49 Fun Facts About Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein was born in 1937 in a village near which Iraqi city?

Tikrit. He was born in the nearby village of al-Awja, and in power he surrounded himself with trusted relatives and clansmen from the town and its countryside.

What does the Arabic name Saddam mean?

One who confronts. His second name was not a surname but his father's given name, and Hussein al-Majid had died before the son who carried it was born.

Sajida, Saddam's first wife, was the daughter of which relative who had raised him?

His maternal uncle. Khairallah Talfah, an army officer jailed for his part in the 1941 revolt against the British, took the boy into his Baghdad home, and Saddam married his daughter in 1963.

Saddam cast himself as the heir of which medieval Muslim hero, adopted as a national symbol by his regime?

Saladin. Saddam's government adopted the sultan as a national symbol, and at the height of the Kuwait crisis he presented himself as a latter-day Saladin bound for Palestine.

Which Egyptian leader's pan-Arab nationalism inspired the young Saddam and his fellow Ba'athists?

Gamal Abdel Nasser. The Egyptian's defiance of Britain and France made him the hero of young Arab nationalists; once president, Saddam set out to take Egypt's place as leader of the Arab world.

In 1959 Saddam took part in a botched attempt to do what?

Kill the prime minister. Meant only to give covering fire as gunmen ambushed Abdul-Karim Qasim's car, Saddam started shooting too soon; Qasim survived, and the wounded Saddam had to flee the country.

After a failed 1959 plot, Saddam eventually fled to which Arab capital?

Cairo. He studied law there under the Egyptian government's protection, and went home in 1963 when a coup brought his party to power for the first time.

Who led the bloodless July 1968 coup in Iraq and made Saddam his deputy?

Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. The older general took the presidency, but Saddam, his 31-year-old deputy, built the security apparatus and was the real power behind him long before taking over in 1979.

Which enterprise did Saddam nationalise while vice president?

The Iraq Petroleum Company. The foreign-owned consortium was seized in June 1972, a year before oil prices soared, and the windfall paid for roads, schools and hospitals across the country.

The 1975 agreement Saddam signed with Iran to settle border disputes was reached in which city?

Algiers. Saddam gave ground on the frontier so that the Shah would stop backing Iraq's Kurdish rebels, then repudiated the deal five years later, days before invading Iran.

Which Iraqi foreign minister met James Baker in Geneva in January 1991 in a last failed attempt to avert war?

Tariq Aziz. The regime's best-known voice abroad and its only senior Christian, he read the American president's letter to Saddam, refused to take it to Baghdad, and the air war began eight days later.

After Saddam's 1979 party purge, who was made to shoot the condemned?

Their own colleagues. Days into his presidency Saddam had dozens of officials named as traitors at a filmed meeting and led out one by one, then made the party's surviving leaders carry out the death sentences.

Which minority community held most of the senior posts in Saddam's regime?

Sunni Arabs. Far outnumbered by the country's Shia majority, they had long dominated Iraq's political life, and under Saddam the army, security services and top offices stayed in their hands.

Which prison near Baghdad, feared under Saddam, became notorious again in 2004 for the abuse of detainees by US soldiers?

Abu Ghraib. Under Saddam, opponents were tortured there and many simply disappeared; a year after his fall, photographs of American guards abusing inmates in the same jail became a scandal of their own.

Which US city gave Saddam a ceremonial key after he donated to one of its churches?

Detroit. Saddam sent close to half a million dollars to a Chaldean Catholic parish whose priest had praised him, and Mayor Coleman Young returned the favour with the key to the city.

Where had Ayatollah Khomeini lived in exile in Iraq before Saddam expelled him in 1978?

Najaf. The Shia shrine city sheltered him for thirteen years; pushed out at the Shah's request, he moved to France, found the world's press at his door and was ruling Iran within months.

Which American, sent by the White House as a special envoy, shook Saddam's hand in Baghdad in December 1983?

