A list of 68 names was read out loud during the meeting, and every person on the list was arrested promptly, and removed from the room. Of those 68, they were all charged and found guilty of treason, and sentenced to death by 22. Hundreds of Saddam's political foes had been executed by early August 1979.
What did Saddam Hussein do to the US
Ayatollah Khomeini led a successful Islamic Revolution in Iraq's northeast neighbour, Iran, the same year that Saddam ascended to the presidency. Saddam, whose political power partly rested on the support of Iraq's Sunni minority population, was concerned that developments in Shiite majority Iran might lead to a similar uprising in Iraq. In response, Saddam ordered Iraqi forces to invade Iran's oil-rich Khuzestan region on 22 September 1980.The conflict soon flourished into an all-out war, but Western nations and much of the Arab world, fearful of the spread of Islamic radicalism and what it would mean for the region and the world, firmly laid their support behind Saddam, despite the fact that his invasion of Iran clearly violated international legislation. Throughout the conflict, these same fears would essentially cause the international community to ignore Iraq's use of chemical weapons, its genocidal treatment of its Kurdish population and its burgeoning nuclear program. A peace agreement was eventually signed on 20 August 1988, following years of violent fighting that left hundreds of thousands dead on both sides.
In the aftermath of the conflict, seeking a way to revitalize Iraq's war-ravaged economy and infrastructure, Saddam turned his attention towards Iraq 's wealthy neighbor, Kuwait, in the late 1980's. On 2 August 1990, Saddam ordered the invasion of Kuwait using the justification that it was a historic part of Iraq. It immediately passed a UN Security Council resolution placing economic sanctions on Iraq and setting a deadline by which Iraqi forces would leave Kuwait. When the deadline of January 15, 1991 was ignored, a U.S.-led coalition force confronted Iraqi forces and driven them from Kuwait a mere six weeks later.A ceasefire agreement was signed which included Iraq's dismantling of its programs for germs and chemical weapons. The economic sanctions against Iraq imposed earlier remained in place. Despite this and having suffered a crushing defeat for his army, Saddam claimed victory in the conflict.
The resulting economic hardships from the Gulf War further divided an already fractured Iraqi population. During the 1990s, various Shiite and Kurdish uprisings took place, but the rest of the world, fearing another war, Kurdish independence (in Turkey 's case) or the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, did little or nothing to support those rebellions, and ultimately they were crushed by Saddam's increasingly repressive security forces. Iraq also remained under intense international scrutiny, at the same time. In 1993, the United States launched a damaging missile attack on Baghdad, when Iraqi forces violated a no-fly zone imposed by the United Nations.Further breaches of the no-fly zones and the alleged continuation of Iraq's weapons programs in 1998 resulted in further missile strikes on Iraq, which would occur intermittently until February 2001.
Members of the Bush administration had suspected a relationship between the Hussein government and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization. In his State of the Union speech in January 2002, U.S. President George W. Bush, along with Iran and North Korea, named Iraq as part of his so-called "Axis of Evil" and claimed the country was developing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism.
UN inspections of suspected weapons sites in Iraq began later that year, but little or no evidence was ultimately found that such programs had existed. Despite this, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, on the pretense that Iraq actually had a covert weapons program and that it was planning attacks. Government and military were toppled within weeks and Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003. However, Saddam managed to elude capture.
An intensive search for Saddam commenced in the months that followed. Saddam released several audio recordings while in hiding, in which he denounced the invaders of Iraq and called for resistance. Saddam was finally found hiding in a small underground bunker near a farmhouse in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit, on December 13th 2003. He was transferred from there to a U.S. base in Baghdad, where he would live until June 30th, 2004, when he was formally handed over to the provisional Iraqi government in order to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
Saddam would prove to be a belligerent defendant during the subsequent trial, often boisterously challenging the authority of the tribunal and making bizarre statements. Saddam was found guilty on 5 November 2006, and sentenced to death. The sentence was appealed, but ended up being upheld by an appeals court. On 30 December 2006, Saddam was hanged at Camp Justice, an Iraqi base in Baghdad, despite his appeal to be shot. He was buried on 31 December 2006 at Al-Awja, his birthplace.