Hussein born in Tikrit District, Iraq
on April 28, 1937 became president and dictator of Iraq in 1979. Hussein
had joined the revolutionary Baath party while he was a university student. He
launched his political career in 1958 by assassinating a supporter of Iraqi
ruler Abdul-Karim Qassim. Saddam rose in the ranks after a Baath coup, and by
1979 he was president of Iraq. He led Iraq through a decade-long war with Iran,
and in August of 1990 his forces invaded the neighboring country of Kuwait. A
U.S.-led alliance organized by George Bush ran Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in
the Gulf War, which ended in February of 1991 with Saddam still in power.
In 2002 Hussein came under renewed pressure form George W. Bush, the son of
the
son of the first President Bush. In March of 2003, the U.S. began an
invasion of Iraq with the declared intent of removing Hussein from power.
Reports that Saddam Hussein might have been in a Baghdad building destroyed by
American bombs on April 7 reunited questions about the Iraqi president’s
whereabouts. Nobody really knows for certain, though U.S. intelligence officials
insist they had positive evidence that he was in the building bombed 45
minutes before the attack. Since the beginning of the war, Iraqi television has
aired successive video tapes of Saddam in an apparent effort to prove he is
still alive. U.S. officials dismissed many of them as archive videos, but one
showing him inside Baghdad convinced many that he had, indeed, survived the
initial effort to target him with precision weaponry on March 19.