Donald Rumsfeld. He came to mend ties with an Iraq then at war with Iran; twenty years later, as defense secretary, he directed the invasion that drove Saddam from power.

Which oil-rich Iranian province bordering Iraq was Saddam's first objective when he invaded in 1980?

Khuzestan. Saddam planned a swift, limited campaign; instead Iran recovered all the ground it had lost within two years, and the fighting dragged on for six more.

Who destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in an air attack on 7 June 1981?

Israel. Its jets flew to the outskirts of Baghdad and wrecked the French-built Osirak reactor before it had been loaded with nuclear fuel.

Which waterway on the border with Iran did Saddam go to war to control in 1980?

Shatt al-Arab. Saddam had signed away half of it five years earlier; after eight years of war the frontier ran where it had before, and in 1990 he accepted the old terms again.

Which Soviet leader did Saddam study closely and take as his model for ruling Iraq?

Joseph Stalin. Saddam is said to have kept a library of books about him and, like his model, rose through the party and its security service, not through the army, which he never trusted.

The Anfal campaign against the Kurds took its code name from what?

A chapter of the Quran. Al-Anfal, 'the spoils', is its eighth sura; the army gave the name to its 1988 sweeps through the Kurdish countryside, which Human Rights Watch judged to be genocide.

Which Kurdish town was attacked with mustard gas and nerve agents on 16 March 1988?

Halabja. Iraqi aircraft struck days after the town had fallen to Iranian troops and their Kurdish allies; thousands of civilians died, and the attack later figured in the charges read to Saddam in court.

What nickname did Saddam's cousin earn leading the 1980s campaign against Iraq's Kurds?

Chemical Ali. Ali Hassan al-Majid, given the powers of a president across northern Iraq in 1987, ordered the gas attacks of the Anfal campaign; he was captured after the 2003 invasion and hanged in 2010.

Which US president's administration took Iraq off its list of state sponsors of terrorism as Saddam fought Iran?

Ronald Reagan. Washington feared an Iranian victory more than it disliked Saddam, so it mended relations with Baghdad and supplied credits and battlefield intelligence for the rest of the war.

Which US ambassador told Saddam, a week before he invaded Kuwait, that America had 'no opinion' on Arab-Arab conflicts?

April Glaspie. Critics later said her words gave Saddam a green light; his foreign minister, who was in the room, called that nonsense and said Iraq never expected America to stay out.

Which phrase did Saddam use for his 1991 war with the US-led coalition?

The mother of all battles. The ground war lasted about four days and ended with his army driven out of Kuwait, but the phrase stuck: 'mother of all' was voted 1991's word of the year.

Kuwait was formally annexed as which numbered governorate of Iraq?

19th. Baghdad proclaimed the new province on 28 August 1990, reviving the old claim that Kuwait had been carved out of Iraq by Britain and had no right to exist as a separate state.

What was the code name of the US-led campaign that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991?

Operation Desert Storm. Five weeks of bombing from mid-January 1991 were followed by a ground attack that was over in days; Saddam survived in power and told Iraqis they had won.

Which Soviet-designed missiles did Iraq fire at Riyadh and other cities across the region during the 1991 Gulf War?

Scud. Iraq launched dozens, many at a country that had stayed out of the war, hoping it would hit back and drive the Arab states from the coalition; under American pressure it held its fire.

Which phrase, said to be in Saddam's own handwriting, was added to the Iraqi flag in 1991?

Allahu Akbar. The words went on to the flag during the Gulf War as Saddam courted religious support; after his fall they were kept but redrawn in Kufic script to remove his hand.

Saddam commissioned a Quran said to be written in what?

His own blood. A nurse is said to have drawn it over about two years for a calligrapher to use as ink; after his fall the book was locked in a Baghdad mosque vault while officials argued over its fate.

Which currency did Saddam insist on for Iraq's oil sales under the Oil-for-Food programme from late 2000?

