In Saddam Hussein’s paunchy, khaki-clad, mostly gray-haired inner circle, one of his ubiquitous Baath Party deputies always stood out from the crowd: Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, who died late last month at age 78. The cause of death was not immediately known since Douri had been on the run for the past 17 years, but he had been treated for leukemia as long ago as 1999 and, in recent photographs, had looked decidedly frail.
Slim to the point of cadaverous, intense, hawk-faced, almost totally bald, and sporting a bristling red mustache, Douri’s devotion to Saddam was absolute and enforced with the loyalty and rigor of the fanatic. Like Saddam, he was a poor boy born in a small town near Tikrit; unlike Saddam, he had only a primary school education and began work by selling ice to neighbors. Both joined the pan-Arab Baath Party underground in their youth, and, when the party seized power in a 1968 coup, the 26-year-old Douri caught Saddam’s eye with his systematic purging of political opponents.
In subsequent years, Douri served in a series of ministerial posts. After establishing Iraq’s first laboratory for bacteriological warfare, he was promoted to the party’s three-man strategic planning committee.
Douri was a key figure in organizing the 1979 internal coup that brought Saddam to power. The then-Iraqi president was forced to give up his office, and Douri and another Revolutionary Command Committee, or RCC, member insisted on immediately appointing Saddam as successor. In a subsequent meeting of the Baath leadership, which was broadcast live on Iraqi television and is available on YouTube, Saddam accused RCC Secretary Muhyi al Mashhadi of masterminding a Syrian-backed coup, forcing him to confess from the podium and name his co-conspirators. Mashhadi denounced several dozen colleagues by name, who were then forcibly ejected from the meeting and immediately imprisoned or, like Mashhadi, shot by firing squad.
Thereafter, until the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Saddam’s power was absolute, and Douri’s new status as RCC vice chairman, Saddam’s principal deputy, enforcer, and likely successor, remained unchallenged.
The announcement of Douri’s death prompted Saddam’s daughter Raghad to post a Twitter tribute to “the brother and real supporter for my father during his rule and after.” The outlawed Baath Party, of which Douri was secretary-general, hailed him in a statement as a “knight of … the Iraqi resistance [and] symbol of courage, heroism, and sacrifice.” Most of his fellow countrymen, by contrast, are likely to conclude that his courage, heroism, and sacrifice were more beneficial to Saddam than to Iraq. Douri, who was nominally a field marshal in the Iraqi army, was a vigorous proponent of the two military adventures, the 1980 invasion of Iran and 1990 annexation of Kuwait, that did inestimable harm to Iraq’s economy and standing in the Arab world and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
He was also a ruthless oppressor of Iraq’s Shiite Muslim majority and Kurdish ethnic minority. In the three years between 1986 and 1989, it was Douri who masterminded Saddam’s so-called Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, which drew international attention when, in 1988, the village of Halabja, near the Iranian border, was attacked with chemical weapons, killing some 5,000 men, women, and children. In 1987, he issued a directive authorizing chemical strikes against Iraqi Kurds in “designated zones,” resulting in the death of some 80,000 civilians and the destruction of 4,000 villages.
Largely unknown outside the Middle East, Douri achieved renown after 2003 when U.S. officials dubbed him the “king of clubs” in a deck of cards that identified prominent fugitives from Saddam’s regime. Despite a $10 million bounty on his head, Douri evaded capture. And while his health problems prompted occasional reports of his death, he survived to exploit tensions between Sunnis and Shiites and, in 2014, to help finance and support the Islamic State’s seizure of Tikrit.
To be sure, Iraq has had its difficulties since the overthrow of Saddam. But the death of Douri is a timely reminder that things could be infinitely worse.
Philip Terzian is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
