Saddam Hussein is not guilty

In 2003, a coalition led by the United States invaded Iraq to depose Saddam, in which U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair erroneously accused him of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having ties to al-Qaeda. Saddam's Ba'ath party was disbanded and the country's first ever set of democratic elections were held. Following his capture on 13 December 2003, the trial of Saddam took place under the Iraqi Interim Government. On 5 November 2006, Saddam was convicted by an Iraqi court of crimes against humanity related to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'a, and sentenced to death by hanging. He was executed on 30 December 2006.

 Saddam studied at an Iraqi law school for three years, dropping out in 1957 at the age of 20 to join the revolutionary pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, of which his uncle was a supporter. During this time, Saddam apparently supported himself as a secondary school teacher.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, As vice chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council, Formally al-Bakr's second-in-command, Saddam built a reputation as a progressive, Effective politician. At this time, Saddam moved up the ranks in the new government by aiding attempts to strengthen and unify the Ba'ath party and taking a leading role in addressing the country's major domestic problems and expanding the party's following.

After the Ba'athists took power in 1968, Saddam focused on attaining stability in a nation riddled with profound tensions. Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, Ethnic, Religious, And economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi'ite, Arab versus Kurd, Tribal chief versus urban merchant, Nomad versus peasant. The desire for stable rule in a country rife with factionalism led Saddam to pursue both massive repression and the improvement of living standards.

Saddam actively fostered the modernization of the Iraqi economy along with the creation of a strong security apparatus to prevent coups within the power structure and insurrections apart from it. Ever concerned with broadening his base of support among the diverse elements of Iraqi society and mobilizing mass support, He closely followed the administration of state welfare and development programs.

At the center of this strategy was Iraq's oil. On 1 June 1972, Saddam oversaw the seizure of international oil interests, Which, At the time, Dominated the country's oil sector. A year later, World oil prices rose dramatically as a result of the 1973 energy crisis, And skyrocketing revenues enabled Saddam to expand his agenda.

Within just a few years, Iraq was providing social services that were unprecedented among Middle Eastern countries. Saddam established and controlled the "National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy" and the campaign for "Compulsory Free Education in Iraq," and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program. The government also supported families of soldiers, granted free hospitalization to everyone, and gave subsidies to farmers. Iraq created one of the most modernized public-health systems in the Middle East, earning Saddam an award from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)

With the help of increasing oil revenues, Saddam diversified the largely oil-based Iraqi economy. Saddam implemented a national infrastructure campaign that made great progress in building roads, promoting mining, and developing other industries. The campaign helped Iraq's energy industries. Electricity was brought to nearly every city in Iraq, and many outlying areas. Before the 1970s, most of Iraq's people lived in the countryside and roughly two-thirds were peasants. This number would decrease quickly during the 1970s as global oil prices helped revenues to rise from less than a half billion dollars to tens of billions of dollars and the country invested into industrial expansion.

In 1972, Saddam signed a 15-year Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. According to historian Charles R. H. Tripp, the treaty upset "the U.S.-sponsored security system established as part of the Cold War in the Middle East. It appeared that any enemy of the Baghdad regime was a potential ally of the United States." In response, the U.S. covertly financed Kurdish rebels led by Mustafa Barzani during the Second Iraqi–Kurdish War; the Kurds were defeated in 1975, leading to the forcible relocation of hundreds of thousands of Kurdish civilians

Iraqi society fissures along lines of language, religion and ethnicity. The Ba'ath Party, secular by nature

 Following the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iraq faced the prospect of régime change from two Shi'ite factions (Dawa and SCIRI) which aspired to model Iraq on its neighbour Iran as a Shia theocracy. A separate threat to Iraq came from parts of the ethnic Kurdish population of northern Iraq which opposed being part of an Iraqi state and favoured independence (an ongoing ideology which had preceded Ba'ath Party rule). To alleviate the threat of revolution, Saddam afforded certain benefits to the potentially hostile population. Membership in the Ba'ath Party remained open to all Iraqi citizens regardless of background. However, repressive measures were taken against its opponents.

