A team of U. N. inspectors, led by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix was admitted, into the country ; their final report stated that Iraqis capability in producing " weapons of mass destruction " was not significantly different from 1992 when the country dismantled the bulk of their remaining arsenals under terms of the ceasefire agreement with U. N. forces, but did not completely rule out the possibility that Saddam still had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

The regime of Saddam Hussein was overt following after the U. S .- led 2003 invasion of Iraq and relations with Iraq dramatically improved afterwards.

In March 2003, a coalition of countries led by the U. S. and U. K. invaded Iraq to depose Saddam, after U. S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair accused him of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having ties to al-Qaeda.

In 1958, a year after Saddam had joined the Ba ' ath party, army officers led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew Faisal II of Iraq in the 14 July Revolution.

In 1968, Saddam participated in a bloodless coup led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr that overthrew Abdul Rahman Arif.

The desire for stable rule in a country rife with factionalism led Saddam to pursue both massive repression and the improvement of living standards.

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.

He also led the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

He also led the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

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.

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.

The Philippines sent 200 medical personnel to assist coalition forces in the liberation of Kuwait from the stranglehold of Iraq then led by Saddam Hussein.

After the lengthy Iraq disarmament crisis culminated with an American demand that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein leave Iraq, which was refused, a coalition led by the United States and the United Kingdom fought the Iraqi army in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The targets were high-level Iraqi governmental officials, including Saddam Hussein himself, and were based on specific intelligence which led the U. S. government to believe it knew his movements.

* Saddam Hussein's failure to provide unfettered access to UN arms inspectors led Washington and London to hit 100 Iraqi targets in four days of bombing as part of Operation Desert Fox.

American and British military forces led an invasion of Iraq in March 2003, driving Saddam Hussein and his Ba ' ath Party from power.

The Fedayeen Saddam did not rise to major international attention, however, until the 2003 invasion of Iraq by U. S .- led coalition forces.

In the 1980s, under the secular Ba ' ath Party formerly led by Saddam Hussein, among the many propaganda campaigns of Iraq, the term majus was used during the Iran – Iraq War as a generalization of all modern-day Iranians.

Saddam and Salah Omar al-Ali led the coup on the ground, but it was al-Bakr who masterminded it.

Since leaving public office Clark has led many progressive activism campaigns, including opposition to the War on Terror, and he has offered legal defense to controversial figures such as Charles Taylor, Slobodan Milošević, Saddam Hussein, and Lyndon LaRouche.

Fearing a repeat of the destruction of Iraqi oil wells in the Gulf War by Saddam Hussein, this operation aimed to prevent similar acts that would have led to pollution of the region and loss of infrastructure.

He has since led police on a high speed chase, fought in the war on terror, led the troops to capture Saddam Hussein, bitten Santa Claus, and traveled into outer space.

Ba ' athist heads of state such as Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein created personality cults around themselves portraying themselves as the nationalist saviours of the Arab world.

This war had begun in September 1980, when Saddam Hussein sent Iraqi forces across the Shatt al Arab into southwestern Iran.

King Abdullah of Jordan has become the first Arab leader to visit Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, a landmark step towards reducing Baghdad's isolation among its Sunni Arab neighbours.

Despite periodic crises of confidence and lingering Iraqi resentment over Jordan's close ties with Saddam Hussein, the two countries have managed to forge deep ties, in fact, Jordan has taken the lead among Arab states to do so.

A leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba ' ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba ' ath Party and its regional organisation Ba ' ath Party – Iraq Region, which espoused ba ' athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup, later referred to as the 17 July Revolution, that brought the party to long-term power of Iraq.

Long before Saddam, Iraq had been split along social, ethnic, religious, and economic fault lines: Sunni versus Shi ' ite, Arab versus Kurd, tribal chief versus urban merchant, nomad versus peasant.

Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad of Syria at an Arab League # Summits | Arab Summit in Baghdad in November 1978.

With the support of the Arab states, the United States, and Europe, and heavily financed by the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Saddam Hussein had become " the defender of the Arab world " against a revolutionary Iran.

Saddam reached out to other Arab governments for cash and political support during the war, particularly after Iraq's oil industry severely suffered at the hands of the Iranian navy in the Persian Gulf.

