Saddam Hussein was born in 1937 in Al-jawa, a village in north-central Iraq. He was raised by his widowed mother and other relatives.
After moving to Baghdad in 1955, he joined the Baath Party, which opposed Iraq's government. In 1968, the party came to power through a coup.
For years he was the power behind the ailing figure of the president, Ahmed Hassan Bakr. Saddam Hussein took over as Iraq's President in 1979. The new president started as he intended to go on - putting to death dozens of his rivals.
Saddam built Iraq into a one of the Arab world's most modern societies, but also plunged the country into an eight-year war with neighboring Iran that killed hundreds of thousands of people on both sides and wrecked Iraq's economy.
During that war, as part of the wider campaign against Kurds, the Iraqi military used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja in northern Iraq, killing many civilians. In putting down a rebellion of Shiites in the south he has razed towns to the ground and drained marshland.
The economic troubles from the Iran war led Saddam to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990, seeking to grab its oil wealth, but a U.S.-led coalition inflicted a defeat on the Iraq army and freed the Kuwaitis. He insisted that the 1991 Gulf War, which he famously described as the Mother-of-All-Battles, ended in victory for Iraq.
U.N. sanctions imposed following the Kuwait invasion remained in place when Saddam failed to cooperate fully in international efforts to ensure his programs for creating weapons of mass destruction had been dismantled. Iraqis were impoverished.
The final blow to Saddam's regime came when U.S.-led forces invaded in March 2003.
After the US invasion, Saddam was captured by American troops on December 13, 2003. On November 5, 2006, he was convicted of crimes against humanity by the Iraq Special Tribunal and was sentenced to death by hanging. He was hanged in Baghdad on December 30, 2006.
