Iraqis now have one less terrorist in their country:


General Ali Hassan al-Majid
(Filed: 08/04/2003)


General Ali Hassan al-Majid , who was reported yesterday to have died aged
62 during a bombing raid on Basra, southern Iraq, was known as "Chemical
Ali" and "the Butcher of Kurdistan" for his atrocities in repressing Kurdish
rebels in Iraq; he ordered the largest-ever chemical weapons attack on
civilians, killing 5,000 and wounding 10,000.

He was the first Iraqi "governor" of Kuwait after the 1990 invasion,
presiding over a campaign of murder, rape and destruction of property. He
later directed Baghdad's violent repression of abortive uprisings by the
Kurds, and Shias in southern Iraq, after Operation Desert Storm had been
halted by the Allied coalition following the liberation of Kuwait.

Al-Majid, a diabetic who suffered in later life from hypertension and spinal
infections, was a key associate for more than 20 years of his first cousin,
President Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti. A Ba'ath Party veteran and influential
member of the Revolution Command Council in Iraq, he was a dependable ally
of the Iraqi leader, despite falling out of favour with him in the
mid-1990s. Unlike others who angered Saddam, al-Majid was wily enough to
recover after a temporary setback.

In the autumn of 2002, the Bush administration named al-Majid as one of a
"dirty dozen" of Saddam's closest henchmen who would face trial for war
crimes, if they survived the overthrow of the Iraqi regime.

Suave in appearance, military in bearing, and uncouth in his use of crude
language and Arabic dialect, al-Majid had few redeeming qualities. He
relished torture, murder and rape.

In one taped recording, dated May 1988, al-Majid boasted about his plans to
use chemical weapons on the Kurds, dismissing the inevitability of
international criticism: "I will kill them all with chemical weapons. Who is
going to say anything? The international community? F*** them, the
international community and those who listen to them."

Ali Hassan al-Majid was born at Tikrit in 1941, the eldest son of Hassan
al-Majid, a full brother to Saddam Hussein's father. Like Saddam's, his
immediate family belonged to the Sunni Muslim al-Bejat clan, part of the
al-Bu Nasir tribe, which was dominant in the Tikrit region.

Tribal loyalty played a large part in al-Majid's early life and, by the
1980s, there were at least five of his kinsmen who held prominent positions
in the government.

Al-Majid's humble elementary education in Tikrit led him to seek a career in
the Iraqi Army; but he was also drawn into radical politics as a supporter
of the Ba'ath Party. On the eve of the 1968 revolution, he was an
unremarkable lance-corporal and army driver. In later years Saddam was fond
of reminding him of this lowly status, and of how much he owed to Saddam's
subsequent patronage. But his party credentials served him well, and
al-Majid married one of the daughters of his kinsman, President al-Bakr, who
was overthrown by Saddam in 1979.

His marriage proved no hindrance to al-Majid's advancement. At an
extraordinary meeting of Ba'ath Party members five days after Saddam's
inauguration, 66 people, including some of Saddam's closest associates, were
denounced, forced to recite the party oath, and then led away for detention
and subsequent punishment or execution. Al-Majid declared his loyalty with
earnest rhetoric. Saddam invited "loyalists" among those present, including
al-Majid, to join the execution squads.

Within two years, and with the Iran-Iraq war under way, al-Majid had become
one of Saddam's closest military advisers and head of the Mukhabarat, the
state security service. In 1983 he directed operations in the "collective
punishment" of inhabitants of the town of Dujail, in the Balad district of
Iraq, after an assassination attempt on Saddam. The whole town was razed to
the ground.

In 1987 al-Majid, by then the Ba'ath Party's Northern Bureau
secretary-general, gained extraordinary powers to direct the Iraqi army and
air force against Kurdish rebels and Iranian forces in "Operation Anful".
The use of chemical weapons - mustard gas and the nerve agents sarin, tabun
and VX - came as early as April 1987, in Sheikh Wazzan and Suleimaniya. But,
as Iranian-led resistance continued, al-Majid set about depopulating Kurdish
villages, burning crops and orchards. By early 1998, some 4,000 villages,
and 1.5 million Kurds, had been moved south to create a cordon sanitaire.

Ordered by Saddam to show no mercy to rebels, al-Majid chose the town of
Halabja, with 40,000 inhabitants, seven miles from the Iranian border. On
March 16 1988 Iraqi warplanes bombed the town with chemical weapons, killing
5,000 and wounding another 10,000. More than 14 years later, thousands of
survivors are still suffering from the side effects - cancer, birth defects
and miscarriages.

