This text provides a detailed account of Saddam Hussein's life, from his early years in a mud and straw village near Tikrit, Iraq, to his rise to power, reign as president, and ultimate downfall. It covers key events such as his ruthless rule, the Iran-Iraq War, the invasion of Kuwait, and the subsequent U.S.-led coalition invasion of Iraq. The text emphasizes Saddam's brutal methods of maintaining power, his defiance of international sanctions, and his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, which became a pretext for the 2003 invasion.
1. Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, to a peasant woman in a village called Al-Awja near Tikrit, on the banks of the Tigris River .
2. Saddam bore the physical mark of his tribe on the wrist of his right hand; a tattoo of three dark blue dots .
3. Saddam’s father, a sheepherder, disappeared before he was born .
4. Saddam’s brother died from cancer when Saddam was 12 years old, leading his mother into a crippling depression .
5. Saddam’s mother Subha attempted to abort her unborn baby and kill herself after her son’s brother's death .
6. Saddam was sent to live with his uncle Khairallah Talfah, a retired army officer and Arab nationalist in Tikrit .
7. Saddam was forbidden from going to school and was made to steal goats and chickens for the family .
8. Saddam joined the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party as a low-level thug and gunman at the age of 20 in 1957 .
9. Saddam played a major role in the Ba’ath Party’s assassination attempt of the then-Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim in 1959 .
10. Saddam escaped prison thanks to the help of sympathetic prison guards in 1966 .
11. Saddam was appointed deputy secretary of the Regional Command, and became a rising star in the Ba'ath organization .
12. Saddam's Ba’ath party seized control in 1968 and Saddam was named deputy and head of the secret police .
13. Saddam became vice president of Iraq’s Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) .
14. Saddam nationalized Iraq’s oil industry in the early 1970s before the energy crisis of 1973 .
15. Saddam had 14 people declared as part of a “Zionist spy ring” .
16. Saddam married his first cousin, Sajida -- his uncle Talfah’s daughter .
17. Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, were given high-ranking positions within Iraq’s government .
18. Saddam was particularly phobic about germs and even top generals summoned to meet him were often ordered to strip to their underwear .
19. Saddam ordered Iraqi forces to invade the oil-rich region of Khuzestan in Iran in 1980, a clear violation of international law .
20. Saddam's troops were out of Kuwait within six weeks after the invasion in 1990 .
21. Saddam released several audio recordings while in hiding, denouncing Iraq's invaders and calling for resistance .
22. Saddam was found hiding in a hole in the ground, a bunker near a farmhouse in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit on December 13, 2003 .
23. Saddam was moved to a U.S. base in Baghdad, where he would remain until June