Saddam Hussein: From Tikrit to the Spider Hole. The deals, the wars, and the moment that sealed his fate.

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Power, oil, and a spider hole

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Born near Tikrit in 1937, Saddam Hussein grew up in hardship, bounced between a strict stepfather and a nationalist uncle in Baghdad. He absorbed Ba'athist ideas about Arab unity and power. At 22 he joined a failed ambush on Prime Minister Qasim, was wounded, and fled through Syria to Egypt. In Cairo he studied law, organized for the Ba'ath, and, according to declassified accounts, met American contacts who saw him as useful against a pro Soviet Baghdad.

In 1963 Ba'ath officers and allies toppled Qasim in what Iraqis call the Ramadan Revolution, with covert help reported by the Church Committee and others. Saddam raced back and ran an internal security shop that hunted rivals. After another coup in 1968 he became the regime’s enforcer, then its mastermind. He nationalized oil in 1972, built a secret party fund, and by 1979 took the presidency after a chilling purge where he read out names on live TV.

Iraq was majority Shia, the ruling core was Sunni, and Saddam tried to manage the gap with money, surveillance, and bans on select rituals. The 1979 Islamic Revolution next door in Iran turned that fear into policy, and the Shatt al Arab waterway became the spark. He invaded Iran in 1980, fought a grinding war, used chemical weapons including at Halabja, and drew quiet U.S. support in intelligence and gear. In 1982 gunmen shot at his convoy in Dujail, and his forces answered with mass arrests and executions that a court would later call crimes against humanity, but which moment would actually put Saddam Hussein on the gallows?

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