Saddam Hussein

NAME Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti. 

WHAT FAMOUS FOR Saddam Hussein was the fifth President of Iraq, a position he held for over two decades. He is famous for his brutal authoritarian rule, the nationalization of Iraqi oil, and leading his country through several major conflicts, including the Iran-Iraq War, the invasion of Kuwait, and the 1991 Gulf War. He is notoriously remembered for his use of chemical weapons against his own citizens and for being the primary target of the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which ultimately led to his capture and execution.

BIRTH Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in the village of Al-Awja, near Tikrit, in northern Iraq. (1)

FAMILY BACKGROUND Saddam was born into a peasant Sunni Arab family from the Al-Bejat clan of the Bedouin Al-Bu Nasir tribe. 

His father, Hussein Abd al-Majid, disappeared before his birth — possibly dying before Saddam was born. His mother, Subha Tulfah al-Mussalat, was so overwhelmed by her circumstances that she reportedly tried to abort the pregnancy and could not care for the infant Saddam. (1)

His stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam harshly and, according to a CIA psychological profile, beat him regularly. His maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah — a devout Sunni Muslim and veteran of the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War who had served five years in prison for fighting the British — became the defining father figure in his life, and later the father of Saddam's wife. Saddam's name means "the fighter who stands steadfast." 

CHILDHOOD At around the age of 10, Saddam fled his family home and returned to live in Baghdad with his uncle Khairallah Talfah. Under his uncle's guidance, he attended a nationalistic high school in Baghdad where he was exposed to Arab nationalist ideas. Talfah was appointed Mayor of Baghdad during Saddam's time in power, though his notorious corruption eventually forced Saddam to remove him from office. 

Saddam in his youth as a shepherd in his village, near Tikrit, 1956

EDUCATION Saddam attended a nationalistic high school in Baghdad. After secondary school, he studied at an Iraqi law school for three years before dropping out in 1957 to join the Ba'ath Party.  Following his involvement in the 1959 assassination attempt on Prime Minister Qasim, he fled to Egypt and in 1962–1963 unsuccessfully pursued a law degree at Cairo Law School, where he also graduated from high school in 1961.

CAREER RECORD 1957 He joined the Ba'ath Party, a Pan-Arab group espousing Arab nationalism and socialism. 

1959 He participated in a failed Ba'athist attempt to assassinate Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim. Shot in the leg during the encounter, he fled to Syria and then Egypt. 

1963 Returned to Iraq after the Ba'athist-led Ramadan Revolution, but was later imprisoned in 1964 when the party lost power to Abdul Rahman Arif. 

1967 Escaped from prison and became a key leader in the Ba'ath Party’s underground organization. 

1968 Played a central role in the July 17 Revolution coup that brought the Ba'ath Party back to power. He became Vice President under General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.

1979-2003, Formally took office as President of Iraq on July 16, 1979, after forcing al-Bakr to resign. He immediately purged the party of perceived rivals.

APPEARANCE Saddam was a tall man, standing 6 ft 2 in (188 cm), which was considered tall for an Arab. (3) 

Saddam addresses the Iraqi state television, in January 2001

He had dark brown eyes, and for most of his career dyed his hair black and maintained his trademark thick moustache, avoiding showing his age publicly — his aides printed his speeches in huge fonts so he would not need to be seen wearing reading glasses. (4) 

He had a tattoo of three small blue dots on his right hand, a traditional mark given to children in his village. (4) 

After his 2003 fall from power, he was captured with long grey hair and a grey beard, having lost weight during his time in hiding. (5)

FASHION Saddam dressed to project authority and versatility, appearing variously in tailored Western suits, military uniform, and the white keffiyah of a tribal Arab. (5) 

He suffered agonizing foot pain caused by his insistence on wearing small, tight shoes out of vanity — footwear that disfigured his feet, and whose resulting pain reportedly affected his temper and decision-making. (1)

CHARACTER Saddam was intelligent, ambitious, and ruthless from an early age, drawn to Arab nationalist ideology and political activism. (6) 

He dominated Iraqi politics for 35 years through an extensive personality cult and a feared secret police apparatus. Many Arabs regarded him as a resolute leader who challenged American imperialism, while many Iraqis — particularly Shias and Kurds — viewed him as a tyrant. 

He was capable, however, of a certain personal warmth: the American soldiers who guarded him in prison reportedly grew attached to him, and at his execution were distraught, feeling as though they had betrayed a close friend or family member. (1)

SPEAKING VOICE Saddam was a powerful and theatrical public speaker in the tradition of Arab nationalist oratory, capable of holding large crowds. His public speeches were heavily propagandized and broadcast across Iraqi state media. 