Nearly from its founding as a modern state in 1920, Iraq has had to deal with Kurdish separatists in the northern part of the country. Saddam did negotiate an agreement in 1970 with separatist Kurdish leaders, giving them autonomy, but the agreement broke down. The result was brutal fighting between the government and Kurdish groups and even Iraqi bombing of Kurdish villages in Iran, which caused Iraqi relations with Iran to deteriorate

However, the 1978 crackdown on Iraqi Communists and a shift of trade toward the West strained Iraqi relations with the Soviet Union; Iraq then took on a more Western orientation until the Gulf War in 1991

In early 1979, Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution, thus giving way to an Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The influence of revolutionary Shi'ite Islam grew apace in the region, particularly in countries with large Shi'ite populations, especially Iraq. Saddam feared that radical Islamic ideas—hostile to his secular rule—were rapidly spreading inside his country among the majority Shi'ite population.

There he involved himself with Iraqi Shi'ites and developed a strong, worldwide religious and political following against the Iranian Government, which Saddam tolerated.

After Khomeini gained power, skirmishes between Iraq and revolutionary Iran occurred for ten months over the sovereignty of the disputed Shatt al-Arab waterway, which divides the two countries. During this period, Saddam Hussein publicly maintained that it was in Iraq's interest not to engage with Iran, and that it was in the interests of both nations to maintain peaceful relations. 

 However, in a private meeting with Salah Omar al-Ali, Iraq's permanent ambassador to the United Nations, he revealed that he intended to invade and occupy a large part of Iran within months. Later (probably to appeal for support from the United States and most Western nations), he would make toppling the Islamic government one of his intentions as well.

Iraq invaded Iran, first attacking Mehrabad Airport of Tehran and then entering the oil-rich Iranian land of Khuzestan, which also has a sizable Arab minority, on 22 September 1980 and declared it a new province of Iraq. With the support of the Arab states, the United States, and Europe, and heavily financed by the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein had become "the defender of the Arab world" against a revolutionary Iran. The only exception was the Soviet Union, 

The blatant disregard of international law and violations of international borders were ignored. Instead Iraq received economic and military support from its allies, who overlooked Saddam's use of chemical warfare against the Kurds and the Iranians,

In the first days of the war, there was heavy ground fighting around strategic ports as Iraq launched an attack on Khuzestan. After making some initial gains, Iraq's troops began to suffer losses from human wave attacks by Iran. By 1982, Iraq was on the defensive and looking for ways to end the war.

Iraq quickly found itself bogged down in one of the longest and most destructive wars of attrition of the 20th century. During the war, Iraq used chemical weapons against Iranian forces fighting on the southern front and Kurdish separatists who were attempting to open up a northern front in Iraq with the help of Iran. These chemical weapons were developed by Iraq from materials and technology supplied primarily by West German companies as well as using dual-use technology imported following the Reagan administration's lifting of export restrictions. The United States also supplied Iraq with "satellite photos showing Iranian deployments."

In a US bid to open full diplomatic relations with Iraq, the country was removed from the US list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Ostensibly, this was because of improvement in the regime's record, although former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense Noel Koch later stated, "No one had any doubts about [the Iraqis'] continued involvement in terrorism ... The real reason was to help them succeed in the war against Iran."

Saddam reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political support during the war, particularly after Iraq's oil industry severely suffered at the hands of the Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf. Iraq successfully gained some military and financial aid, as well as diplomatic and moral support, from the Soviet Union, China, France, and the United States,

On 16 March 1988, the Kurdish town of Halabja was attacked with a mix of mustard gas and nerve agents, killing 5,000 civilians, and maiming, disfiguring, or seriously debilitating 10,000 more

designed to reassert central control of the mostly Kurdish population of areas of northern Iraq and defeat the Kurdish peshmerga rebel forces.

