Today, we embark on a riveting exploration of a life laden with intrigue, conflict, and the enduring echoes of power – the legacy of Saddam Hussein and the tumultuous landscape of Iraq.
As we delve into the corridors of time, let us peer into the rise of a man who would become a central figure in the complex narrative of the Middle East. Saddam Hussein, a name that resonates with both fascination and dread, steered Iraq through an era marked by authoritarian rule, regional tensions, and global scrutiny.
Our journey begins in the dusty streets of Tikrit, Saddam’s birthplace, tracing the footsteps of a young man whose destiny would intertwine with the fate of a nation. From his early political ambitions to the consolidation of power, we navigate through the intricate web of alliances, betrayals, and the cunning strategies that propelled him to the summit of Iraqi leadership.
But Saddam’s story is not confined to the borders of Iraq; it reverberates globally. We examine the geopolitical landscape that set the stage for the Iran-Iraq War, the invasion of Kuwait, and the subsequent Gulf War that drew the world’s attention. The consequences of these events, etched into the history books, continue to shape the geopolitical chessboard we navigate today.
Hi everyone and welcome back to the dark history podcast where we explore the darkest parts of human history. hope everyone is well I’m Rob your host as always. Welcome to the new episode, Dark Biography: Saddam Hussein the necessary evil. Saddam hussein. Was he a necessary evil in the Middle East? Now twenty years ago to even mention that question would have got you tarred and feathered, but now you can see the chaos that has befell Iraq and the Middle East a whole, you have Islamic extremist running a mock, countries such as Iraq in absolute civil chaos, wars, civil wars and poxy wars everywhere and these seem to have ramped up exponentially over the last two decades, is this because a power vacuum was created when the Iraqi strong man was deposed? Well Join us as we peel back the layers of propaganda, uncover the human stories obscured by political rhetoric, and analyze the enduring impact of Saddam Hussein’s life and rule on the people and the region. As we traverse the annals of time, we invite you to immerse yourself in the complexities, contradictions, and controversies that define this pivotal chapter in the history of Iraq and the broader Middle East.
So without further ado please turn off those lights sit back and relax next to the fire for more dark history.
Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in the dusty sand drenched streets Tikrit, Iraq. His father, who was a shepherd, disappeared several months before Saddam was born. A few months later, Saddam's older brother died of cancer. So When Saddam was born, his mother, wracked with guilt and despair became severely depressed. Due to her grief she unfortunately was unable to effectively care for Saddam, and at age three, he was sent to Baghdad to live with his uncle, Khairallah Talfah.
Years later, Saddam would return to the desolate village of Al-Awja to live with his mother, but after suffering abuse at the hand of his stepfather, he fled to Baghdad to again live with Talfah, a devout Sunni Muslim and ardent Arab nationalist whose politics would have a profound influence on the young Saddam.
After attending the nationalistic al-Karh Secondary School in Baghdad, in 1957, at age 20, Saddam joined the Ba'ath Party, whose ultimate ideological aim was the unity of Arab states in the Middle East. Saddam had a few brushes with the law in his earlier life but in 1958 Saddam legal troubles would begin to come to a head. He was arrested for killing his brother-in-law, who by all intents and purposes was a Communist; and he spent six months in prison.
Following his release Saddam again would find himself in hot water with the police but this time on a more grander scale. On October 7, 1959, Saddam and other members of the Ba-ath Party attempted to assassinate Iraq's then-president, Abd al-Karim Qasim. Qasim’s resistance to joining the nascent United Arab Republic and his alliance with Iraq's communist party had put him at odds with the Ba'athists. During the assassination attempt, Qasim's chauffeur was killed, and Qasim was shot several times, but survived. Saddam was shot in the leg. Several of the would-be assassins were caught, tried and executed, but Saddam and several others managed to escape to Syria, where Saddam stayed briefly before fleeing to Egypt, where he attended law school.
In 1963, when Qasim's government was overthrown in the so-called Ramadan Revolution, Saddam returned to Iraq, but he was arrested the following year as the result of in-fighting in the Ba'ath Party. While in prison, however, he remained involved in politics, and in 1966, was appointed deputy secretary of the Regional Command. Shortly thereafter he managed to escape prison, and in the years that followed, continued to strengthen his political power.
In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless but successful Ba'athist coup that resulted in Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr becoming Iraq's president and Saddam his deputy. During al-Bakr’s presidency, Saddam proved himself to be an effective and progressive politician, albeit a decidedly ruthless one. He did much to modernize Iraq's infrastructure, industry and health-care system, and raised social services, education and farming subsidies to levels unparalleled in other Arab countries in the region. He also nationalized Iraq's oil industry, just before the energy crisis of 1973, which resulted in massive revenues for the nation. During that same time, however, Saddam helped develop Iraq's first chemical weapons program and, to guard against coups, created a powerful security apparatus, which included both Ba'athist paramilitary groups and the People's Army, which frequently used torture, rape and assassination to achieve its goals.