SENSE OF HUMOUR Saddam was not known for self-deprecating humour, but his US prison guards claimed that one of the few times he ever looked defeated was when they brought him the wrong breakfast cereal. (1)

RELATIONSHIPS Saddam's first marriage, in 1963, was to Sajida Talfah, daughter of his uncle Khairallah — making her both his first cousin and his wife, an arranged union negotiated when they were children. They had five children: sons Uday (1964–2003) and Qusay (1966–2003), and daughters Raghad, Rana, and Hala. Uday, originally Saddam's favourite son and groomed as a successor, fell out of favour due to erratic and violent behaviour. (7)

Saddam's affair with Samira Shahbandar became public in the late 1980s, and he reportedly married her secretly in 1986, while both were still married to their respective spouses. Saddam's brother-in-law Adnan Khairallah was vocal in protesting the dishonour to Sajida; he subsequently died in what was officially described as a "freak" helicopter accident, though one of Saddam's bodyguards later admitted he had planted explosives on the chopper at Saddam's orders. (7)

Saddam burned his son Uday's motor vehicle collection — consisting of hundreds of rare, luxury cars — as punishment after a shooting incident at a dinner party on August 7, 1995, in which six bodyguards were killed and Saddam's half-brother Watban Ibrahim al-Tikriti was seriously injured. (1)

MONEY AND FAME Saddam exercised total control over Iraq's financial resources, diverting significant sums through opaque networks of front companies. 

In 1980, the city of Detroit presented Saddam Hussein with a key to the city, after he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to a local church — the gift reflecting a period when he was seen as a US ally in the region. 

In 2001, Saddam promised to donate $94 million (£73 million) to poor Americans, pointing out that 30 million people in the US were living below the poverty line.

Saddam and his family took approximately $1 billion from the Iraqi central bank in the hours before the first bombs fell on Baghdad at the start of the 2003 invasion. (1)

FOOD AND DRINK Saddam's favourite dish was masgouf — a traditional Iraqi meal of grilled carp spiced with salt and pepper.  He also had a particular fondness for Doritos and could reportedly eat a family-sized bag in ten minutes. (1)

Image by Chat GBT

MUSIC AND ARTS Saddam fostered an extraordinary personality cult through the arts. Innumerable statues, portraits, and murals of him filled Baghdad's streets and galleries; he needed a veritable army of sculptors and painters to meet the demand. His obsession with grand building projects recreated, among others, the palace of Nebuchadnezzar, giving scores of architects and craftsmen employment. (8) 

Baghdad's Music School, which trained students in classical ballet, folk music, and orchestral performance, operated under state patronage throughout his rule. 

LITERATURE Saddam wrote a novel in 2000, Zabiba and the King — an allegorical tale that was unsurprisingly a bestseller across Iraq and was incorporated into the school curriculum. 

Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea was one of his favourite books; he reportedly admired it because it was about "struggling against overwhelming odds with courage, perseverance and dignity." (1)

NATURE While in prison awaiting trial, Saddam tended a small garden during his daily exercise period, carefully tending bushes, shrubs, and a palm tree surrounded by a circle of white stones — a habit noted for its irony given that he had overseen one of the worst acts of ecocide in modern history: the deliberate draining of the Mesopotamian Marshes. After the 1991 Shia uprising, his regime diverted the Tigris and Euphrates rivers to drain the marshes — once the third-largest wetland in the world — reducing them by over 90% by 1993, displacing more than 200,000 Marsh Arabs.

PETS Saddam's eldest son Uday was notorious for keeping lions and tigers in private enclosures at his palace — animals he reportedly used to intimidate and threaten enemies. After the 2003 invasion, American soldiers discovered the abandoned big cats at Saddam's palace complex and adopted them as unofficial mascots, naming the male lion Brutus.

HOBBIES AND SPORTS Saddam was an avid reader and a prolific writer. He also had a passion for collecting rare and luxury automobiles, a passion shared — and then destroyed — by his son Uday, whose entire collection Saddam had burned as punishment in 1995. (1) 

He was an enthusiastic builder and architectural patron, commissioning grand palaces throughout his rule. 

