Saddam Hussein was executed
On this day · 30 December 2006
After a fourteen-month trial over a single village massacre, Iraq's deposed dictator was hanged at dawn on a sacred holiday.
Before dawn on December 30, 2006, former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was hanged at an Iraqi army base in the Kazimain district of Baghdad. He died convicted of crimes against humanity for the 1982 Dujail massacre — the killing of 148 Shia villagers in reprisal for a failed assassination attempt.
The verdict closed a turbulent fourteen-month trial that had cost defense lawyers and a judge their composure, and some their lives. As one legal account put it:
Saddam Hussein died at the hands of Iraqi officials at dawn on December 30, 2006.
The timing carried its own weight. The execution fell on the first day of Eid al-Adha, one of Islam’s holiest festivals, and a smuggled mobile-phone video of jeering guards turned a state act into a global spectacle. Dujail was only the first of several cases prepared against him; the others never reached a verdict.
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