Instant Expert Kit - Saddam Hussein

He was born near Takrit, Iraq, in 1937. Beaten by his step-father and hated by the other children in the village . . .

Oh please, I can hear violins playing. Don't most dictators-to-be start off as the oppressed salt of the earth?
Saddam's first serious political activity was on a Baath Party mission to assassinate President Qassem in 1959.

Who, what and why?
The Baath (Renaissance) Party was a small pan-Arab nationalist party set up by Michel Aflaq, a Syrian, in the 1940s. The anti-Baathist Qassem had just seized power in a coup.

What happened?
It was a cock-up. At the vital moment, the assassins mislaid their car keys and one of them shot Saddam in the leg. He escaped Iraq dressed as a Bedouin, and eventually ended up in Cairo.

So when did things start going right?
In 1963 the Baath Party successfully staged a coup, and Saddam reappeared as bodyguard to the centrist Hassan Al-Bakr, a distant cousin from Takrit. The Baathists soon lost power, and Saddam is thought to have travelled to Syria to see Aflaq. Aged only 26, he asked the Baath founder to dissolve the Iraqi party, and reconvene it with himself as secretary. Amazingly, Aflaq agreed. He seemed very taken with the ruthless and organised young Iraqi.

But it must have looked pretty pushy to the other Baathists.
Years of in-fighting followed, but he used his command of the brutal intelligence unit of the party, Jihaz Hunain, to full effect. He maintained a close circle of friends and associates from Takrit, eventually murdering most of them anyway. In 1968 the Baathists seized power again. Bakr was made president, but it was vice-president Saddam who had the real authority.

How has he managed to survive 30 years?
By combining tactics of absolute terror, popular support and diplomacy. Terror comes naturally to him, as he is no stranger to torture. When he became president in 1979 he made the reshuffled ruling council form the firing squad for their former colleagues. Gassing the Kurds in the north and massacring the country's majority Shi'a Muslims in the south is just Realpolitik to Saddam. As an arbitrary and ungovernable slice of the Near East, Iraq's break-up has long been expected - and feared - by its rulers.

Did you say he was popular?
Oil prices and living standards rose during the 1970s, particularly for the ruling Sunni minority. Wars with the Israelis in the west (in 1973) and the "racist Persians" in the east during the bloody Iran-Iraq conflict (1980-88) allowed Saddam, a man who has never served in the military in his life, to act the ancient Babylonian warrior. His image also seems to transcend his total inadequacy in public speaking.