Euros. Saddam dropped the dollar as 'the currency of the enemy' just as the euro hit a record low, a move the UN warned would cost Iraq millions; the euro's later rise turned it into a windfall.

Which US president gave Saddam 48 hours to leave Iraq before invading?

George W. Bush. Saddam stayed, and the war opened with an air strike on a site where he was thought to be; Baghdad fell three weeks later.

In which city were Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay killed in a gunfight with US forces in July 2003?

Mosul. The brothers, ranked just below their father on the American list of most-wanted Iraqis, were cornered in the northern city and died with Qusay's teenage son after a gun battle lasting hours.

What was the code name of the mission that captured Saddam on 13 December 2003?

Operation Red Dawn. After a manhunt of almost nine months, the raid found him near a farmhouse outside his home town; he was armed, but gave himself up without a fight.

Where did US troops find Saddam hiding when they captured him in December 2003?

A hole in the ground. Soldiers pulled the once-dapper leader, bearded and dishevelled, from a 'spider hole' on a farm near his birthplace, almost nine months after the invasion began.

Saddam's interrogator George Piro worked for which US agency?

The FBI. Piro, a Lebanese-born agent chosen for his fluent Arabic, let Saddam believe he answered directly to the American president; the prisoner never learned which agency he really worked for.

Saddam was convicted for the 1982 killing of 148 Shia residents of which town?

Dujail. The killings were reprisals for an attempt on his life during a visit to the town in 1982, and they became the first case the Iraqi tribunal brought against him.

By what method had Saddam asked to be executed, arguing it befitted a commander-in-chief?

Firing squad. He argued that shooting was the proper end for the head of an army; the court refused, and he was hanged before dawn at an Iraqi army base in northern Baghdad.

Saddam's execution on 30 December 2006 fell on the first day of which festival?

Eid al-Adha. Saudi Arabia condemned the choice of a holy day, and Iraqi officials put off the hanging of his two co-defendants until the feast was over.

Saddam is credited with writing several of what in his last years in power, the first appearing anonymously in 2000?

Novels. The first, Zabibah and the King, a love story between a ruler and a commoner, was signed only 'by he who wrote it'; another was finished the day before the 2003 invasion.

Saddam had the bricks of ancient Babylon stamped with his name beside that of which king?

He styled himself the modern successor of the Babylonian ruler and adopted Saladin as a national symbol.

To which country did Saddam's sons-in-law, the Kamel brothers, defect with his daughters in August 1995?

Jordan. Hussein Kamel had run Iraq's weapons programmes and told UN inspectors what he knew; lured home six months later by a promise of pardon, the brothers were dead within days.

Which sporting body did Saddam's elder son Uday head, alongside the Fedayeen militia?

The Iraqi Olympic Committee. Uday used the post to terrorise his own athletes, who told of being jailed and beaten after defeats; an attempt on his life later left him partly paralysed.

Which European ruler, who died the following year, received Saddam on a visit in December 1974?

Francisco Franco. Saddam, then Iraq's vice president, was received at the dictator's palace outside Madrid; the next autumn he was in Paris, where the prime minister, Jacques Chirac, greeted him as a personal friend.

In a 2002 speech the US president branded Iraq, Iran and which third country an 'axis of evil'?

North Korea. The speech put Saddam's Iraq first in line: American troops invaded the following year, although he had played no part in the September 11 attacks that prompted it.

Which American news anchor interviewed Saddam weeks before the 2003 invasion, hearing his offer of a live TV debate?

Dan Rather. In a three-hour interview for CBS, Saddam denied having any banned weapons and challenged the American president to debate him on live television; the White House declined.

What reportedly happened to Saddam's tomb in his home village of Al-Awja in March 2015?

It was destroyed. The mausoleum was levelled during the battle to drive Islamic State out of the area, and locals said his body had already been moved to a secret place.