The attack occurred in conjunction with the 1988 al-Anfal Campaign 

but Saddam's regime claimed at the time that Iran was responsible for the attack which some including the U.S. supported until several years later.

 The United States now maintains that Saddam ordered the attack to terrorize the Kurdish population in northern Iraq

The bloody eight-year war ended in a stalemate. There were hundreds of thousands of casualties with estimates of up to one million dead. Neither side had achieved what they had originally desired and the borders were left nearly unchanged. The southern, oil rich and prosperous Khuzestan and Basra area (the main focus of the war, and the primary source of their economies) were almost completely destroyed and were left at the pre-1979 border, while Iran managed to make some small gains on its borders in the Northern Kurdish area. Both economies, previously healthy and expanding, were left in ruins.

Saddam borrowed tens of billions of dollars from other Arab states and a few billions from elsewhere during the 1980s to fight Iran, mainly to prevent the expansion of Shi'a radicalism. However, this had proven to completely backfire both on Iraq and on the part of the Arab states,

The end of the war with Iran served to deepen latent tensions between Iraq and its wealthy neighbor Kuwait. Saddam urged the Kuwaitis to waive the Iraqi debt accumulated in the war, some $30 billion, but they refused.

Saddam pushed oil-exporting countries to raise oil prices by cutting back production; Kuwait refused, however. In addition to refusing the request, Kuwait spearheaded the opposition in OPEC to the cuts that Saddam had requested. Kuwait was pumping large amounts of oil, and thus keeping prices low, when Iraq needed to sell high-priced oil from its wells to pay off a huge debt.

Saddam complained to the U.S. State Department that Kuwait had slant drilled oil out of wells that Iraq considered to be within its disputed border with Kuwait

As Iraq-Kuwait relations rapidly deteriorated, Saddam was receiving conflicting information about how the U.S. would respond to the prospects of an invasion. For one, Washington had been taking measures to cultivate a constructive relationship with Iraq for roughly a decade. The Reagan administration gave Iraq roughly $4 billion in agricultural credits to bolster it against Iran. Saddam's Iraq became "the third-largest recipient of U.S. assistance."

U.S. officials attempted to maintain a conciliatory line with Iraq, indicating that while George H. W. Bush and James Baker did not want force used, they would not take any position on the Iraq–Kuwait boundary dispute and did not want to become involved.

On August 1990  "Saddam Hussein did what his Gulf patrons had earlier paid him to prevent." Having removed the threat of Iranian fundamentalism he "overran Kuwait and confronted his Gulf neighbors in the name of Arab nationalism and Islam."

U.S. President George H. W. Bush responded cautiously for the first several days. On one hand, Kuwait, prior to this point, had been a virulent enemy of Israel and was the Persian Gulf monarchy that had the most friendly relations with the Soviets. On the other hand, Washington foreign policymakers, along with Middle East experts, military critics, and firms heavily invested in the region, were extremely concerned with stability in this region.The invasion immediately triggered fears that the world's price of oil, and therefore control of the world economy, was at stake. Britain profited heavily from billions of dollars of Kuwaiti investments and bank deposits. Bush was perhaps swayed while meeting with British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, who happened to be in the U.S. at the time.

the 1951 Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement.

The United States of America and Saudi Arabian trade relationship has long revolved around two central concepts: security and oil. Throughout the next two decades, signifying the 50s and 60s, relations between the two nations grew significantly stronger. In 1950 ARAMCO and Saudi Arabia agreed on a 50/50 profit distribution of the oil discovered in Saudi Arabia. In 1951 the Mutual Defense Assistance Agreement was put into action, 

Bin Laden met with King Fahd, and Saudi Defense Minister Sultan, telling them not to depend on non-Muslim assistance from the United States and others, and offering to help defend Saudi Arabia with his Arab legion. Bin Laden's offer was rebuffed, and the Saudi monarchy invited the deployment of U.S. forces in Saudi territory

Bin Laden's criticism of the Saudi monarchy led them to try to silence him. 