In 1979, when al-Bakr attempted to unite Iraq and Syria, in a move that would have left Saddam effectively powerless, Saddam forced al-Bakr to resign, and on July 16, 1979, Saddam became president of Iraq. Less than a week later, he called an assembly of the Ba'ath Party. During the meeting, a list of 68 names was read out loud, and each person on the list was promptly arrested and removed from the room. Of those 68, all were tried and found guilty of treason and 22 were sentenced to death. By early August 1979, hundreds of Saddam's political foes had been executed.
The same year that Saddam ascended to the presidency, Ayatollah Khomeini led a successful Islamic revolution in Iraq's neighbor to the northeast, Iran. Saddam, whose political power rested in part upon the support of Iraq's minority Sunni population, worried that developments in Shi-ite majority Iran could lead to a similar uprising in Iraq. In response, on September 22, 1980, Saddam ordered Iraqi forces to invade the oil-rich region of Khuzestan in Iran. The conflict soon blossomed into an all-out war, Western nations and much of the Arab world, fearful of the spread of Islamic radicalism and what it would mean to the region and the world, laid their support firmly behind Saddam, despite the fact that his invasion of Iran clearly violated international law. During the conflict, these same fears would cause the international community to essentially ignore Iraq's use of chemical weapons, its genocidal dealing with its Kurdish population.
One such chemical attack occurred on March 16, 1988, Hussein, committed one of the worst atrocities of the modern era: the murder by poison gas of thousands of civilians in the Kurdish-Iraqi town of Halabja. As part of a genocidal campaign against the Kurds and other ethnic groups in Northern Iraq, government forces spent two days shelling the city of Halabja with rockets and Napalm, an incendiary gel that sticks to skin and causes terrible burns. On the second day, March 16th, they suddenly changed tactics, attacking with aircraft, the Iraqi forces began to pepper the civilian parts of the city with canisters of chemical weapons including mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX. That day, some 3,500 to 5,000 people died within minutes gasping and choking as their lungs filled with fluid, some hit with the nerve agents would be left with painful convulsions and inevitably die through cardiac arrest or suffocation . Another 7,000 to 10,000 were injured, crippled, or suffered long-term health problems.
On August 20, 1988, after years of intense conflict that had devolved into a bloody stalemate that had left hundreds of thousands dead on both sides, a ceasefire agreement was finally reached. I know I’ve not really gone into the details of the Iran-Iraq war here but this really does deserve its own episode so just I’ve just sort of given you the jist of it as it was a big part in saddam life.
Saddam was an incredibly brutal man,
He’d had approximately 40 of his own relatives murdered. He used Allegations of prostitution to intimidate opponents of the regime and were used by the regime to justify the barbaric beheading of women. There had been documented chemical attacks by the regime, from 1983 to 1988, resulting in some 30,000 Iraqi and Iranian deaths.
he and the regime carried out an unspecified number of executions in a bid to keep Saddam’ grip on power. The Iraqi president had brutally put down Kurdish rebellions in the north and Shia uprisings in the south.
Saddam Hussein was married to Sajida Khair Allah Talfah and has two sons and three daughters.
Two of his daughters were married to the brothers Saddam Kamil and Hussain Kamil, who defected with their families to Jordan in 1995. The brothers returned to Iraq after they were pardoned by the Iraqi president but were killed upon their arrival to Baghdad.
While Iraqi media reports said they were killed by their tribes that were outraged by their defection, other reports said they were killed by Saddam and his sons, Uday and Qusay.
Now Uday really were psychopaths. Uday bludgeoned and stabbed one of Saddam’s favorite attendants to death at a 1988 party, Uday continued to make a name for himself among the Iraqi people for his sadism and cruelty. He was Prone to beating and torturing his servants and anyone else who displeased him, he was known to spend time studying new torture devices and methods to improve his technique. He even treated his so-called friends poorly—in one report, he forced some to drink dangerous amounts of alcohol purely for his amusement. Uday was also a man of unrestrained sexual appetites, sleeping with several women per night up to five nights a week. He was known for raping young women—some as young as 12—whom he found attractive, threatening their and their families’ lives if they complained or spoke out against the crime. he would sometimes torture and kill his victims after sex. Many Iraqi women were forced off the streets into the back of his car and never seen again.
Uday held several jobs during his father’s regime, most notably publishing the most widely read newspaper in the country and heading Iraq’s Olympic Committee. In that position, he is known to have beaten athletes whom he felt did not perform up to expectations. He once tortured and kidnapped the captain of the Iraqi football team and sent him to a labour camp for 3 weeks for missing a penalty.
