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Saddam was born in the village of Al-Awja, near Tikrit in northern Iraq, to a Sunni Arab family. [8] He joined the Ba'ath Party in 1957, and later in 1966 the Iraqi and Baghdad-based Ba'ath parties. He played a key role in the 17 July Revolution and was appointed vice president by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr .
The 1979–1980 Shia uprising in Iraq, also known as the First Sadr Uprising, took place as a followup to the Iranian Revolution (1978–1979) in neighbouring Iran, as the Shia Iraqi clerics vowed to overthrow Ba'athist Iraq, dominated by (secular) Sunni Muslims - specifically the Saddam Hussein family.
At first the revolution inspired and energized Islamist Muslims (both Shia and Sunni) everywhere, but it was a revolution in a predominantly Shi'i Muslim country, led by Shi'i Muslims, and serious rifts with Sunni Muslims soon developed. The revolution changed the Shia–Sunni power equation in Muslim countries "from Lebanon to India".
In the south, Saddam's forces quelled all but a scattering of the resistance by the end of March. On March 29, SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim conceded that Shia rebels withdrew from the cities and that fighting was limited to rural areas. [25] The Kurdish uprising in the north of the country collapsed even more quickly than it began.
While 80% of the army officers were Sunni, the rank and file of the regular army was 80% Shia. [20] Prisoners let out of prison by Saddam Hussein before his disappearance provided another source both of insurgent recruits and of organized crime factions. [18]
Bush's 2003 decision to oust Saddam Hussein from power revealed a cursory grasp of the critical distinctions between Sunni and Shiite Muslims, and the repercussions of Saddam's Sunni-led regime's ...
In 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran, leading to the Iran-Iraq war, the Syrian Ba'ath chose to ally with Iran. This began a Syrian Ba'athist alliance with Shia Islamists, and an Iraqi Ba'athist alliance with the West and Sunni Islamists.
The Dujail massacre was a mass killing of Shiite rebels by the Ba'athist Iraqi government on 8 July 1982 in Dujail, Iraq.The massacre was committed in retaliation to an earlier assassination attempt by the Iranian-backed Islamic Dawa Party against the then President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.