IRAQ - Profile - Saddam Hussein 'Al Takriti'.

On April 28, 2001, Saddam Hussein celebrated his 64th birthday in events of gigantic proportions, as usual. While massive festivities were staged across the central areas which his Baathist regime controls, he kept to his tradition of spending his birthday in Baghdad with children coming from all of Iraq's provinces, including the Kurdish north.

Saddam holds several positions. Apart from being chairman of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) and president of the republic, he is the prime minister, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and secretary-general of the ruling Baath Party's National (pan-Arab) and Regional (Iraqi) Commands. He chairs several high councils which cover all matters.

Saddam monitors all developments in and around Iraq. He has been the first among Baathist leaders in the early 1970s to head a follow up committee on oil contracts. He is as much of an oilman as King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has been since the early 1970s. He is the first leader in the world to have survived more than ten years of isolation. He survived the world's first high-tech war which liberated Kuwait from Iraq in early 1991. That followed eight years of war between Iraq and Iran (1980-88).

Born in Takrit on April 28, 1937, of a Sunni peasant family, Saddam's career has become a mix of reality and myth. This has been enhanced by the fact that Takrit, on the Tigris, was previously known as the birthplace of Saladin. Takrit was the Sunni base from which the Baath Party emerged after World War Two.

Saddam formally became a member of the Baath Party in 1957, when he was aged 20. He soon gained a reputation as a ruthless man, participating in the failed attempt to assassinate Iraq's then dictator Gen. Abdel Karim Kassim in 1959. He kept shooting at Kassim's forces until he was wounded in the leg and ran out of bullets. He was captured and jailed. Later he fled to Syria and then to Egypt, where he resumed his studies.

Saddam's flight and subsequent return to Iraq has become part of the legend surrounding him. He was well placed in the Baath Party's civilian leadership when its military wing under Gen. Ahmad Hassan Al Bakr (a relative of Saddam's) overthrew the nationalist government of Gen. Abdel Salam Aref on July 16, 1968.

With the somewhat paternal support of Bakr, Saddam quickly pushed himself up in the Baath hierarchy. In 1969 he became RCC vice chairman and emerged as the strongman of Iraq. In July 1979, Saddam took over from Bakr and executed his Syria-backed opponents (see Saddam's detailed profile in OMT Vol. 36).

Saddam's July 1979 coup was against both the military wing of the Iraqi Baath Party and Syria's rival military Baathists of President Hafez Al Assad (who died in June 2000 and was succeeded by his son Bashar). In late 1978, Assad and Bakr had agreed on merging Iraq with Syria and Saddam had been strongly opposed to that as the Syrian ruler intended to control the union.

King Hussein of Jordan (who died in February 1999 and was succeeded by his son from a British mother Abdullah) had played a key role against that union in the first half of 1979. When Saddam Hussein visited Amman in May 1979, King Hussein gave him an intelligence file which showed that Bakr and Assad were plotting to remove from power or liquidate the entire civilian faction of Iraq's Baath regime. That was to be done after the merger was in place and Saddam Hussein was to be killed.

On his return to Baghdad, Saddam secretly began a thorough investigation and in July 1979 announced "the big plot" inspired by Syria. Saddam put Bakr and all the main Baath military leaders under house arrest. Saddam arrested and immediately executed more than 20 Baathist leaders accused of taking part in the plot, and cut all links with Syria.

The US and Israel, as well as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, were against the proposed Syria-Iraq union. As he killed that merger, Saddam gradually became the man in whom Washington - as well as Riyadh and Kuwait - saw the best candidate to confront the Khomeini regime of Iran.

Ayatullah Ruhallah Khomeini's Shiite Islamic movement had come to power in Iran in early 1979 and had begun to threaten the Arab Gulf states as well as the US interests in the Middle East. In May 1980, then King Khalid and Crown Prince Fahd of Saudi Arabia and Saddam Hussein held a summit meeting in Ta'if, together with the Emir of Kuwait Shaikh Jabir Al Ahmad Al Sabah. It was Shaikh Jabir who, at the summit, asked Saddam to begin a war against Iran; and Shaikh Jabir pledged that Kuwait would cover the cost of such a war. Khalid and Fahd also pledged that Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states would contribute heavily in covering the war's costs. They all promised that they would get the Washington to put its weight behind Iraq, with Baghdad already having had a strategic alliance with Moscow.

In 1979-80 Iran was threatening Kuwait, Bahrain and the other Gulf regimes. Iranian Ayatullahs repeatedly promised that Kuwait would have an Islamic revolution and would become a Shiite republic. Similar threats were faced by Bahrain and others. In Saudi Arabia, the Shiites of the Eastern Province revolted in the autumn of 1979, and the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979 was followed in December by the seizure of the Grand Mosque of Mecca by radical Saudi Islamists.

It was said that, during the Ta'if summit, Fahd relayed to Saddam an oral message from then US President Carter pledging that the US would give Iraq all satellite intelligence information on Iran's military movements in the event of a war between Iran and Iraq. It became clear to Saddam that the world was on his side against Iran. Reportedly Saddam agreed that he would start a war against Iran but asked the Saudi and Kuwaiti rulers to work against an alliance between Iran and Syria because, he said, such an axis would be against both Iraq and the Arab Gulf regimes as well as against US interests in the Middle East.

