* 1996 – Saddam Hussein's troops seized Irbil after the Kurdish Masoud Barzani appealed for help to defeat his Kurdish rival PUK.

* 2003 – U. S. troops capture Baghdad ; Saddam Hussein's regime falls two days later.

In Clinton's 1998 State of the Union Address, he warned Congress of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's possible pursuit of nuclear weapons:

To weaken Saddam Hussein's grip of power, Clinton signed H. R.

Historian of fascism Stanley Payne has said about Saddam Hussein's regime: " There will probably never again be a reproduction of the Third Reich, but Saddam Hussein has come closer than any other dictator since 1945 ".

The first Iraqi Republic Railways train to Basra since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime arrived on 26 April 2003.

One elements of Riyadh's containment policy included support for Iraqi opposition forces that advocated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government.

Another factor in the early 1990s that worked to radicalize the Islamist movement was the Gulf War, which brought several hundred thousand US and allied non-Muslim military personnel to Saudi Arabian soil to put an end to Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait.

* 2003 – Members of 101st Airborne of the United States, aided by Special Forces, attack a compound in Iraq, killing Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, along with Mustapha Hussein, Qusay's 14-year old son, and a bodyguard.

Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's primary justifications included a charge that Kuwaiti territory was in fact an Iraqi province, and that annexation was retaliation for " economic warfare " Kuwait had waged through slant drilling into Iraq's oil supplies.

Following the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, Gaddafi decided to abandon his weapons of mass destruction programs and pay almost 3 billion euros in compensation to the families of Pan Am Flight 103 and UTA Flight 772.

Journalist Andrew Cockburn reported in Britain's The First Post that Ekéus told him how former U. S. President Bill Clinton attempted to prevent Saddam Hussein's Iraq from being certified as free of weapons of mass destruction.

This insult was demonstrated in Iraq, first when Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in 2003, Iraqis gathered around it and struck the statue with their shoes.

Since coming to power, a disproportionate number of leading positions have been awarded to members of the Alawi sect in a move akin to Saddam Hussein's Ba ' ath Party governance in neighbouring Iraq between 1968 and 2003 when persons from Saddam's home town of Tikrit were appointed in prominent roles.

Some reports cite Saddam Hussein's army as being responsible for 200, 000 civilian deaths.

The statement condemned President Saddam Hussein's government for its " systematic, widespread and extremely grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian law ".

* Saddam Hussein's novels

Prior to the Gulf War in 1990 – 91, when the Intifada's intensity began to wear down, Arafat supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and opposed the US-led coalition attack on Iraq.

A United States-led coalition invaded Iraq, and the Iraq war led to the end of Saddam Hussein's rule as Iraqi President and the Ba ' ath Party regime in Iraq.

The war, which ended the rule of Saddam Hussein's Ba ' ath Party, also led to violence against the coalition forces and between many Sunni and Shia Iraqi groups, and to al-Qaeda operations in Iraq.

Similarly, Saddam Hussein's formal rule of Iraq is often recorded as beginning in 1979, the year he assumed the Presidency of Iraq.

After Saddam Hussein's regime was removed from power, the Iraq campaign moved into a different type of asymmetric warfare where the coalition's use of superior conventional warfare training, tactics and technology were of much less use against continued opposition from the various partisan groups operating inside Iraq.

They may be almost exclusively selected from a particular group ( for example, Sunni Arabs in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union, or the Junkers in Imperial Germany ) that support the regime in return for such favors.

In June 1982, Saddam Hussein ordered most of the Iraqi units to withdraw from Iranian territory ; after that time, the Baathist government tried to obtain a cease-fire based on a return of all armed personnel to the international borders that prevailed as of September 21, 1979.

He resigned as Co-Chairman of Freedom Works in March 2005 after the Federal Bureau of Investigation ( FBI ) questioned his ties to Samir Vincent, a Northern Virginia oil trader implicated in the U. N. Oil-for-food scandal who pled guilty to four criminal charges, including illegally acting as an unregistered lobbyist of the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein.

Leszek Miller ’ s government, together with President Kwaśniewski, made a decision ( March 2003 ) to join the international coalition and deploy Polish troops to Iraq, targeting at overthrowing Saddam Hussein ’ s government.

As vice president under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, and at a time when many groups were considered capable of overthrowing the government, Saddam created security forces through which he tightly controlled conflict between the government and the armed forces.

Through the 1970s, Saddam cemented his authority over the apparatuses of government as oil money helped Iraq's economy to grow at a rapid pace.

Following his capture on 13 December 2003, the trial of Saddam took place under the Iraqi interim government.

According to biographers, Saddam never forgot the tensions within the first Ba ' athist government, which formed the basis for his measures to promote Ba ' ath party unity as well as his resolve to maintain power and programs to ensure social stability.

At this time, Saddam moved up the ranks in the new government by aiding attempts to strengthen and unify the Ba ' ath party and taking a leading role in addressing the country's major domestic problems and expanding the party's following.

Saddam established and controlled the " National Campaign for the Eradication of Illiteracy " and the campaign for " Compulsory Free Education in Iraq ," and largely under his auspices, the government established universal free schooling up to the highest education levels ; hundreds of thousands learned to read in the years following the initiation of the program.

In 1976, Saddam rose to the position of general in the Iraqi armed forces, and rapidly became the strongman of the government.

As the ailing, elderly al-Bakr became unable to execute his duties, Saddam took on an increasingly prominent role as the face of the government both internally and externally.

The Al-Anfal Campaign was a genocidal campaign against the Kurdish people ( and many others ) in Iraqi Kurdistan led by the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein and headed by Ali Hassan al-Majid.

On 30 June 2004, Saddam Hussein, held in custody by U. S. forces at the U. S. base " Camp Cropper ", along with 11 other senior Ba ' athist leaders, were handed over legally ( though not physically ) to the interim Iraqi government to stand trial for crimes against humanity and other offences.

Investigators also found that the firm violated the terms of the United Nations ' Oil-for-Food Programme with Iraq by giving kickbacks worth 10 % of the contract values to officials within the Iraqi government, then led by Saddam Hussein.

* 2003-U. S .- led coalition invades Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein ; troops remain to fight insurgency against the U. N .- approved elected government.

Under the government of Saddam Hussein, Internet access was tightly controlled and very few people were thought to be online ; in 2002 it was estimated that only 25, 000 Iraqis used the Internet.

It was formed with the aid and direction of the United States government following the Gulf War, for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

With the fall of Saddam, the INA entered Iraq playing a central role in the occupation government.

Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq was founded in 1982 during the Iran – Iraq War after the leading Islamist insurgent group, Islamic Dawa Party, was severely weakened by a government crackdown following Dawa's unsuccessful attempt to assassinate Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

It was again removed following the 2003 invasion and the overthrow of the government of Saddam Hussein.