Saddam was a keen swimmer. On September 16, 1997, he was photographed swimming the width of the Tigris River near his birthplace of Tikrit — a feat staged as part of his personality cult to project an image of physical health and vigour. His many palace complexes were equipped with large swimming pools, some of which became famous after American soldiers commandeered them following the 2003 invasion.

SCIENCE AND MATHS Saddam oversaw Iraq's development of chemical and biological weapons programmes during his time as vice president and president, and in the 1980s authorised the use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians and Iranian forces. 

He also pursued a nuclear weapons programme, which suffered a decisive setback when Israel destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in an air strike in 1981. 

PHILOSOPHY & THEOLOGY Saddam was a secular Ba'athist and a Sunni Muslim by background, but his governance was broadly secular. He espoused Ba'athism — a synthesis of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism. In the late 1990s, however, as his rule became increasingly embattled, he launched the Faith Campaign, an Islamist agenda for Iraq that saw him cultivate a more devout public persona. 

In an extraordinary devotional act, he spent two painstaking years in the late 1990s drawing 27 litres (57 pints) of his own blood and using it as ink to transcribe the entire Qur'an — all 336,000-plus words. Since his overthrow, no one has known what to do with it: it is a sin to have written the Qur'an in blood, but it is equally a sin to destroy any copy of the Qur'an. (1)

PRESIDENCY When Saddam Hussein formally took power on July 16, 1979, he did so with the brisk efficiency of a man rearranging a filing cabinet — though in this case the folders screamed. He eased aside the ageing Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who had been serving increasingly as a ceremonial presence, then staged one of the grimmer political performances of the 20th century: a televised Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party gathering in which he read aloud the names of supposed traitors. Twenty-two were executed, some by their own comrades, a method of fostering loyalty that was both theatrical and chillingly efficient. Saddam simultaneously made himself President, Prime Minister, and head of the Revolutionary Command Council — a tidy accumulation of titles suggesting he was not keen on delegation.

He governed through a vast lattice of intelligence agencies and secret police, where dissent tended to have a short and unhappy shelf life. Key positions were concentrated among Sunni Arabs, despite their minority status, and Saddam cultivated a personality cult of operatic proportions: portraits on buildings, statues in squares, slogans on walls — a man could scarcely buy bread without being reminded who was in charge. Yet amid the menace was a paradox. Saddam also pursued real modernization. Iraq’s oil industry, nationalized under the Ba’ath in 1972, funded free healthcare, mass literacy campaigns, electrification, roads, and social programs, including comparatively progressive openings for women. Like many strongmen, he seemed to believe it entirely reasonable to build schools in the morning and prisons in the afternoon.

His ambitions stretched beyond Iraq. He wanted to eclipse Egypt as the Arab world’s leading power and dominate the Gulf, goals that led to ruinous wars. In 1980 he launched the Iran–Iraq War, an eight-year bloodbath that consumed lives and treasure on a near-industrial scale, ending largely where it began. Two years later came the invasion of Kuwait, which triggered the Gulf War and brought a US-led coalition crashing down on Iraqi forces in a campaign so swift it must have seemed, to Saddam, indecently abrupt. Afterward, Shia and Kurdish uprisings were suppressed with characteristic brutality, producing massacres and waves of refugees.

The 1990s brought sanctions, economic collapse, and a slow erosion of the state he had built. After the September 11 attacks, the United States claimed Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction — claims later discredited, though they became the rationale for the 2003 invasion. Baghdad fell in April. Saddam, who had once appeared on murals in heroic pose beside lions and palm trees, was discovered in December hiding in a cramped underground chamber near Tikrit — a descent from imperial grandeur to something almost absurdly small. It had the bleak irony history occasionally specializes in.

POLITICS Saddam joined the Ba'ath Party in 1957 and made himself its dominant force in Iraq over the following two decades. His political goals as president were to supplant Egypt as leader of the Arab world and to achieve hegemony over the Persian Gulf. (9) 

He was a leading opponent of the 1978 Camp David Accords and hosted the Arab League summit that condemned Egypt for pursuing peace with Israel. (

He championed women's rights and education domestically — by the 1980s, women made up 46% of all teachers, 29% of doctors, and 40% of the civil service in Iraq — while simultaneously operating one of the most repressive state security systems in the Middle East. 

SCANDAL The Halabja chemical attack of March 16, 1988, in which the Kurdish town of Halabja was struck with mustard gas and nerve agents killing between 3,200 and 5,000 people, stands as one of the worst chemical weapons attacks in modern history and was part of the broader genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds. 

