Saddam Hussein's Record of Infamy Ends

In the 1980s, Hussein used chemical weapons on Iranian forces in the Iran-Iraq war, as well as on his own people in the Kurdish campaign, and he embarked on an ambitious program to develop nuclear arms. Those efforts were disrupted by the Persian Gulf war and the U.N. inspections and sanctions that followed. Such was Hussein's reputation for duplicity and brutality, however, that he was widely suspected of maintaining his chemical, biological and nuclear programs in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of 2003, which was originally predicated on removing the threat of weapons of mass destruction. After the invasion, no significant stores of such weapons were found.

Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in the village of Auja near Tikrit. His father, Hussein al-Majid, was a landless peasant who disappeared before his son was born. Shortly after his birth, his mother, Subha Tulfah al-Mussallat, sent him to live with an uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, a nationalist army officer who opposed the British-backed monarchy then ruling Iraq.

When Hussein was 3, his uncle was imprisoned for joining a failed coup attempt, and the boy was sent back to his mother, who had remarried. But his stepfather treated him harshly, and he fled when he was around 10 to rejoin his uncle in Tikrit. Tulfah, who was released from prison in 1947, sent the boy to school for the first time. After finishing his primary schooling in 1955 at age 18, Hussein accompanied his uncle to Baghdad and enrolled in high school.

Under his uncle's guidance, Hussein joined the Baath Party in 1956, embracing the secular Arab nationalist movement that had been formed in Syria in the late 1940s. One of the party's leaders in Iraq was a relative, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, a top army general. The recruit became a street enforcer for the party and was soon accused of his first murder. He was jailed in 1958 for the killing of a government official in Tikrit but was released after six months for lack of evidence.

Bakr participated that year in an army coup led by Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem against Iraqi King Faisal II, but Qassem later spurned the Baathists, who began hatching their own plot to take power. In October 1959, Hussein participated in a failed assassination attempt against Qassem, an ambush that left the young Baathist with a gunshot wound in the leg. Hussein fled to Syria and later moved to Egypt, where he studied law and rose in Baath Party ranks. He was sentenced to death in absentia in February 1960.

While in exile in Egypt in 1963, Hussein married a cousin, Sajida Tulfah, the daughter of his uncle and mentor. They later had two sons -- Uday and Qusay -- and three daughters: Rana, Raghad and Hala.

Hussein returned to Iraq in 1963 after Bakr, having helped lead a successful coup against Qassem, was installed as prime minister by the new president, Abdul Salam Arif. But Arif soon turned against the Baathists, and Hussein, by then a member of the Baath Party leadership, was arrested again in October 1964 for plotting against the government. He spent the next three years behind bars before escaping from prison in 1967.

When the Baathists launched a coup that succeeded in ousting Arif on July 17, 1968, Hussein was on the lead tank that besieged the presidential palace and played a key role "in carrying out the revolution that day," according to an official biography issued while he was in power. Bakr became president, and Hussein effectively became his deputy. He assumed control over Iraq's intelligence and security agencies, purged government ranks of people deemed unreliable and gradually consolidated power as the strongman behind an increasingly frail and ailing Bakr.

When Bakr moved to unite Iraq with Syria, which was also under Baathist leadership, Hussein stepped in to thwart a development he perceived would marginalize him and forced Bakr to resign. On July 16, 1979, at the age of 42, he succeeded his relative as chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council and president of Iraq.

Hussein quickly demonstrated his ruthlessness -- and symbolized his rule -- by gathering the party leadership at an assembly in which he read out the names of more than 60 alleged plotters backed by Syria. As cameras rolled, guards escorted the alleged conspirators out of the conference hall one by one. Many of those arrested at the meeting were later executed.

The new president began spending heavily in pursuit of his dreams of making Iraq the political, economic and cultural center of the Middle East, as well as the Arab world's leading military power. But the attack he launched in 1980 against Iran, his neighbor to the east, soon bogged down, becoming a bloody and costly war of attrition. By the war's end, estimates of the death toll on both sides ranged up to 1.5 million. Iraq put its own its dead at 500,000, while Iran said it lost 300,000.

Hussein's nuclear ambitions were also set back when Israeli bombers destroyed Iraq's French-built Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.