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| “ | I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? F*ck them! the international community, and those who listen to them! I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for fifteen days. | „ |
| ~ Al-Majid's plan of genocide against Kurdish forces |
Ali Hassan al-Majid (November 30, 1941 - January 25, 2010) was a Ba'athist Iraqi Defense Minister, Interior Minister, military commander and chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service. He was also the governor of annexed Kuwait, during the Persian Gulf War.
A first cousin of the late Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Al-Majid became one of Saddam's closest military advisors and head of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, Iraqi secret police known as the Mukhabarat. Following an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Saddam in 1983 in the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, al-Majid directed the subsequent collective punishment operations in which scores of local men were killed, thousands more inhabitants were deported and the entire town was razed to the ground.
During the late stages of the Iran–Iraq War al-Majid was given the post of Secretary General of the Northern Bureau of the Ba'ath Party, in which capacity he served from March 1987 to April 1989. This effectively made him Saddam's proconsul in the north of the country, commanding all state agencies in the rebellious Kurdish-populated region of the country. He was known for his ruthlessness, ordering the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas, sarin, tabun and VX against Kurdish targets during a genocidal campaign dubbed Al-Anfal, or The Spoils of War. The first such attacks occurred as early as April 1987 and continued into 1988, culminating in the notorious attack on Halabja in which over 5,000 people were killed.
With Kurdish resistance continuing, al-Majid decided to cripple the rebellion by eradicating the civilian population of the Kurdish regions. His forces embarked on a systematic campaign of mass killings, property destruction, prison camps, and forced population transfer (called "Arabization") in which thousands of Kurdish and Assyrian villages were razed and their inhabitants either killed or deported to the south of Iraq. He signed a decree in June 1987 stating that "Within their jurisdiction, the armed forces must kill any human being or animal present in these areas." By 1988, some 4,000 villages had been destroyed, an estimated 180,000 Kurds had been killed and some 1.5 million had been deported, with thousands of Assyrians residing around Iraqi Kurdistan also perishing. He was often called Chemical Ali; according to Iraqi Kurdish sources, Ali Hassan openly boasted of this nickname. Others dubbed him the Butcher of Kurdistan.
Al-Majid was captured following the 2003 invasion of Iraq and was charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. He was convicted in June 2007 and was sentenced to death for crimes of genocide against Kurds committed in the al-Anfal campaign of the 1980s. His appeal of the death sentence was rejected on 4 September 2007, and he was sentenced to death for the fourth time on 17 January 2010 and was hanged eight days later, on 25 January 2010.
Biography
Al-Majid was born around 1941. He is a first cousin of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whose father, Husayn al-Majid, was the brother of Ali's father, Hasan al-Majid. Both Saddam and Ali Hasan al-Majid were born in al-Awja, Iraq, a village near the city of Tikrit. Both belonged to the Sunni Arab al-Bejat clan, which is part of the larger al-Bu Nasir tribe.
Unlike his cousin, al-Majid served in the Iraqi army. By the late 1960s, he was a motorcycle messenger and member of the Ba'ath Party. When a 17 July 1968 coup toppled the government and brought the Ba'ath into power in Iraq, a distant relative of al-Majid, General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, became the new president. However, real power in the new regime lay in the hands of Saddam and the Ba'ath Party security services that he oversaw. In 1980, Saddam appointed al-Majid, who had been promoted to general in the army, as the head of the General Security Service—thus making him one of the most powerful men in Iraq. He eventually was chosen as the director of the Revolutionary Command Council, the regime's top consultative body.
It was his close family ties to Saddam that underlay al-Majid's power and position in Iraq. This was in keeping with Saddam's policy of placing family members, members of his extended tribe, and other Sunni Arabs from the Takrit area in the regime's most important positions. Al-Majid retained the post of head of the General Security Service until 1987, one of the few individuals Saddam allowed to head that or any other sensitive agency for a long period of time. Despite this, al-Majid later confessed that he still feared Saddam, who had done away with close relatives before when he distrusted them.
Al-Majid was notorious for his brutality in carrying out the wishes of Saddam. In March 1987, Saddam made him general secretary of the Ba'th Party's Northern Bureau, which encompassed the Kurdish regions of Iraq. In this capacity, al-Majid directly supervised the notorious 1988 Anfal campaign of genocide against the Kurds. He later served as the military governor of Kuwait during the harsh Iraqi occupation of the country from August 1990 until February 1991. He was responsible for the looting that occurred during Iraqi rule of Kuwait. He was appointed minister of the interior in March 1991, in time to take charge of the ferocious government crackdown on the Shi'ite rebellion that flared up that month in the wake of Iraq's defeat in the Gulf War. Thereafter, al-Majid served as Iraq's defense minister from 1991 to 1995, although Saddam dismissed him in 1995 after he discovered that he had been smuggling grain to Iran.
In February 1996, al-Majid was back in Saddam's favor. He orchestrated the notorious attack that killed his nephews, Lieutenant-General Husayn Kamil Hasan al-Majid and Colonel Saddam Kamil Hasan al-Majid, who had just returned to Iraq after defecting to Jordan the year before. Shortly after their defection, Saddam—who was both their second cousin and father-in-law—dispatched Ali Hasan al-Majid to Jordan to persuade them to return. He failed when Jordan's King Hussein bin Talal refused to allow him to see them. After several months, the two men decided to return to Iraq. Although they had been promised clemency from Saddam if they returned, both men were killed almost immediately after returning home during a thirteen-hour gun battle with al-Majid and other family members. Some reports state that al-Majid himself fired the coup de grâce shot into Husayn Kamil's head.
Al-Majid continued to be given sensitive and important positions by Saddam. In 1996, he became a member of the Committee of the Four, or the Quartet, Saddam's senior foreign policy advisory group. In December 1998, Saddam appointed al-Majid commander of the Southern Region, one of four military regions established to confront a possible American attack. In this capacity he was responsible for harshly suppressing the Shi'ite uprising in the south in 1999 known as the al-Sadr intifada.
The U.S.-led coalition forces invasion of Iraq in March 2003 led to the downfall of al-Majid and the entire Baa'th regime. Shortly before the invasion, in September 2002, he traveled to several North African Arab states. It was the first time that he had left Iraq since 1988. American intelligence officials surmised that he might have been trying to locate a sanctuary to which Saddam could flee into exile. During the invasion, his death or capture was a major American goal. American aircraft bombed al-Majid's home in Basra on 4 April 2003, and British forces in the city initially reported that he had died in the attack. These reports were erroneous, however, and American forces later captured al-Majid on or about 19 August 2003.
The new Iraqi government established the Iraqi High Tribunal to try members of Saddam's government for various crimes. Al-Majid was charged with genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. His trial on the charges of genocide against the Kurds began on 21 August 2006. He was found guilty on 24 June 2007, and was sentenced to death by hanging.
Trivia
- He was alleged to have told his cousin Saddam that he was "too merciful".[1]