Saddam got a bullet wound in his left leg in the counter-fire by his bodyguards.
Saddam hussein capture pwned driver#
The driver of Qassim’s vehicle was killed but Qassim escaped unhurt. A military-like operation was planned and Saddam was nominated as the leader of ten young men to execute the assassination plan. In October 1959, it was decided by the Baath party to eliminate Qassim. As a beginning, he aligned himself with the Moscow-oriented Communist Party to counterbalance the forces of pan-Arabism – as in Iraq these forces had gathered under the banner of the Baath party. Soon after seizing power, Qassim started a witch hunt to eliminate all individuals and groups who were a real or perceived threat to his rule.
In 1958, the sun-baked and blood-soaked sands of Iraq witnessed another gory and bloody drama when the Hashemite King Faisal II and his prime minister, along with their entire families, were brutally massacred and general Abd-al-Karim Qassim became the new ruler of Iraq. Soon after this misadventure, Saddam Hussein joined the Baath party in 1957. In 1956, Saddam took part in a failed coup attempt against King Faisal and PM Nuri al-Said, experiencing for the first time the violent and radical Arab politics of that time. And it was here that he came in contact with the Arab Baath Socialist Party. Here he got his first taste of student activism and politics, which fired his political instinct and ambitions. At the age of 18 in 1955, he left his village for Baghdad and took admission in the Al-Karkh secondary school. Saddam was nine years old when he started his primary education along with religious ideas according to the Sunni school of thought.
This was the traditional and ancestral profession of Saddam’s forefathers, who were devout Muslims of the Sunni sect of Islam for the last many generations. Coincidentally, the famous Arab general Sultan Salahuddin Ayubi, the Muslim hero of the Crusades, was also a native of this area.Īlmost nothing or very little is known about Saddam’s early years except that he was orphaned at an early age and then taken care of by his uncle, a small farmer of watermelons. This area was called Mesopotamia by the early Greeks, which means “between two rivers.” It was in this area in the small remote village on the outskirts of the town of Tikrit, on the banks of the Tigris river, that Saddam Hussein was born on 28 April 1937. The area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in Iraq has been known as the birthplace of the world’s first known civilisation and early cultures. But the man himself remained relatively unknown to his friends and enemies both. Cruel, despotic, ruthless, power hungry, ambitious, wily and the list could be endless when left to the journalistic and linguistic jugglery of the Western media. Saddam Hussein of Iraq has been called many names. This tall, fair Arab leader with penetrating eyes, who in the words of an Arab writer “Speaks with the language of the poet” stood proud, defiant, and haughty – and still a challenge to all the countries allied against him. Defeated, humiliated and conclusively beaten in the mother of all battles, Saddam Hussein survived still in command of his forces and his nation. With an estimated 110,000 soldiers killed thousands of civilians dead and the military might of Iraq humbled and humiliated, Operation Desert Storm had achieved everything it was designed to achieve – except the elimination of Saddam Hussein, the aggressor against Kuwait and the architect of the Gulf crisis. The biggest army in the Middle East had been smashed. After 42 days of relentless air raids, a massive and continuous blitz from the air was followed by 100 hours of ground attack by the ferocious juggernaut of the allied forces. The first salvo against Iraq had been fired by the coalition of 17 nations led by the United States. “The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated” announced Pater Arnett of CNN to a world audience of television viewers.
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