Al-Majid remained the viceroy of Northern Iraq until 1989 when, in a
handover meeting, he gloated about his success in dismantling Kurdish
communities and repopulating their traditional homeland with Arab settlers.

When the Iraqi Republican Guard led the invasion of Kuwait on August 2 1990,
al-Majid, now Minister of Local Government, led the second wave of troops
from the People's Army, and also directed 7,000 Mukhabarat. After only six
days, Saddam annexed Kuwait as Iraq's 19th province and named al-Majid as
governor, deposing a quisling Kuwaiti whom the Iraqis had appointed interim
president.

Under al-Majid's occupying army, Kuwait was systemically brutalised and
robbed of artefacts and treasures, with hundreds of Kuwaitis rounded up and
taken to Iraq for use as "human shields". Some of them have never returned
home. In decrees promulgated in September 1990, al-Majid ordered that any
house bearing emblems or pictures of Kuwait's Emir was to be burned, and the
owners arrested.

Any neighbourhood in which an Iraqi corpse was found was to be razed to the
ground. Kuwaitis were banned from wearing beards - and some offenders were
punished, on al-Majid's orders, by having their beards plucked out with
pliers.

In 1991, after Iraq's expulsion from Kuwait, and with Saddam's authority
undermined, al-Majid was appointed Iraq's Interior Minister, to quell
growing opposition to the regime. He was once again in charge of dealing
with the Kurds; he was also charged with the brutal suppression of the Shia
Muslim population of southern Iraq, and the destruction of Shia Muslim life
and culture. Iraqi tanks under his command rolled into southern villages
bearing the slogan, "no more Shia after today".

The defection of Saddam's two sons-in-law, who were also al-Majid's cousins,
to Jordan in August 1995 was a damaging blow to the regime. Hussein Kamel,
as head of Iraq's weapons procurement agency, was well briefed on Saddam's
programme for weapons of mass destruction. Al-Majid publicly denounced the
defections, declaring on Iraqi television that his family had unanimously
decided to avenge the rebellion by the "spilling of blood".

In February 1996 Hussein Kamel and his brother Saddam unexpectedly returned
home after receiving assurances of safe passage. On their arrival in
Baghdad, the mood changed: both men were forced to sign papers divorcing
their wives (Saddam's daughters Raghda and Rana) and were put under house
arrest. In a shoot-out witnessed by a coachload of al-Majid's family, Iraqi
Special Forces led by al-Majid stormed the house. After a 13-hour battle, he
went over to the body of Hussein Kamel, put his foot on his neck, and
administered a final shot to the head.

Al-Majid had a temporary setback in 1995, when Saddam dismissed him as
Defence Minister for smuggling grain to Iran. But, in December 1998, Saddam
again put his trust in al-Majid, appointing him commander of his armed
forces in southern Iraq. Al-Majid personally ordered a number of executions,
and directed the brutal suppression of the Shia uprising that swept southern
Iraq in the days following the murder of a leading cleric, Ayatollah Mohamed
Sadeq al-Sadar, and his two sons, in the holy city of Najaf.

Al-Majid remained a trusted adviser to Saddam during the confrontation with
the Bush administration about UN weapons inspections. In September 2002,
al-Majid undertook his first official mission outside Iraq since 1988 when
he travelled to Algeria for a meeting with President Abdul Aziz Bouteflika.
Human rights groups denounced the visit.

Something of a puritan in his private life, al-Majid condemned the excesses
of Baghdad society in the mid-1990s; he denounced as "denigrating nocturnal
activities" the capital's nightclubs, with their belly-dancers and gipsy
bands. A nightclub patron who hurled a blank cheque at a belly-dancer's feet
was jailed and fined the equivalent of £18,000.

Among the numerous audiotapes and films of al-Majid in action, one clip
stands out; it is of the newly-appointed al-Majid as Interior Minister in
the early 1990s. He is seen instructing an Iraqi helicopter pilot not to
return from a mission until he has "burned" a group of rebels holding a
bridge.

He is then shown slapping and kicking a group of defenceless prisoners as
they lie on the ground. He chain-smokes as he interrogates the terrified
captives. "Don't execute this one," he remarks. "He will be useful to us."
The fate of the rest is unknown.

Yesterday local police in Basra were said by British military sources to
have confirmed that "Chemical Ali" had been among 20 Iraqis killed by a
coalition air strike.




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