The 1990 invasion of Kuwait — which Saddam justified by accusing Kuwait of slant-drilling Iraqi oil reserves — triggered the Gulf War and years of crippling UN sanctions. (

The 2003 US-led invasion, premised on the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, subsequently proved to be based on false intelligence. 

Saddam's regime was estimated to have been responsible for the murder or disappearance of between 250,000 and 290,000 of his own people. 

MILITARY RECORD Saddam was not a professional military officer by training but rose to the rank of general in the Iraqi armed forces in 1976. 

He led Iraq through two major wars: the Iran–Iraq War (1980–1988) and the Gulf War (1991). As vice president he oversaw Iraq's defeat of the Kurdish insurgency in the Second Iraqi–Kurdish War (mid-1970s). 

He authorized the use of chemical weapons against both Iranian forces and Kurdish civilians during the Anfal campaign. 

HEALTH AND PHYSICAL FITNESS Saddam suffered from severe, chronic foot pain caused by his vanity-driven insistence on wearing shoes that were too small and too tight, which over time disfigured his feet. The pain was said to affect his temper and, reportedly, his judgement and decision-making. (1)

HOMES Saddam commissioned dozens of grandiose presidential palaces across Iraq during his rule, including a reconstruction of the ancient palace of Nebuchadnezzar. (8)

He owned dozens of lavish palaces throughout Iraq, including the "Victory Over America" Palace, commissioned in 1991 but never finished due to the 2003 bombing. (1) 

Former palace of Saddam Hussein atop a hill overlooking Babylon, By David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada 

At the end of his rule, he was reduced to hiding in a series of safe houses before being discovered in a cramped underground "spider hole" — a hole barely large enough for a man — at a farmhouse in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit. (1)

TRAVEL Saddam made rare trips abroad during his rise to power. He visited Spain in December 1974, at the invitation of Francisco Franco, and toured Granada, Córdoba, and Toledo. In September 1975, he met French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac in Paris, cementing close trade ties with France. 

Earlier in his life, he spent several years in exile in Damascus and Cairo. 

DEATH On December 13, 2003, Saddam Hussein was discovered hiding in an underground "spider hole" at a farmhouse in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit, at approximately 8:30 PM Iraqi time, in an operation called Operation Red Dawn. He was subsequently tried by the Iraqi High Tribunal for crimes against humanity, specifically the massacre of 148 Shi'a Muslims in the town of Dujail in 1982. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. (1) 

He was hanged on December 30, 2006, at 6:05 AM, Iraqi time. He refused to wear a hood during his execution. The American soldiers guarding him had grown attached to him during his captivity; at his execution, they were reportedly distraught, feeling as though they had betrayed and murdered a close friend or family member. (1)

He was buried the following day at his birthplace of Al-Awja in Tikrit, Iraq, two miles from the graves of his sons Uday and Qusay Hussein. 

APPEARANCES IN MEDIA  Saddam Hussein was the subject of an intense state-sponsored personality cult throughout his rule, appearing on countless murals, statues, portraits, and monuments across Iraq. (8) 

He featured prominently in international news coverage for over two decades. His trial and execution were broadcast globally. 

He was the subject of South Park's recurring parody portrayal as a bumbling villain. 

He was portrayed in various films and satires, most notably in South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and the comedy The Dictator (which was loosely inspired by his novel)

ACHIEVEMENTS Nationalized Iraq's oil industry in 1972, generating massive revenue for the state and transforming the Iraqi economy. 

Oversaw one of the fastest literacy drives in the Arab world, winning a UNESCO award for Iraq's education campaign. 

Introduced free healthcare and universal free education in Iraq, raised social services and farming subsidies to levels unparalleled in the region, and brought electricity to nearly every city in the country. 

Granted women full suffrage and the right to run for political office in 1980, and passed labour laws guaranteeing equal pay, six months of paid maternity leave, and legal protections against harassment.

Signed the 1975 Algiers Agreement with Iran, temporarily settling longstanding border disputes. 

Sources: (1) Encyclopaedia of Trivia – Saddam Hussein (2) Wikipedia – Saddam Hussein (3) Celebriot – Saddam Hussein Physical Stats (4) The Independent – The Life and Times of Saddam Hussein (5) ABC News – Saddam Has Changed Appearance (6) Young Pioneer Tours – Saddam Hussein Biography (7) All That's Interesting – Saddam Hussein's Wife Sajida Talfah (8) YouTube – Saddam Hussein's Artistic Legacy (2002) (9) Britannica – Saddam Hussein