Saddam Hussein Trivia
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49 free Saddam Hussein trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Saddam Hussein trivia for history buffs, politics students and anyone who watched the Gulf Wars unfold on television. The quiz follows the man from a village outside Tikrit, through the botched 1959 ambush of Prime Minister Qasim, exile in Cairo, the 1968 Ba'athist coup and eleven years as the real power behind President al-Bakr, to the videotaped purge of July 1979 that opened his presidency. The middle rounds cover the eight-year war with Khomeini's Iran, the Israeli strike on the Osirak reactor, the Anfal campaign and the gassing of Halabja, the invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm, the uprisings and sanctions of the 1990s, the Faith Campaign and the Blood Quran, and the show referendum that reported 100 percent approval. It ends with the 2003 invasion, the deaths of Uday and Qusay, Operation Red Dawn and the spider hole near ad-Dawr, the Dujail trial and the execution on the first day of Eid al-Adha in 2006. Questions run from easy to expert, and every answer was checked against a reference page and carries its source. See also our Iraq, Gulf War, Cold War and 20th-century history quizzes.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Saddam Hussein was born in 1937 in a village near which Iraqi city?
Tikrit
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.
Q 02What does the Arabic name Saddam mean?
One who confronts
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.
Q 03Sajida, Saddam's first wife, was the daughter of which relative who had raised him?
His maternal uncle
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.
Q 04Saddam cast himself as the heir of which medieval Muslim hero, adopted as a national symbol by his regime?
Saladin
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.
Q 05Which Egyptian leader's pan-Arab nationalism inspired the young Saddam and his fellow Ba'athists?
Gamal Abdel Nasser
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.
Q 06In 1959 Saddam took part in a botched attempt to do what?
Kill the prime minister
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.
Q 07After a failed 1959 plot, Saddam eventually fled to which Arab capital?
Cairo
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.
Q 08Who led the bloodless July 1968 coup in Iraq and made Saddam his deputy?
Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr
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.
Q 09Which enterprise did Saddam nationalise while vice president?
The Iraq Petroleum Company
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.
Q 10The 1975 agreement Saddam signed with Iran to settle border disputes was reached in which city?
Algiers
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.
Q 11Which Iraqi foreign minister met James Baker in Geneva in January 1991 in a last failed attempt to avert war?
Tariq Aziz
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.
Q 12After Saddam's 1979 party purge, who was made to shoot the condemned?
Their own colleagues
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.
Q 13Which minority community held most of the senior posts in Saddam's regime?
Sunni Arabs
Q 21Which Soviet leader did Saddam study closely and take as his model for ruling Iraq?
Joseph Stalin
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.
Q 22The Anfal campaign against the Kurds took its code name from what?
A chapter of the Quran
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.
Q 23Which Kurdish town was attacked with mustard gas and nerve agents on 16 March 1988?
Halabja
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.
Q 14Which prison near Baghdad, feared under Saddam, became notorious again in 2004 for the abuse of detainees by US soldiers?
Abu Ghraib
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.
Q 15Which US city gave Saddam a ceremonial key after he donated to one of its churches?
Detroit
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.
Q 16Where had Ayatollah Khomeini lived in exile in Iraq before Saddam expelled him in 1978?
Najaf
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.
Q 17Which American, sent by the White House as a special envoy, shook Saddam's hand in Baghdad in December 1983?
Donald Rumsfeld
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.
Q 18Which oil-rich Iranian province bordering Iraq was Saddam's first objective when he invaded in 1980?
Khuzestan
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.
Q 19Who destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in an air attack on 7 June 1981?
Israel
Israel. Its jets flew to the outskirts of Baghdad and wrecked the French-built Osirak reactor before it had been loaded with nuclear fuel.
Q 20Which waterway on the border with Iran did Saddam go to war to control in 1980?
Shatt al-Arab
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.
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.
Q 24What nickname did Saddam's cousin earn leading the 1980s campaign against Iraq's Kurds?
Chemical Ali
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.
Q 25Which US president's administration took Iraq off its list of state sponsors of terrorism as Saddam fought Iran?
Ronald Reagan
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.
Q 26Which US ambassador told Saddam, a week before he invaded Kuwait, that America had 'no opinion' on Arab-Arab conflicts?
April Glaspie
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.
Q 27Which phrase did Saddam use for his 1991 war with the US-led coalition?
The mother of all battles
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.
Q 28Kuwait was formally annexed as which numbered governorate of Iraq?
19th
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.
Q 29What was the code name of the US-led campaign that drove Iraqi forces out of Kuwait in 1991?
Operation Desert Storm
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.
Q 30Which Soviet-designed missiles did Iraq fire at Riyadh and other cities across the region during the 1991 Gulf War?
Scud
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.