Saddam Hussein

His first wife, Sajida Talfah, was his cousin whom he married in 1958. She was the daughter of his maternal uncle Khairallah Talfah. He fathered five children with her viz., Uday Hussein, Qusay Hussein, Raghad Hussein, Rana Hussein and Hala Hussein.

His second wife was Samira Shahbandar, whom he married in 1986. Before their marriage, Shahbandar was married to an Iraqi Airways executive but stayed with the dictator as his mistress. Later, Saddam forced Shahbandar’s husband to divorce her so that they could marry.

Nidal al-Hamdani, the general manager of the Solar Energy Research Center in the Council of Scientific Research, was his third wife. It was also rumored that he got married for a fourth time to Wafa el-Mullah al-Howeish in 2002.

Born into a family of shepherds as Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, this famous dictator was named ‘Saddam’ by his mother, which, in Arabic, means the ‘one who confronts’.

He was only six months old when his father abandoned the family, leaving him solely to the care of his mother. To add to the family’s misery, his teenage brother died of cancer following which, he was sent to the care of his maternal uncle Khairallah Talfah, where he stayed till he was three.

Soon his mother remarried and the toddler was sent back to stay with her. However, upset with the constant ill-treatment at the hands of his stepfather, Saddam, aged ten, fled to Baghdad to stay with his uncle again.

In Baghdad, he attended the al-Karh Secondary School and later dropped out. Soon he was introduced to the Ba’ath Party which derives its name from Ba’athism, an Arab nationalist ideology advocating creation of single-party states to end the political pluralism prevalent in the Arabian countries. He was deeply influenced by this ideology and became an active member of the party in 1957.

In 1958, Faisal II, the last king of Iraq, was overthrown by an army led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim, a Ba’athist, in what is known as the 14 July Revolution.

Iraq was declared a republic and Qasim became its Prime Minister who, despite being a Ba’athist, opposed the idea of Iraq joining the United Arab Republic. His alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party earned him the resentment of the Ba’ath Party and prompted other party members to act against him.

A plan to assassinate the prime minister was formulated and Saddam was asked to lead the operation. On October 7, 1959, in a bid to slay Qasim, the group started shooting but, due to a serious misjudgment on their part, the prime minister was only wounded. The assassins however assumed that Qasim was dead and fled the spot.

After the failure of the plot, fearing arrest Saddam Hussein fled to Syria where he was offered asylum by Michel Aflaq, one of the co-founders of Ba’athism. Aflaq, impressed by his dedication to Ba’athism, later made him one of the leaders of the Ba’ath party in Iraq.

The year 1968 proved to be fruitful for him as, in a bloodless coup by his party, the-then president Abdul Rahman Arif was overthrown and Ba’athist leader Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr became the new president with Saddam as his deputy.

Though al-Bakr was the president, it was the deputy who really wielded the power at the center and introduced himself as a revolutionary leader of Iraq, addressing the nation’s major domestic issues while working towards its progress.

Saddam’s political strategies were largely driven by his desire to stabilize his country which was then plagued with a multitude of internal conflicts. In tandem with this desire, he, unlike his orthodox predecessors, encouraged modernization of Iraq and began reviving the infrastructure, industry and health-care system.

Iraq flourished under this new system, the standard of living of Iraqis improved and the social services system became so strong that the neighboring countries’ socio-economic indices were overshadowed by leaps and bounds.

His initiatives, "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq", led thousands of children to attend schools which improved the literacy rate of the country drastically.