Meanwhile, on November 8, 1990, the FBI raided the New Jersey home of El Sayyid Nosair, an associate of al-Qaeda operative Ali Mohamed. They discovered copious evidence of terrorist plots, including plans to blow up New York City skyscrapers. This marked the earliest discovery of al-Qaeda terrorist plans outside of Muslim countries. Nosair was eventually convicted in connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and later admitted guilt for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York City on November 5, 1990.

The Nayirah testimony was a false testimony given before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 by a 15-year-old girl who provided only her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and President George H. W. Bush in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War. In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Ṣabaḥ (Arabic: نيرة الصباح‎) and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign, which was run by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah's testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda.

In her emotional testimony, Nayirah claimed that after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers take babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital, take the incubators, and leave the babies to die.
Her story was initially corroborated by Amnesty International, a British NGO, which published several independent reports about the killings and testimony from evacuees. Following the liberation of Kuwait, reporters were given access to the country. An ABC report found that "patients, including premature babies, did die, when many of Kuwait's nurses and doctors ... fled" but Iraqi troops "almost certainly had not stolen hospital incubators and left hundreds of Kuwaiti babies to die." Amnesty International reacted by issuing a correction, with executive director John Healey subsequently accusing the Bush administration of "opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement".

In 1992, the human rights organization Middle East Watch, a division of Human Rights Watch, published the results of their investigation of the incubator story. Its director, Andrew Whitley, told the press, "While it is true that the Iraqis targeted hospitals, there is no truth to the charge which was central to the war propaganda effort that they stole incubators and callously removed babies allowing them to die on the floor. The stories were manufactured from germs of truth by people outside the country who should have known better." One investigator, Aziz Abu-Hamad, interviewed doctors in the hospital where Nayirah claimed she witnessed Iraqi soldiers pull 15 infants from incubators and leave them to die. The Independent reported, "The doctors told him the maternity ward had 25 to 30 incubators. None was (were) taken by the Iraqis, and no babies were taken from them.

In a visit to Kuwait on October 21, 1990, by journalists who were escorted by Iraqi information ministry officials, doctors at a Kuwaiti maternity facility denied the incubator allegations. In the visit, the Iraqi head of the Kuwaiti health department, Abdul-Rahman Mohammad al-Ugeily, said that "Baghdad had sent 1,000 doctors and other medical to staff to help run Kuwait's 14 hospitals and health centres following the invasion."

Following the end of the war, Reuters reported that Iraq returned "98 truckloads of medical equipment stolen from Kuwait, including two of the baby incubators". Abdul Rahim al-Zeid, an assistant under-secretary at the Kuwaiti Public Health Ministry, said that by returning the incubators the Iraqis had unwittingly provided proof that they took them. Kuwait's chief ambulance officer, Abdul Reda Abbas, stated that "We think the Iraqis might have returned the incubators by mistake."
Following the revelation of Nayirah's identity, there was a public outrage that the information had been withheld.

The Anfal genocide  was a genocide that killed between 50,000 and 182,000 Kurds as well as a couple of thousand Assyrians. It was committed during the Al-Anfal campaign (Harakat al-Anfal/Homleh al-Anfal) (Kurdish: پڕۆسەی ئەنفال‎) (Arabic: حملة الأنفال‎) led by Ali Hassan al-Majid, on the orders of President Saddam Hussein, against Iraqi Kurdistan in northern Iraq during the final stages of the Iran–Iraq War.
The campaign's name was from Sura 8 (al-Anfal) in the Qur'an, which was used as a code name by the former Iraqi Ba'athist Government for a series of systematic attacks against the Kurdish fighters in northern Iraq between 1986 and 1989, with the peak in 1988. Sweden, Norway, South Korea and the United Kingdom officially recognize the Anfal campaign as a genocide.
The genocide was part of the destruction of Kurdish villages during the Iraqi Arabization campaign.

