Saddam Hussein takes power in Iraq

On July 16, 1979 Iraq's president, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, resigned, officially for health reasons, and his deputy Saddam Hussein took over as president and chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council. Within days Saddam showed what this meant. At a Baath Party gathering on July 22, a list of alleged traitors was read out, those named were taken from the hall, and 22 of the 68 arrested were sentenced to death. Saddam would rule Iraq for almost 24 years.¹

Saddam was born in 1937 near Tikrit, and joined the Baath Party in the 1950s. Baathism, a secular Arab nationalist ideology, drew on the Arab nationalism of Nasser and the military coups that followed Egypt's 1952 revolution. The Baath seized power in Iraq in a coup in 1968, and Saddam, a cousin of al-Bakr, quietly built up the party's security services as the real power behind the president. Iraq itself was a state drawn up by Britain after World War I from three Ottoman provinces, with Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs and Kurds uneasily together. Oil, nationalized in 1972, gave the regime enormous wealth after 1973 and a way to buy loyalty.¹

As president Saddam combined personality cult, patronage and terror. Seeing the Iranian revolution of 1979 as a threat and an opportunity, he invaded Iran in September 1980, beginning an eight-year war that killed hundreds of thousands. In the late 1980s his forces carried out the Anfal campaign against Iraqi Kurds, including the chemical attack on Halabja in 1988. In August 1990 he invaded Kuwait, provoking the Gulf War of 1991 and years of sanctions. In March 2003 a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq and overthrew him. He was captured in December 2003, tried by an Iraqi court and executed on December 30, 2006.¹