Saddam Hussein al-Majid al-Tikriti

Saddam Hussein was born on 28 April 1937 in the poor farming village of Tikrit, Iraq, where he was raised by his widowed mother. In 1955, he moved to the neighbouring city of Baghdad, where he became involved in the Arab Nationalist Movement.

A year after Saddam Hussein had joined the Ba'ath party, army officers led by General Abdul Karim Qassim overthrew Faisal II of Iraq. The Ba'athists opposed the new regime, and in 1959, Saddam Hussein was involved in the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Qassim. Saddam Hussein was shot in the leg, but managed to flee to Syria, from where he later moved to Egypt. He was sentenced to death, in absentia. In exile he attended the University of Cairo law school.

Army officers, including some aligned with the Ba'ath party, came to power in Iraq in a military coup in 1963. However, the new regime was ousted quickly, within seven to eight months, torn by internal faction fights.

Saddam Hussein returned to Iraq, but was imprisoned in 1964 when an anti-Ba'ath group led by Abdul Rahman Arif took power. He escaped from jail in 1967 and became one of the leading members of the party.

In July 1968 a second coup brought the Ba'athists back to power under General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, a Tikriti and a relative of Saddam Hussein. The Ba'ath's ruling clique named Saddam Hussein Vice-Chairman of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council and Vice President of Iraq.

In his new position, Saddam Hussein concentrated on improving Iraq's domestic problems. He nationalized the country's oil industry, which served as Iraq's major source of wealth. Benefiting from the rise of oil prices in the early 1970s, Saddam Hussein implemented an economic improvement plan that included new factories, energy for all, free hospitals, and free schools.

In 1979 President al-Bakr began to make treaties with Syria, also under Ba'athist leadership, that would lead to unification between the two countries. Syrian President Hafez al-Assad would become deputy leader in a union, and this would drive Saddam Hussein to obscurity. Before this could happen, however, the ailing al-Bakr resigned on 16 July 1979 and Saddam Hussein formally assumed the presidency of Iraq.

Shortly afterwards, he convened an assembly of Ba'ath party leaders on 22 July 1979. During the assembly, which he ordered videotaped, Saddam Hussein claimed to have found spies and conspirators within the Ba'ath Party and read out the names of members whom he thought could oppose him. These members were labelled "disloyal" and were removed from the room one-by-one to face a firing squad. After the list was read, Saddam Hussein congratulated those still seated in the room for their past and future loyalty.

That same year, he led Arab opposition to the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt.

After Khomeini gained power in Iran, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for ten months over the sovereignty of the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which divides the two countries. Iraq and Iran entered into open warfare on 22 September 1980. The pretext for hostilities with Iran was this territorial dispute, but the war was more likely an attempt by Saddam Hussein, supported by both the United States and the Soviet Union, to have Iraq form a bulwark against the expansion of radical Iranian-style revolution.

During the war, Iraq repeatedly used chemical weapons against Iranian forces and Kurdish separatists.

On 16 March 1988 Iraqi troops, on orders from Saddam Hussein to stop a Kurdish uprising, attacked the Kurdish town of Halabjah with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents killing 5000 people, mostly women and children. Dissenting opinions dispute the numbers and have said the incident was actually a battle in the Iran-Iraq war where chemical weapons were used on both sides and a significant portion of the fatalities were caused by the Iranian weapons.

Saddam Hussein reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political support. The Iranians, hoping to bring down Saddam Hussein's secular government and instigate a Shi'ite rebellion in Iraq, refused a cease-fire until 1988.

The bloody eight-year war ended in a stalemate. There were hundreds of thousands of casualties. Perhaps upwards of 1.7 million died on both sides. Both economies, previously healthy and expanding, were left in ruins.

Saddam Hussein was also stuck with a war debt of roughly $75 billion. He desperately sought out cash once again, this time for post-war reconstruction.

Saddam Hussein also put pressure on Kuwait to forgive its share of his war debt, some $30 billion.

He argued that since the struggle with Iran had been fought for the benefit of the other Gulf Arab states as much as for Iraq that a share of Iraqi debt should be forgiven. Perhaps Saddam Hussein's war with Iran spared the Kuwaitis from the imminent threat of Iranian domination.

The Kuwaitis refused to raise oil prices and also helped spearhead OPEC's opposition to the production cuts that Saddam Hussein had requested. Kuwait then reactivated some oil fields in disputed territories between Kuwait and Iraq.

They were also some historic disputes about Kuwaiti access to the sea belonging to Iraqi.

As Iraq-Kuwait relations rapidly deteriorated, Saddam Hussein was receiving conflicting information about how the U.S. would respond to the prospects of an invasion.

On 2 August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded and annexed Kuwait, thus sparking an international crisis. The annexation of Kuwait gave Iraq, with its own substantial oil fields, control of 20 percent of the Persian Gulf reserves.

Co-operation between the United States and the Soviet Union made possible the passage of resolutions in the United Nations Security Council giving Iraq a deadline to leave Kuwait and approving the use of force if Saddam Hussein did not comply with the timetable.

Saddam Hussein ignored the Security Council deadline. Backed by the Security Council, a U.S.-led coalition launched missile attacks on Iraq, on 16 January 1991. The United States and a group of allies it had hastily rounded up to fight the Gulf War, including Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia, evicted Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait in January 1991.

Some 175,000 Iraqis were taken prisoner and casualties were estimated at over 85,000.

Iraq's ethnic and religious divisions, together with the brutality of the conflict that this had engendered, laid the groundwork for post-war rebellions. In the aftermath of the fighting, social and ethnic unrest among Shi'ite Muslims, Kurds, and dissident military units threatened the stability of Saddam Hussein's regime. Uprisings erupted in the Kurdish north and Shi'a southern and central parts of Iraq, but were ruthlessly repressed.

Saddam Hussein's support base of Tikriti tribesmen, family members, and other supporters was divided after the war and in the following years, contributing to the regime's increasingly repressive and arbitrary nature. Domestic repression inside Iraq grew worse, and Saddam Hussein's sons, Uday Hussein and Qusay Hussein, became increasingly powerful and carried out a private reign of terror. They likely had a leading hand when, in August 1995, two of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law (Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel), who held high positions in the Iraqi military, defected to Jordan. Both were killed after returning to Iraq the following February.

Saddam Hussein increasingly portrayed himself as a devout Muslim, in an effort to co-opt the conservative religious segments of society. Some elements of Sharia law were re-introduced (such as the 2001 edict imposing the death penalty for homosexuality and other sexual offences), and the ritual phrase "Allah Akbar" ("God is great"), in Saddam Hussein's handwriting, was added to the national flag.

The domestic political equation changed in the U.S. after the 11September 2001 attacks. In his January 2002 state-of-the-union message to Congress, George W. Bush (the son of George H.W. Bush) spoke of an "axis of evil" comprising Iran, North Korea, and Iraq.

Bush claimed, "The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade." "Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror," said Bush.

In March 2003, after months of debate, the United States and Britain led the war on Iraq without the support of the U.N. Security Council.

After four weeks, coalition ground and air forces surrounded and captured Baghdad. Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit fell with little resistance, and the Pentagon declared that major combat in Iraq was over.

On 13 December 2003, acting on a tip, U.S. forces captured Saddam Hussein, who was hiding in a hole in the ground at a farmhouse outside of Tikrit.