Saddam borrowed tens of billions of dollars from other Arab states and a few billions from elsewhere during the 1980s to fight Iran, mainly to prevent the expansion of Shiite radicalism.

Saddam routinely cited his survival as " proof " that Iraq had in fact won the war against the U. S. This message earned Saddam a great deal of popularity in many sectors of the Arab world.

That they rallied not so much to Saddam Hussein as to the bipolar nature of the confrontation ( the West versus the Arab Muslim world ) and the issues that Saddam proclaimed: Arab unity, self-sufficiency, and social justice.

" A shift was, therefore, clearly visible among many Islamic movements in the post war period " from an initial Islamic ideological rejection of Saddam Hussein, the secular persecutor of Islamic movements, and his invasion of Kuwait to a more populist Arab nationalist, anti-imperialist support for Saddam ( or more precisely those issues he represented or championed ) and the condemnation of foreign intervention and occupation.

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

The Central Intelligence Agency supported a variety of covert actions designed to depose Saddam Hussein, while Congress approved the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 aimed at providing Iraqi opposition groups with increased financial assistance.

In addition to refusing the request, Kuwait spearheaded the opposition in OPEC to the cuts that Saddam had requested.

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.

On 29 September 1998, the United States Congress passed the Iraq Liberation Act supporting the efforts of Iraqi opposition groups to remove Saddam Hussein from office.

It was founded at the time of the Persian Gulf War as an opposition group to Saddam Hussein.

He thus became a leading figure of the British opposition to the War on Iraq, and in February 2003 he travelled to Baghdad to meet Saddam Hussein.

In explaining her opposition to the resolution, Pelosi noted that Central Intelligence Agency Director George Tenet had told Congress that the likelihood of Iraq's Saddam Hussein launching an attack on the U. S. using weapons of mass destruction was low.

The new Act appropriated funds for Iraqi opposition groups in the hope of removing Saddam Hussein from power and replacing his regime with a democracy.

A first cousin of former President of Iraq Saddam Hussein, he became notorious in the 1980s and 1990s for his role in the Iraqi government's campaigns against internal opposition forces, namely the ethnic Kurdish rebels of the north, and the Shia religious dissidents of the south.

Chalabi was also part of a three-man executive council for the umbrella Iraqi opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress ( INC ), created in 1992 for the purpose of fomenting the overthrow of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.

In 2003 Tatchell wrote in The Guardian that he supported giving " massive material aid " to Iraqi opposition groups, including the " Shi ' ite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq " so as to bring the downfall of Saddam.

During the uprising of March 1991, following the Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein's Republican Guards damaged the shrine, where members of the Shia opposition were cornered, in storming the shrine and massacring virtually all its occupants.

Shortly after the US-led coalition ousted Saddam Hussein and his Ba ' ath regime, al-Sadr voiced opposition to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

: The Afghan government welcomed news of the capture of Saddam Hussein, deeming it a warning to opposition leaders such as Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar.

New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark reiterated the New Zealand legislature's opposition to capital punishment, with such opposition extending to the treatment of Saddam Hussein.

Known as a writer, philosopher, thinker and political activist, he started his political party as a vehicle to coordinate opposition against Saddam Hussein.

While still recovering in hospital from the attack, Allawi started organising an opposition network to work against the government of Saddam Hussein.

In his student years, Al Rubaie was a protégé of the leading intellectual Shia theologian of his time, Grand Ayatollah Syed Mohammad Baqir Al Sadr, the founder of the Islamic Da ' awa party, which served as the main opposition to Saddam Hussain's repressive Ba ' ath regime.

Following the Gulf War of 1991 and the founding of the Iraqi National Congress ( INC ) Al Rubaie sought to bring the Da ' awa Party into the mainstream of Iraqi opposition with the shared goal of toppling Saddam.

Dr Rashid has also represented Kurdish politics and Iraqi opposition groups to Saddam in official meetings with various international institutions and governments.

Many scholars such Charles Tripp argue that Saddam Hussein ’ s complete control of both the executive and legislative components of the government led to the rise of a brutal dictatorship that crushed any forms of opposition.