General Ali Hassan al-Majid: General Ali Hassan al-Majid, also known as Chemical Ali, has died aged 64. He was killed commanding the southern Iraqi city of Basra by SAS-organised air and artillery attacks.
Majid earned his macabre nickname during the two years from 1987 when, as head of the Iraqi Baath Party's northern bureau, he presided over Operation Al-Anfal, which devastated most of Kurdistan.
More than 100,000 Kurds were killed during a campaign of gassings, mass executions and starvation, including 5,000 who died in one day when the town of Halabja was saturated with chemical weapons.
Majid's attitude to this slaughter was captured on videotape when he told a group of party officials in the middle of the campaign: "Who will say anything? The international community? Fuck them."
Majid personified the clannish and ruthless nature of Saddam Hussein's republic of fear in Iraq. A key figure in the country's security apparatus, his appointment last month as commander of the southern region had as much to do with instilling fear into the Iraqi forces as with organising an effective military strategy to resist the American onslaught.
Born near Tikrit, Saddam's hometown to the north of Baghdad, Majid was the son of the Iraqi leader's paternal uncle, a peasant from a subordinate clan of the al-Bu Nasir tribe. He joined the Iraqi army as a young man and, by the mid-1960s, was an NCO and driver.
It was then that the family connections helped his rise. After the collapse of the Baath government of 1963, the party was being rebuilt by Col Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, a tribal relative of Majid, who had entrusted Saddam with restoring the underground networks of the Baath party.
In the violent and conspiratorial world of Baghdad politics, Majid became Saddam's loyal enforcer.
This stood him in good stead when al-Bakr seized power in 1968. As Saddam's star rose, so too did the fortunes of Majid. By 1976, he was director general of the office of the Baath's regional command; in 1978, he became head of the party's key military bureau.
After his important role in the bloody party purges which accompanied Saddam's assumption of the Baghdad presidency in 1979, he was rewarded the following year with the directorship of public security.
This was the beginning of eight years of war with Iran, when the Iraqi regime was as much concerned with internal security as with the battle front on its eastern border. Majid rooted out real and imagined enemies with terrifying zeal and it was these qualities which led Saddam to entrust him with the crushing of resistance in the Kurdish areas of the north in the latter stages of the war.
When Iraqi forces invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Majid was appointed governor, bringing his methods and reputation with him. Later that year, when it seemed that war with the western coalition would follow, he was recalled to Baghdad.
In March 1991, he was made minister of the interior and charged with putting down the rebellions that had broken out in southern and northern Iraq following the Iraqi army's expulsion from Kuwait. He helped to crush these uprisings in his usual style, leaving some 30,000 people dead or missing.
During the years of UN sanctions and isolation in the 1990s, Majid occupied a number of senior government posts, using the opportunity - as did many in the elite - to enrich himself through the web of smuggling and business deals made possible by his close connection to the ruling family.
It was said that his blatant corruption led to his dismissal as defence minister in 1995, although shifts in the politics of the clan, most of whose members were similarly implicated, probably had a significant effect.
In 1996, he got the chance to rehabilitate himself. He helped to organise the murder of his nephews - and Saddam's sons-in-law - Hussein Kamil and Saddam Kamil, who had fled the country in 1995, but had then unwisely returned.
Thereafter, Majid was back in the centre, and, in 1997, he was appointed as overseer and co-ordinator of the intelligence services and of the Baath party apparatus in central and southern Iraq.
As the present crisis between the US and the Baghdad regime closed in, it was not surprising that Saddam should have looked to one of his most loyal and ruthless clansmen to try to salvage something from the wreckage.
This time, however, he and the regime he served were up against something that their resources of violence and cruelty were unable to handle.
Ali Hassan al-Majid, born 1938; died April 4th, 2003 .