After that brief caveat I’ll get back to the story. In the aftermath of the conflict, seeking a means of revitalizing Iraq's war-ravaged economy and infrastructure, at the end of the 1980s, Saddam turned his attention toward Iraq's wealthy neighbor, Kuwait. Using the justification that it was a historical part of Iraq, on August 2, 1990, Saddam ordered the invasion of Kuwait. This act would firmly put saddam in the cross hair of the US. In retaliation A UN Security Council resolution was promptly passed, imposing economic sanctions on Iraq and setting a deadline by which Iraqi forces must leave Kuwait. When the January 15, 1991 deadline was ignored, a UN coalition force headed by the United States confronted Iraqi forces, and a mere six weeks later, had driven them from Kuwait. A ceasefire agreement was signed, the terms of which included Iraq dismantling its germ and chemical weapons programs. The previously imposed economic sanctions levied against Iraq remained in place. Despite this and the fact that his military had suffered a crushing defeat, Saddam claimed victory in the conflict.
The Gulf War's resulting economic hardships further divided an already fractured Iraqi population. During the 1990s, various Shi-ite and Kurdish uprisings occurred, but the rest of the world, fearing another war, Kurdish independence (in the case of Turkey) or the spread of Islamic fundamentalism did little or nothing to support these rebellions, and they were ultimately crushed by Saddam's increasingly repressive security forces. At the same time, Iraq remained under intense international scrutiny as well. In 1993, when Iraqi forces violated a no-fly zone imposed by the United Nations, the United States launched a damaging missile attack on Baghdad. In 1998, further violations of the no-fly zones and Iraq's alleged continuation of its weapons programs led to further missile strikes on Iraq, which would occur intermittently until February 2001.
Members of the Bush administration had suspected that the Hussein government had a relationship with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization. In his January 2002 State of the Union address, U.S. President George W. Bush named Iraq as part of his so-called "Axis of Evil," along with Iran and North Korea, and claimed that the country was developing weapons of mass destruction and supporting terrorism.
Later that year, UN inspections of suspected weapons sites in Iraq began, but little or no evidence that such programs existed was ultimately found. Despite this, on March 20, 2003, under the pretense that Iraq did in fact have a covert weapons program and that it was planning attacks, a U.S.-led coalition invaded Iraq. Within weeks, the government and military had been toppled, and on April 9, 2003, Baghdad fell. Saddam, however, managed to elude capture.
In the months that followed, an intensive search for Saddam began. While in hiding, Saddam released several audio recordings, in which he denounced Iraq's invaders and called for resistance. Finally, on December 13, 2003, Saddam was found hiding in a small underground bunker near a farmhouse in ad-Dawr, near Tikrit. From there, he was moved to a U.S. base in Baghdad, where he would remain until June 30, 2004, when he was officially handed over to the interim Iraqi government to stand trial for crimes against humanity.
During the subsequent trial, Saddam would prove to be a belligerent defendant, often boisterously challenging the court's authority and making bizarre statements. On November 5, 2006, Saddam was found guilty and sentenced to death. The sentencing was appealed, but was ultimately upheld by a court of appeals. On December 30, 2006, at Camp Justice, an Iraqi base in Baghdad, Saddam was hanged, despite his request to be shot. He was buried in Al-Awja, his birthplace, on December 31, 2006.
Thank you for listen to this dark episode.
Yeah so saddam hussein, like I eluded to in the beginning of the episode, and in previous episodes, Iraq and the Middle East is in absolute chaos and a constant state of flux. The geopolitical landscape over the last twenty years has dramatically changed for the worse over the last few decades and to me it seems like there is one glaring thing that is missing and that is obviously saddam hussein.
As a spotty faced teen I remember the war in Iraq quite vividly, paired with the war in Afghanistan, it was the first I can consciously remember, at the risk of showing my age, the wars in Yugoslavia, Bosnia and the Chechen war don’t really resonate with me as I was to young to remember and understand. Now as I said I remember the war starting, the pictures of the shock and awe tactics of bush and Blair pummelling Baghdad’s military infrastructure and the subsequent invasion and toppling of saddam. Then of course the search,capture and execution of saddam. As I’ve got older and researched the war more I’ve come to believe that yes saddam was a disgustingly evil human being but he was necessary. He kept that region in check, he kept extremist in check and he kept Iran in its place. This is no offence to anyone living or regrettable dead that served their countries bravely in that war but I firmly believe that we invade Iraq for oil, not because of WMDS, not because of nuclear weapons and not because he was helping terrorist, it was so we could have the oil. The same blood that is on saddams hands for that war are also on bush and Blair’s and they too are war criminals. I now that that will piss some people off but it’s true, they didn’t make the world a better place they booted a hornets nest caught it shook it and made the world worse.
So to end my little rant, and don’t get me wrong hindsight is a brilliant thing, but was saddam hussein a necessary evil? Some people may say yes others may say no.
Before we go any further next week will be our Christmas special and last of season 2 before I go on my annual Christmas break, so fortunately, or unfortunately which ever way you look at it, you will get a bonus episode next week.
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