Saddam began the war against Iran in September 1980. Immediately, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the other Arab Gulf states poured billions of dollars into Baghdad. Iraq in late 1980 and throughout 1981 had an unprecedented economic boom. It was the busiest and most profitable workshop in the Middle East.

During that Gulf war, 1980-1988, Saddam's regime was the only state in the world and in the history of the Cold War to enjoy full support from the two rival super-powers: the US and the USSR. That was because both super-powers wanted to see Khomeini's regime fall and to them Saddam was a hero in August 1988, when a humiliated Khomeini accepted the UN ceasefire offer. Thus, Iran was defeated.

Changing Regional Circumstances: Many fateful developments occurred during the 1980-88 war. Where Iraq and its neighbours were concerned, the most important were the following:

Israel destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad in a June 1981 raid, with its air force jets having flown over Jordan and Saudi Arabia at a time when the skies in that part of the world were fully monitored by five American AWACs and other suveillance facilities. It was said there was some co-operation between Israel's air force and that of Iran.

In March 1982, Syria and Iran deepened their strategic alliance through a series of deals and an agreement for the supply of Iranian crude oil to Syrian refineries at discounted prices. By then Iraq had stopped supplying Syria and Lebanon with crude oil through pipelines running from Kirkuk to their territories. The Tehran-Damascus alliance let to a flow of Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Lebanon to arm and train Shiite militants.

In early June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon and later ousted the PLO forces from that country. In July 1982 King Khalid died and was succeeded by Fahd as king of Saudi Arabia. Fahd, the US-backed head of the progressive faction, was forced to name Prince Abdullah as crown prince. Abdullah headed the conservative faction which was opposed to any US presence in Saudi Arabia and favoured priority for European interests. Abdullah was also an ally of Syrian President Assad, having married an Alawite woman close to Assad's family; and as a pan-Arab nationalist he was strongly against the special US alliance with Israel. Thereafter, the Iranian envoy to Damascus got Lebanon's Shiite militants to form Hizbollah and prepare for armed resistance against Western and Israeli occupation of Lebanese soil.

In 1983-84, the Cold War between the US and USSR became tense and Lebanon was the focus. By then the US had sent troops to Lebanon, together with troops sent by France and Italy, to help in the evacuation of the Palestinian guerillas and in the restoration of order for the Beirut government.

Syria, backed by the USSR and in alliance with Iran, gained the maximum from a series of Shiite human bombings which killed many US and French military personnel in Lebanon. This caused President Reagan to order an immediate withdrawal of American troops from Lebanon. The French and Italians did the same. In a way, the USSR won that battle in the Cold War with the US.

In 1984, France shifted its emphasis to Iraq and gave Baghdad sophisticated aircraft and Exocet missiles. With the US providing Baghdad with vital intelligence on Iranian movements, the French help enabled Saddam's regime to launch an air war on Iranian oil shipping. Iraqi air raids in the subsequent years severely damaged or destroyed Iran's oil installations, several refineries and infrastructures.

Iran singled out Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for retaliatory attacks. That was because Saudi Arabia was the main link between Baghdad and the flow of US intelligence to Iraq and because Kuwait gave Iraq logistical support. In May 1985, Shiite militants attempted to assassinate Kuwait's Emir. In that year and in 1986, Shiite operations simultaneously targeted in Kuwait City several installations. These included the US embassy, Kuwait's water desalination plants and reservoirs, and other installations. Iranian missiles were fired at Kuwait's oil installations, including the oil terminal at Mina Al Ahmadi.

In Feb/March 1986, Iranian forces occupied Iraq's Faw peninsula, close to Kuwait. By then the war had tilted in favour of Iran and Saddam's regime had become vulnerable. The Iranians had taken the offensive since June 1982, when they recaptured the Khuzistan province and later threatened to break Iraq through numerous attacks, which led to the tanker war. For their part, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait launched an oil price war in OPEC from late 1985 which eventually drained Iran's treasury. This led to the collapse of crude oil prices to about $7/barrel in mid-1986. It ended in September 1996 with an OPEC agreement imposing production quotas on all members. But Iran was still suffering from the collapse of its oil income and, because of arms embargoes imposed by Western powers, Tehran had to spend huge sums to buy Western arms and spare parts from black markets.

The tide in the war went back in favour of Iraq in 1987, when the US naval units in the Gulf began harrassing Iran's navy. At the time, the US navy was protecting Kuwaiti tankers carrying the US flag. Attacks and counter-attacks led to a big naval battle in April 1988, in which the US destroyed a major part of Iran's navy and some vital oil installations in the Gulf.

By then, the Iranian forces had become exhausted and Iraq was able to penetrate deep into Iranian territories. At one time, it was said that Iraqi and Mujahedeen forces of the Iranian opposition could reach Tehran by August 1988, and Iran would have collapsed, had Khomeini not announced his acceptance of the ceasefire. In June 1988 a US naval unit had fired at an Iranian airbus, killing its civilian passengers. That tragedy, together with Iraqi military advances, were the trigger for Tehran to accept the ceasefire which, Baghdad said, meant a declaration of defeat.