Q 01/05

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

A) Baghdad

B) Tikrit

C) Mosul

D) Basra

Answer · why

B) 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 cou...

Q 02/05

What does the Arabic name Saddam mean?

A) One who confronts

B) One chosen by God

C) Lion of the desert

D) One who is praised

Answer · why

A) 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 03/05

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

A) His stepfather

B) His maternal uncle

C) His elder brother

D) His grandfather

Answer · why

B) 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,...

Q 04/05

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

A) Tamerlane

B) Saladin

C) Harun al-Rashid

D) Baibars

Answer · why

B) 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 Sala...

Q 05/05

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

A) Anwar el-Sadat

B) King Farouk

C) Gamal Abdel Nasser

D) Hosni Mubarak

Answer · why

C) 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...