|
Saddam Hussein, a Life of Violence
Iraqi Leader Captured Eight Months After Fall of Baghdad
Two photos of Saddam Hussein after his capture shown during a press conference in Baghdad, Dec. 14, 2003.
Credit: Reuters Limited © 2003
|
Saddam Hussein appears on Iraqi television on March 20, 2003, hours after U.S. bombs and missiles strike one of his residences in an attempt to kill him. It was not known when the speech was taped.
Credit: Reuters Limited © 2003
|
An Iraqi man throws stones at a huge statue of Saddam Hussein as it falls in central Baghdad, April 9, 2003. Showing contempt for the man who ruled them for 24 years, Iraqis attacked the statue with sledgehammers and put a noose around its neck.
Credit: Reuters Limited © 2003
|
Saddam Hussein Timeline
April 28, 1937: Saddam Hussein is born in the central Iraqi town of Tikrit.
1959-1963: Saddam flees Baghdad for Damascus, then Cairo, after failed plot to kill Qasim.
Feb. 8, 1963: Qasim ousted in coup led by the Arab Socialist Bath Party (ASBP).
Nov. 18, 1963: Baath government overthrown by Arif and a group of military officers.
1964-1966: Saddam Hussein is jailed as a member for participation in the Baath Party.
April 17, 1966: President Arif dies in a helicopter crash. He is succeeded by his elder brother, Maj-Gen Abd-al-Rahman Muhamad Arif.
July 17, 1968: Baath-led coup ousts Arif. Gen. Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr becomes president. Saddam Hussein rises to vice president.
July 16, 1979: President Al-Bakr resigns and is succeeded by Saddam. Tensions between Iraq and Iran rise.
1980-88: Iran-Iraq War.
August 1990: Iraq invades Kuwait.
Jan. 17, 1991: Gulf War starts with aerial bombing of Iraq under the name "Operation Desert Storm."
Feb. 24-27, 1991: Kuwait is liberated after brief ground war with a U.S.-led coalition.
Oct. 31, 1998: UN weapons inspectors are removed from Iraq.
Dec. 16-19, 1998: U.S., U.K. launch "Operation Desert Fox" bombing campaign to destroy suspected nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
Sept. 12, 2002: President Bush challenges U.N. to confront the "grave and gathering danger" of Iraq -— or stand aside as the United States and likeminded nations act.
March 17, 2003: President Bush gives Saddam Hussein and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face "the full force and might" of the American military "at a time of our choosing."
March 20, 2003: The U.S. launches a pre-dawn missile attack on what President Bush calls "selected targets of military importance" in Iraq. Further air bombardment is followed within days by a U.S. and British ground invasion. U.S. forces advance rapidly toward Baghdad.
April 4, 2003: U.S. forces secure Baghdad's international airport.
April 7, 2003: U.S. drops four bombs in a Baghdad neighborhood, flattening a building after receiving intelligence that Saddam was meeting there with top Iraqi officials.
April 9, 2003: Iraq's regime collapses as U.S. forces enter central Baghdad. Residents cheer as a huge statue of Saddam is toppled.
July 22, 2003: Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, are killed in a firefight with U.S. forces in Mosul.
Dec. 13, 2003: U.S. forces capture Saddam as he hides in a farmhouse cellar near Tikrit.
|
Saddam Hussein had been president of Iraq since 1979.
Credit: Reuters Limited © 2003
|
Dec. 14, 2003 -- Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader who took his nation into three disastrous wars during his nearly quarter-century of rule, has been captured, some eight months after a U.S.-led invasion toppled his government.
During Saddam's dicatatorship, he led his nation into wars with Iran in the 1980s, then with the United States and its allies in 1991. In 2003, by his refusal to cede power, he entered a month-long war with the United States, Britain and other coalition forces that ended with Saddam thrown from power and forced into hiding.
Saddam was the preeminent strongman in Iraq since the late 1960s, but his name did not become a household word in the United States until Aug. 2, 1990, when he launched his army on a blitzkrieg attack against Kuwait.
In response, the United States built up a military force half a million strong in Saudi Arabia and in the waters of the Persian Gulf, and President George Bush gave the orders to go to war against Iraq on Jan. 16, 1991.
Saddam Hussein also took to the airwaves that night to appeal to all Arabs everywhere to rise up against the United States in the great battle between the Arab world and the infidels.
The "mother of all battles" proved to be short-lived. Allied warplanes pounded Iraq and Iraqi forces in Kuwait for nearly two months. Then a ground invasion took back Kuwait in one hundred hours, leaving tens of thousands of Iraqis killed, but only 500 Allied deaths.
