Saddam Hussein was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 to 2003. He also served as prime minister of Iraq from 1979 to 1991 and later from 1994 to 2003. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and later its Iraqi regional branch. Ideologically, he espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, while the policies and political ideas he championed are collectively known as Saddamism.
Tariq Aziz was an Iraqi politician who served as Deputy Prime Minister (1979–2003), Minister of Foreign Affairs (1983–1991) and a close advisor of President Saddam Hussein. Their association began in the 1950s when both were activists for the then-banned Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. He was both an Arab nationalist and a member of the Chaldean Catholic Church.
Iraq under the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party saw severe violations of human rights. Secret police, state terrorism, torture, mass murder, genocide, ethnic cleansing, rape, deportations, extrajudicial killings, forced disappearances, assassinations, chemical warfare, and the destruction of the Mesopotamian marshes were some of the methods Saddam Hussein and the country's Ba'athist government used to maintain control. Saddam committed crimes of aggression during the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War, which violated the Charter of the United Nations. The total number of deaths and disappearances related to repression during this period is unknown, but is estimated to be at least 250,000 to 290,000 according to Human Rights Watch, with the great majority of those occurring as a result of the Anfal genocide in 1988 and the suppression of the uprisings in Iraq in 1991. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued regular reports of widespread imprisonment and torture.
Ali Hassan Majid al-Tikriti, nicknamed Chemical Ali, was an Iraqi military officer and politician under Saddam Hussein who served as defence minister, interior minister, and chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. He was also the governor of Kuwait during much of the 1990–91 Gulf War.
Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr was an Iraqi politician who served as the fourth president of Iraq, from 17 July 1968 to 16 July 1979. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party and later the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organisation Ba'ath Party – Iraq Region, which espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism.
Sabawi Ibrahim al-Tikriti, half-brother of Saddam Hussein, was the leader of the Iraqi secret service, the Mukhabarat, at the time of the 1991 Gulf War. He was the head of the Directorate of General Security from 1991 to 1996, and later served as a presidential advisor to Hussein.
Barzan Ibrahim Hassan al-Tikriti, also known as Barazan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, Barasan Ibrahem Alhassen and Barzan Hassan, was one of three half-brothers of Saddam Hussein, and a leader of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi intelligence service. Despite falling out of favour with Saddam at one time, he was believed to have been a close presidential adviser at the time of his capture by U.S. forces in 2003. On 15 January 2007, Barzan was hanged for crimes against humanity. He was decapitated by the hangman's rope after errors were made calculating his body weight and length of drop from the platform.
The following is a timeline of major events during the Iraq War, following the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Abu Ghraib prison was a prison complex in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, located 32 kilometers (20 mi) west of Baghdad. Abu Ghraib prison was opened in the 1950s and served as a maximum-security prison. From the 1970s, the prison was used by Saddam Hussein to hold political prisoners and later the United States to hold Iraqi prisoners. It developed a reputation for torture and extrajudicial killing, and was closed in 2014.
Abu Ghraib is a city in the Baghdad Governorate of Iraq, located just west of Baghdad's city center, or northwest of Baghdad International Airport. It has a population of 189,000 (2003). The old road to Jordan passes through Abu Ghraib. The government of Iraq created the city and Abu Ghraib District in 1944.
Farzad Bazoft was an Iranian journalist who settled in the United Kingdom in the mid-1970s. He worked as a freelance reporter for The Observer. He was arrested by Iraqi authorities and executed in 1990 after being convicted of spying for Israel while working in Iraq.
The Iraqi Intelligence Service also known as the Mukhabarat, General Intelligence Directorate, or Party Intelligence, was an 8,000-man agency and the main state intelligence organization in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. The IIS was primarily concerned with international intelligence collection and analysis but also performed many activities inside Iraq in conjunction with the Directorate of General Security as a secret police organization.
The Iraq War, sometimes called the Second Gulf War, was a protracted armed conflict in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. It began with the invasion of Iraq by the United States-led coalition that overthrew the Ba'athist government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the coalition forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. US troops were officially withdrawn in 2011.
Khidir Hamza is an Iraqi atomic scientist who worked for Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme in the 1980s and early 1990s. Following the Gulf War, he left Iraq in 1994 and went into exile in the United States. He provided testimony to Western intelligence agencies suggesting that Hussein's weapons of mass destruction programmes were active and ongoing. However, claims of active WMD programs including nuclear weapons have since been invalidated, and his self-described role as the former head of Iraq's nuclear weapons programme has been discredited.
Iraq–Israel relations refer to the bilateral ties between the State of Israel and the Republic of Iraq. Due to Iraq's non-recognition of Israel as a legitimate state since the latter's establishment in 1948, the two countries have not had any formal diplomatic relations. The Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq was a part of the Arab coalition that declared war on and invaded Israel shortly after its establishment, sparking the First–Arab Israeli War, and the two states have since then been in a continuous state of hostilities. Iraqi forces also participated in the Third Arab–Israeli War and the Fourth Arab–Israeli War in 1967 and 1973, respectively.
House of Saddam is a 2008 British docudrama television miniseries that charted the rise and fall of Saddam Hussein. A co-production between BBC Television and HBO Films, the series was first broadcast on BBC Two in four parts between 30 July and 20 August 2008.
The 17 July Revolution was a bloodless coup in Iraq in 1968 led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Abd ar-Razzaq an-Naif, and Abd ar-Rahman al-Dawud that ousted President Abdul Rahman Arif and Prime Minister Tahir Yahya and brought the Iraqi Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party to power. Ba'athists involved in the coup as well as the subsequent purge of the moderate faction led by Naif included Hardan al-Tikriti, Salih Mahdi Ammash, and Saddam Hussein, the future President of Iraq. The coup was primarily directed against Yahya, an outspoken Nasserist who exploited the political crisis created by the June 1967 Six-Day War to push Arif's moderate government to nationalize the Western-owned Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) in order to use Iraq's "oil as a weapon in the battle against Israel." Full nationalization of the IPC did not occur until 1972, under the Ba'athist administration. In the aftermath of the coup, the new Iraqi government consolidated power by denouncing alleged American and Israeli machinations, publicly executing 14 people including 9 Iraqi Jews on fabricated espionage charges amidst a broader purge, and working to expand Iraq's traditionally close relations with the Soviet Union.
The Tulfah family was the family of Saddam Hussein of Ba'athist Iraq who ruled from 1979 to 2003 and established a single party authoritarian government under the control of the Ba'ath Party until the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Jafar Dhia Jafar is an Iraqi nuclear physicist, former Vice Chairman of the Iraq Atomic Energy Commission, and chief of Iraq's nuclear program. He is widely known by American and international officials including UN Chief Inspector David Kay (1991-1992) as the father of the Iraqi Nuclear Program.
Ibrahim Sabawi Ibrahim was Saddam Hussein's half-nephew and an Islamic State guerrilla.
