Saddam Hussein Death: When And Why The Former Iraq President Got Executed?

On December 30, 2006, the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was put to death. After being found guilty of crimes against humanity in the 1982 Dujail massacre, which resulted in the murder of 148 Iraqi Shi’ites in the town of Dujail in reprisal for an assassination attempt against him, Saddam Hussein was given the death penalty by hanging.

An official video of his execution, which was made public by the Iraqi government, begins with him being carried to the gallows and ends with the hangman’s noose being tightened around his neck.

Mobile phone footage of the execution that showed him being jeered at in Arabic by a group of his compatriots while being applauded by Shia preacher Muqtada al-Sadr and falling through the gallows’ trap door sparked outrage on a global scale.

Who Was Saddam Hussein?

A prominent member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, later the Baghdad-based Ba’ath Party and its regional organization, the Iraqi Ba’ath Party.

It advocated Ba’athism, a blend of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism—Saddam played a significant role in the 1968 coup (later referred to as the 17 July Revolution) that overthrew the government of Iraq and installed Saddam Hussein.

At a period when several factions were seen to be capable of overthrowing the government, Saddam established security forces through which he tightly controlled tensions between the government and the military forces while serving as vice president to the ill General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr.

Early in the 1970s, Saddam nationalized independent banks and the Iraq Petroleum Company, leading to the collapse of the banking system as a result of inflation and defaulted loans.

During this time, he also steadily increased his control over the state apparatus as oil revenue drove Iraq’s economy to a point of rapid expansion. Only a fifth of the population was Sunni Arabs, a minority who dominated positions of authority in the nation.

Saddam Hussein Death

Saddam wanted to be killed by firing squad rather than hanging after receiving a death sentence from an Iraqi court, arguing that this was the proper military method and referencing his role as the country’s military commander in chief. The court rejected this request. Also, read about Gabriel Iglesias Divorce

A letter written by Saddam was published on the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party website two days before his execution. In the letter, he exhorted the Iraqi people to come together and detest the decision-makers rather than the citizens of the countries that invaded Iraq, such as the United States.

He claimed that this was his death sentence and that he was prepared to die as a martyr. Saddam consumed a cup of hot water with honey and chicken and rice for his final supper in the hours prior to his death.

On the first day of Eid al-Adha, at around 06:00 UTC +03:00, Saddam was hanged (30 December 2006).

Accounts of the execution’s precise timing differed, with some accounts giving the hour as 06:00, 06:05, or even as late as 06:10.

The execution took held in the joint American-Iraqi military installation Camp Justice, which is situated in the Kazimain neighborhood of Baghdad’s northeast. Also, read about Kelly Rowland

Instead of being executed alongside his co-defendants Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed al-Bandar on January 15, 2007, as some initial reports said, Saddam was executed alone. Ali Hassan al-Majid, a relative of Saddam, received a death sentence and was hanged on January 25, 2010.

On December 31, 2006, at 4:00 p.m. local time, Saddam’s body was interred in his birthplace of Al-Awja in Tikrit, Iraq, close to family members, including his two sons Uday and Qusay Hussein.

A U.S. military chopper carried his remains to Tikrit, where Sheikh Ali al-Nida, the late leader of the Albu Nasir clan and governor of Saladin, received custody of him from the Iraqi government.

It was interred in the same big cemetery as his two boys’ corpses, around two miles (three kilometers) away. In a family plot, Saddam Hussein’s burial was carved out of the floor of an octagonal, dome-shaped structure he had commissioned to be built in the 1980s for religious celebrations there.

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