Saddam Hussein's life had been permeated by violence -- in wars, in coups successful and unsuccessful, in assassination, treachery and terrorism.
Born in the central Iraqi town of Tikrit in 1936, Saddam learned violence at an early age. By the time he was a teenager, his biographers say, he had carried out his first killing, the stabbing murder of a Communist militant.
In 1959, he was a member of the hit squad that sought to assassinate Iraq's military leader, Abdel Karim Kassem. Kassem's car was riddled with bullets, but he survived. Saddam was wounded in the leg and fled to Cairo.
He returned to Iraq a few years later and began to organize gangs for the rising Baath Party. When the Baathists took power in 1968, Saddam became Iraq's second most powerful leader, turning his gangs into an intricate array of secret police organizations that would eventually infiltrate every aspect of Iraq's political life.
Saddam took the supreme spot for himself in 1979, eliminating his rivals in a power grab captured on videotape. At a meeting of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council, those who were taken out of the hall were shot, by those who had allied themselves with Saddam.
A year later, Saddam made the first of his great political miscalculations. With the Islamic Revolution only a year old in neighboring Iran, Saddam ordered his troops to invade. The Iran-Iraq War lasted for eight years and eventually ended in stalemate.
Saddam wanted to be the great leader who unites all Arabs into one of the world's richest and most powerful nations. Oil and arms would be the means. Saddam spent billions to acquire an enormous arsenal, which would include an effort to obtain nuclear weapons.
But the war with Iran put enormous strains on the economy of Iraq. Saddam needed more resources, and in 1990 he seized Kuwait and its oil fields, claiming that Kuwait was actually a province of Iraq.
The invasion of Kuwait was Saddam's second great political and military miscalculation, says Andrew Parasiliti, director of the Middle East Initiative at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
The Gulf War devastated Iraq and nearly toppled Saddam. In the north the Kurds rose up against his rule, and in the south, Shi'ite Muslims rebelled. Saddam enleashed his military on both. The United States looked the other way, and Saddam retained power in Baghdad.
After that, says Andrew Parasiliti, Saddam could no longer cast himself as the modern day Saladin, who defeated the Crusaders and captured Jerusalem in the name of Islam eight hundred years ago.
In the years after the Gulf War, Saddam continued to fight the U.S. and the West, but it was a more subtle war. It involved a hide-and-seek game with U.N. weapons inspectors over whether Iraq retained chemical and biological weapons. And it involved an international propaganda struggle over economic sanctions, which the United Nations imposed in part to rid Iraq of its prohibited weapons.
Saddam proved as intransigent on this issue as he had on all others. And it brought a confrontation with another U.S. president, Bill Clinton, who ordered the four-day bombing of Iraq in December 1998. As he did after the Gulf War, Saddam cast this too as a victory for Iraq.
A decade after his father assembled a U.S.-led coalition to eject Iraq from Kuwait, President George W. Bush began to push for Saddam's disarmament, warning that Iraq and its suspected possession of weapons of mass destruction made it part of an "axis of evil" that threatened world peace, along with Iran and North Korea.
Claiming that Iraq was failing to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspections, Bush pushed the U.N. Security Council for months to take a tougher stance with Baghdad. When France and other members of the Security Council refused to agree to threaten military action, Bush, and his close ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, decided to act on their own. Bush gave Saddam a 48-hour deadline to leave Iraq. When Saddam refused, Bush ordered a military strike designed to "decapitate" the Iraqi leadership. A massive air bombing campaign and land invasion followed, and U.S. forces rapidly advanced toward Baghdad. Less than three weeks later, the Iraqi regime collapsed, though sporadic fighting continued in the capital and other cities.
Fighting has continued, with U.S., British and other coalition forces the prime targets of Iraqi insurgents. More than 300 U.S. troops have been killed since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major hostilities.
Saddam sought to paint himself as a champion of the Arabs, but his legacy is a dismal one for the people of Iraq. Of 23 years that he ruled Iraq, only two were spent in peace and free from the burden of international sanctions.
Related NPR Stories
 A Chronology of Saddam Hussein's Capture
More Reports on Saddam Hussein
Beyond the War in Iraq
 Feb. 13, 2003: NPR's Bob Edwards talks to Saddam Biographer Charles Tripp of the University of London
Nov. 17, 2002: NPR's Steve Inskeep Profiles Saddam
Aug. 31, 1988: Morning Edition Reports on the History of Saddam
July 15, 1982: All Things Considered Reports on How Saddam Gained and Retained Power
|
