Following the execution of Iraq’s former president Saddam Hussein on December 30, 2006, several theories have been advanced to try and explain the factors leading to his execution. Among the foremost common factors in these theories include Hussein’s role in advancing chemical warfare, state terrorism, and mass genocide. These reasons are today’s worst human rights violations and war crimes, considered the leading official causes of execution. Nevertheless, the essential role of chemical and war terrorism, along with the genocide in the execution of Saddam Hussein, is discussed.
Most of the sources studied do not doubt that these reasons are the primary ones. According to DeVillers, renowned lawyer and former prosecutor, Hussein’s execution came following his conviction in the Iraq High Tribunal of crimes against humanity (19). To complement DeVillers’ claims, lawyer Satish alludes that Iraq’s special tribunal took charge of Saddam’s case and charged him with mass genocide, state terrorism, and chemical warfare (1651). Historian bachelor Taha likewise suggests that Hussein’s animosity resulted from a revenge mission on the failed assassination threat on his life by local young men in 1982 at Dujail, north of Baghdad (2). However, the latter author is already a research historian, unlike the previous ones, who are lawyers.
Genocide is one of the central themes around the leading factors to Hussein’s execution. Taha posits that the Anfal campaign was characterized by the Iraqi government forces’ drive from 1987 to 1988 to control Kurdish areas in the north (3). The campaign resulted in the distraction of whole villages and farming, forcing the eviction of the inhabitants and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. The government forces should have been held accountable for the atrocities against humans since they were the main perpetrators of the same. However, Taha fails to link Hussein directly to the outcomes of the Anfal campaign. Still, what happened there is terror, and one cannot disagree with it.
The facts confirming the elimination of the people are more than enough. Furthermore, Satish sheds light on the entire events of the Kurdish genocide that led to the Anfal campaign and linked Hussein to the Satish work (1667). He posited that the Kurdish genocide happened during the Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988 when Saddam Hussein was at the country’s helm. Hussein’s vision of having a homogeneous, Arabized Iraq saw him order the Iran-Iraq war and the Kurdish genocide, who are the minority in Iraq (Satish 1665). Consequently, it is plausible that among the main factors leading to Hussein was massing to execution.
Furthermore, several conspiracy theories today exist, many of which exonerate Hussein and believe that his actions and subsequent execution resulted from the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A compilation of such opinions can be seen in Tahoor’s article in The Washington Post. However, these preposterous perceptions do not stand up to criticism and are not supported in the first place by people who suffered or lost relatives during Hussein’s terror.
Chemical weapons characterized Saddam Hussein’s mode of operation in warfare. During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein used his cousin, Al-Majid, who was famous for his brutality, to be in control of northern Iraq. Historians argue that the war resulted in the indiscriminate killings of hundreds of people, making it the first in history to attack its civilians with chemical weapons (Montgomery and Hennerbichler 202). These views of using chemicals as weapons of war received support from Kirmanj, who argues that the onset of Anfal in early 1988 aimed at killing the most significant population present by using poisonous gases, among other weapons (164). The attackers used chemicals that dropped peshmerga targets and the civilian population. The troops on the ground surrounded the villages and set ablaze homesteads. Such data converge in various sources and are difficult to dispute.
Saddam Hussein was the first global leader in the current times to have used chemical weapons brutally against his people. According to historians, he had goals of systematically terrorizing and exterminating the Kurdish population to silence critics in northern Iraq and to test the efficiency of his biological and chemical weapons (Montgomery and Hennerbichler 192). In 1987-88, Hussein launched chemical attacks as test grounds against forty Kurdish villages and innocent civilians. The attack worsened on March 16, 1988, when it destroyed Halabja city. The Halabja casualties included five thousand civilians, mostly older people, children, and women, dying within hours of the outbreak (Huber 10). 10 thousand people were irreversibly debilitated, disfigured, maimed, and blinded. Thousands died of horrific difficulties, congenital disabilities, and devastating diseases in the same year.
Furthermore, following the attack on Halabja city, the immediate medical effects included coma, convulsions, neurological disorder, respiratory shutdown, digestive shutdown, impaired vision, skin burns, and death by asphyxiation. There were long-term effects, such as congenital disabilities, neurological disorders, disfigurement, and permanent blindness (Huber 5). The regime of Saddam intentionally mixed mustard gas and nerve agents, increasing its long-term and initial impacts on the villagers.