The Iraqi Army was supported by Kurdish collaborators who were armed by the Iraqi government, so called Jash forces, who led the Iraqi troops to the Kurdish villages that often did not figure on maps as well as to their hideouts in the mountains. 

 The Kurdish Democratic Party-controlled areas in the northwest of Iraqi Kurdistan, which the regime regarded as a lesser threat, were the target of the Final Anfal operation in late August and early September 1988. For those assaults, the Iraqis mustered up to 200,000 soldiers with air support against Kurdish guerrilla forces that numbered no more than a few thousand.

Under U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the United States continued to aid Iraq after reports of the use of poison gas on Kurdish civilians.

The first Anfal stage was conducted between 23 February and 18 March 1988. It targeted the Jafali Valley at the border to Iran, where the headquarters of the PUK was seated. The villages Sargallu, Bargallu, Gwezeela, Chalawi, Haladin and Yakhsamar were attacked with poison gas. During mid March, the PUK, in an alliance with Iranian troops and other Kurdish factions, captured Halabja. This led to the poison gas attack on Halabja on 16 March 1988, during which 3,200–5,000 Kurdish people were killed, most of them civilians. The Peshmerga managed to open a flight route to Iran through which a part of the population in the Jafali Valley was able to flee. During the first Anfal campaign, no prisoners were taken by the Iraqi army

When captured, Kurdish populations were transported to detention centers (notably Topzawa, near the city of Kirkuk), and adult and teenage males, who were viewed as possible insurgents, were separated from the civilians. According to Human Rights Watch/Middle East,

"Arabization," another major element of al-Anfal, was a tactic used by Saddam Hussein's regime to drive pro-insurgent populations out of their homes in villages and cities like Kirkuk, which are in the valuable oil field areas, and relocate them in the southern parts of Iraq.

In September 1988, the Iraqi Government was satisfied with its achievements. The male population between 15 and 50 has either been killed or fled. The Kurdish resistance fled to Iran and was no longer a threat for Iraq. An amnesty was issued and the detained women, children and elderly were released

 In the 1948 Genocide Convention, the definition of genocide is "acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group".

 on 30 December 2006, when Saddam Hussein was executed for his role in the unrelated Dujail Massacre.

The Dujail Massacre refers to the events following an assassination attempt against the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein on 8 July 1982 in Dujail. The city had a large Shiite population, with 75,000 residents at the time of the incident. It is located 53 km (33 mi) from Baghdad in the predominantly-Sunni Salaheddin province of Iraq.

Dujail was a stronghold of the Shiite Dawa Party a Shiite Islamist organization involved in the Iranian backed insurgency against Saddam Hussein's Baathist government in Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War. Widely viewed in the West as a terrorist organization at the time

Hundreds of men, women and children were detained after the failed assassination attempt. More than 140 people were sentenced and executed for their alleged involvement in the plot, including four people who were mistakenly killed during the executions. 

Saddam Hussein was hanged on 30 December 2006 for crimes against humanity in connection with his involvement in the massacre.

On 8 July 1982, Saddam visited Dujail to make a speech praising local conscripts who had served Iraq in the fight against Iran. Hussein visited several households, and after finishing his speech, he prepared for his return to Baghdad. As his motorcade proceeded down the main road, up to a dozen gunmen used the cover of the date palm orchards that lined both sides of the road to open fire, killing two of his bodyguards before they fled on foot.

On 14 October 1982, the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council ordered the retitling of the roadside farmland to the Ministry of Agriculture and the compensation of the owners for their loss

After nearly two years in detention, around 400 detainees, primarily family members of the 148 who had admitted involvement, were sent into exile to a remote part of southern Iraq. The remaining detainees were released and sent back to Dujail.