Saddam Hussein

In 1956, he participated in an unsuccessful coup attempt against King Faisal II.

First wife Sajida is the daughter of Khairallah Tulfah, Saddam's uncle and first mentor. Their marriage was arranged when Saddam was 5 and Sajida was 7. However, the two didn't meet until 1958; they were married in Egypt during his exile. While Sajida was officially Iraq's First Lady, Saddam has at least three other wives the Iraqi press kept silent about. His newest wife, Wafa, is the daughter of his last deputy prime minister, Abdul Tawab el-Mulla Howeish.

In 1959, he and a group from the radical nationalist movement Ba'ath attempted to assassinate General Abd al-Karim Qasim, who had overthrown King Faisal II. It was unsuccessful, forcing Saddam to go into exile until 9 February, 1963, when Qasim was tortured and killed by Ba'ath army officers after a kangaroo trial broadcast live on Iraqi television.

Saddam Hussein was a bloody and brutal dictator who kept his country of Iraq at war almost constantly after assuming power in 1979. At least one million people died due to the machinations of Saddam. After his regime was toppled by the U. S.

Saddam invaded neighboring Iran in 1980 and waged war for seven years and 11 months, making it the longest conventional war in the 20th Century. Saddam had hoped to take advantage of what he perceived as the chaos of the Iranian revolution to settle border disputes and suppress his own Shi'ite Muslim population. (Iran is predominantly Shi'ite while Hussein was a Sunni Muslim. ) The war ended in a stalemate with approximately 500,000 Iraqis and 400,000 Iranians dead. Both sides, major oil producers, suffered economic losses of half-a-trillion dollars. Saddam used poison gas against Iranian troops, an atrocity even Adolf Hitler didn't engage on the battlefields of World War II.

He was subsequently tried and executed by the Iraqi interim government for the killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites in 1982.

Beginning in 1986 and continuing through 1989, Saddam launched a deliberate campaign of genocide against the Kurds in northern Iraq. The campaign also targeted areas populated by other minorities, including Assyrians and Jews.

In 1988, his forces launched a poison gas attack on the Kurdish town of Halabja that killed as many as 5,000 people and injured as many as 10,000. In all, Saddam's three-year-long genocide against the Kurds and other minorities claimed as many as 182,000 lives.

In 1990, the war-monger Saddam invaded Kuwait with the intention of looting and annexing the oil-rich country. An international coalition was put together by the first President George Bush and freed Kuwait but left Saddam in power. His son President George W.

Children: Sons Uday Hussein and Qusay Hussein, daughters Raghda, Rana and Hala by first wife, Sajida; son Ali Saddam by second wife, Samira. Uday controlled the media and was named Journalist of the Century by the Iraqi Union of Journalists. Qusay ran the elite Republican Guard and was considered Saddam's heir. Both brothers made a fortune smuggling oil. Saddam ordered Raghda's and Rana's husbands killed in 1996 after they plotted against him. Raghda, Rana and Sajida were placed under house arrest in 1997 when it was suspected they had a role in the 12 December 1996 ambush that nearly killed Uday. Hala's husband, Jamal Mustafa Sultan al-Tikriti, surrendered to U.S. troops in April 2003. Uday and Qusai were killed in Mosul during a firefight with United States troops in mid-July 2003.

Credited as "Himself" in the animated film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999). Photos of the real Hussein (and the voice of Matt Stone) were used for the animated character.

Ranked 55th on the Forbes World's Richest with an estimated worth of $7 billion. (2000).

In an open letter to the American people, Hussein said that the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were retribution for the death and destruction America has unleashed against foreigners, including the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Gulf War and economic sanctions against Iraq. (18 September 2001).

invasion of 2003, he wound up on a gallows, his life terminated at the end of a hangman's noose.

Bush put together a second coalition army dominated by American and British forces that invaded Iraq in March 2003 to depose the dictator. The invasion was launched on the pretext that he possessed weapons of mass destruction and was in league with al-Qaeda, the terrorist group that had launched the 9/11 attacks on the United States.

Both charges were false, but it led to Saddam's capture in December 2003.

On November 5, 2006, he was sentenced to death by hanging for the murders of 148 people in the mostly-Shia town of Dujail in 1982.