Iraq applied chemical weapons for the first time in 1983 against Iranian soldiers, a creation that escalated towards the end of the war in 1988. As political analysts insist, Iraq released an urgent warning in 1984 that invaders must know each harmful insect has an insecticide with abilities to annihilate, which they possess (Palkki and Lawrence 123). The regime of Saddam employed chemical weapons with the claim that it was in response to the use of Iran, and the chemical warfare became devastating in 1988 (Huber 3). Following this chemical warfare that killed innocent people and caused a massive distraction, Saddam Hussein was found guilty against humanity for killing people using chemical weapons while the city was on test grounds.
Moreover, it is impossible not to agree that another argument advanced in justification of the execution of Saddam Hussein is his act of state terrorism. Under the leadership of Hussein, Iraq became one of the seven nations designated to sponsor global terrorism (DeVillers 19). Under Hussein, Iraq harbored terrorist groups using them to commit violence in Iran. In the 1970s, Iraqi terrorist groups were accountable for massively killing U.S. civilians and military staff. These developments implicate Hussein directly in trying to convert Iraq into a terrorist state that provided a haven for terrorist groups that raked havoc in different parts of the world.
Some lawyers tried to ease the sentence and transfer the blame from Hussein onto terrorist cells. For example, one such – Abu Nidal Organization in Iraq – was responsible for terrorist attacks in more than twenty nations, injuring and killing nearly 900 persons (Montgomery and Hennerbichler 189). The militia group targeted western nations and the U.S. Hussein raised the money earned by homicide bombers or Palestinian suicide in 2002 few thousand dollars (Satish 1660). However, this point’s detail is arguable and unclear, so that it can be disregarded. Furthermore, he committed these atrocities without caring for humanity, and therefore, the court found him culpable and sentenced him to death by hanging. It is definitely the one and only possible result of his actions.
In addition, several theories have been made to justify the execution of Saddam Hussein. Some scholars have justified the execution of the former Iraq president by differing on some key aspects. The main reasons that tend to be shared among many scholars include Hussein’s chemical warfare, the support of terrorism, ordering of mass genocides, and the displacement of civilians. Saddam committed massive genocide at first as revenge following a failed assassination attempt. Human rights watch approximated that nearly 50,000 to 100,000 persons were annihilated during Anfal, with Kurdish officials putting the numbers to be more than 180,000 (Kirmanj and Aram 3). Iraq High Tribunal ruled the case leading to his execution.
In conclusion, it can be summed up that Saddam Hussein caused massive genocide, which resulted in the death of innocent people, including women and children, and the massive destruction of their farmlands. Moreover, it was depicted that Hussein used mustard gas in chemical warfare. The chemical resulted in devastating effects on innocent people, and Saddam used cities such as Halabja as a testing ground for this massive and deadly weapon. It is obvious that mass genocides, state terrorism, and chemical warfare were the main reasons behind the execution of Saddam Hussein.
Works Cited
DeVillers, David M. “Rule of Law in Time of War: The Trial of Saddam Hussein.” Department of Justice Journal of Federal Law and Practice, vol. 67, no. 4, 2019, pp. 19-47, Web.
Huber, Christopher. A War of Frustration: Saddam Hussein’s Use of Nerve Gas on Civilians at Halabja (1988) and the American Response. 2019. James Madison University, Bachelor’s thesis.
Kirmanj, Sherko, and Aram Rafaat. “The Kurdish Genocide in Iraq: The Security-Anfal and the Identity-Anfal.” National Identities, vol. 23, no. 2, 2021, pp. 163–183.
Montgomery, Bruce P., and Hennerbichler Hennerbichler. “The Kurdish Files of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Regime: Struggle for Reconciliation in Iraq.” Advances in Anthropology, vol. 10, no. 03, 2020, pp. 181–213.
Palkki, David D., and Lawrence Rubin. “Saddam Hussein’s Role in the Gassing of Halabja.” The Nonproliferation Review, vol. 28, no. 1–3, 2021, pp. 115–129.
Satish, Kiran. “The Trial of the Tribunal: An Evaluation of the History of Iraq and the Iraqi Special Tribunal.” International Journal of Law Management & Humanities, vol. 1, no. 5, 2022, pp. 1651-1667.
Taha, A. The Intifadah in Shinafiyah: How a Small Village in Iraq Revolted against Saddam Hussein in 1991. 2018. Utrecht University, Master’s thesis.
Tharoor, Ishaan, et al. “The world 9/11 created: What if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq?” The Washington Post, Web.