ʿAlī Ḥasan al-Majīd

ʿAlī Ḥasan al-Majīd (born c. 1941, Tikrīt, Iraq—died Jan. 25, 2010, Baghdad) was an Iraqi Baʿth Party official and a cousin of Iraqi Pres. Ṣaddām Ḥussein. During his career he became known for brutal attacks on Iraqi citizens, especially Kurds and Shīʿites.

In 1958 al-Majīd joined the Baʿth Party. With Ṣaddām’s rise to power in the government of Pres. Aḥmad Ḥasan al-Bakr—after the Baʿth Party, which had been unseated in 1963, returned to power in Iraq in 1968—al-Majīd rose as well. He held a number of governmental posts and participated in the purges that accompanied Ṣaddām’s seizure of power in 1979.

In 1987, during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), he was appointed the governor of the largely Kurdish region of northern Iraq. Between February and September 1988 he perpetrated the Anfāl (Arabic: “Spoils”) chemical attacks on Iraqi Kurds as a reprisal for Kurdish resistance, and in March he conducted the separate chemical attacks in and around the village of Ḥalabjah in which some 5,000 people were killed.

During his tenure as defense minister (1991–95), al-Majīd played an important role in crushing domestic unrest, notably that of Shīʿites in the south of the country in 1991. Although he was dismissed as minister of defense in 1995 on charges of corruption, he later went on to hold other high-ranking posts. He was arrested following the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 (see Iraq War) and was subsequently convicted on charges that included genocide and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death multiple times between 2007 and 2010, and in January 2010 he was executed.