Even at the end, Saddam showed no remorse. When four members of the temporary government that replaced him visited him after his capture in December 2003, they asked about some of his more brutal acts. Saddam responded that the Halabja attack had been Iran's handiwork, that Kuwait was rightfully part of Iraq and that the mass graves were filled with thieves who fled the battlefields, according to Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister. Saddam declared that he'd been "just but firm" because Iraqis needed a tough ruler, Pachachi said.
Aside from his secret police, the main factor that preserved his power was his practice of filling the regime's upper ranks with members of his extended clan, regardless of their qualifications.
Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937, in a mud hut on stilts near the banks of the Tigris River near the village of Tikrit, 160km northwest of Baghdad. He was raised by a clan of landless peasants, his father apparently having deserted his mother before his birth -- Government accounts said the father died.
"His birth was not a joyful occasion, and no roses or aromatic plants bedecked his cradle," his official biographer, Amir Iskander, wrote in Saddam Hussein, the Fighter, the Thinker and The Man, published in 1981.
Saddam's wife, three daughters and roughly a dozen grandchildren survive him. His sons Uday and Qusay, along with Qusay's teenage son, Mustapha, died in July 2003 during a fierce gunbattle with US forces in a villa in the northern city of Mosul. Denounced by an informant, they had been the two most wanted men in Iraq after their father.
Savage
No other Arab despot matched the savagery of Saddam as he went about bending all state institutions to his whim. His notorious opening act, in January 1969, was hanging about 17 so-called spies for Israel, up to 13 of them Jews, in a downtown Baghdad square. Hundreds of arrests and executions followed as the civilian wing of Baath gradually eclipsed the Iraqi military.
Rarely traveling abroad, surrounded by often uneducated cousins, Saddam had a rather limited world view. He once reacted with wonder when a reporter told him that the US had no law against insulting the president. Former officials painted him as a vain, paranoid loner who no longer believed he was a normal person and considered compromise a sign of weakness.
There were widespread reports that Saddam himself periodically carried out the torture or even execution of those he felt had crossed him.
Saddam often tried to draw parallels between himself and the famous leaders of Mesopotamia, the earliest civilization in the region, as well as Saladin, the 12th century Kurdish Muslim military commander who expelled the Crusaders from Jerusalem.
What preoccupied him, Saddam said, was what people would be thinking about him 500 years from now. To the horror of historic preservationists, he had the ancient walls of Babylon completely reconstructed using tens of thousands of newly fired bricks. An archaeologist had shown him bricks stamped with the name of Nebuchadnezzar II in 605 BC.
After the reconstruction, the small Arabic script on thousands of bricks read: "In the reign of the victorious Saddam Hussein, the president of the Republic, may God keep him, the guardian of the great Iraq and the renovator of its renaissance and the builder of its great civilization, the rebuilding of the great city of Babylon was done."
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