When Saddam Hussein was Hanged and the Footage Leaked! JJ
Iraq s new government wanted Saddam Hussein s execution to be remembered as a controlled and legal end to his brutal rule. But what actually happened was very different. A secret cell-phone recording showed what the official cameras left out, exposing a chaotic and disturbing side of Saddam s execution that shocked the whole world.
Saddam Hussein was born in 1937 in the village of al-Awja, near the city of Tikrit, about 140 kilometers north of Baghdad. He grew up in poverty and became involved in politics at a young age. He joined the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party, a political movement that promoted Arab nationalism and socialism and had branches in several countries across the Middle East.
In 1959, Saddam took part in a failed attempt to assassinate Iraq’s prime minister. After the attempt failed, he fled Iraq and spent several years outside the country. The Ba’ath Party eventually seized power in Iraq through a military coup in 1968. Saddam quickly became one of the party’s most powerful figures, even though he was not yet the country’s president.
He worked behind the scenes to strengthen his position, especially within Iraq’s security and intelligence services. These agencies became important tools for watching political opponents and protecting the regime. In July 1979, Saddam officially became president after forcing his predecessor, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, to leave office.
Within days, Saddam organized a televised meeting of senior Ba’ath Party officials. During the meeting, several people were accused of plotting against him or being disloyal. Some were taken away and executed by other party members. The event sent a clear message throughout the country that Saddam’s rule would be based on absolute control, and anyone who threatened that control could pay with their life.
His rule was marked by almost constant conflict, both inside and outside Iraq. In 1980, he launched a war against neighboring Iran. The Iran-Iraq War lasted eight years, from 1980 to 1988, and caused enormous destruction. Estimates of the total number killed on both sides vary widely, but they are generally believed to have reached hundreds of thousands, with some estimates approaching one million. The war also left Iraq heavily in debt.
In 1988, Saddam’s forces carried out another major campaign, known as Anfal, against Iraq’s Kurdish population in the north. Thousands of Kurdish civilians were killed, and the campaign included the chemical weapons attack on the town of Halabja, where thousands of civilians died in a single day. Then, in 1990, Saddam ordered the invasion of neighboring Kuwait.
The invasion triggered the Gulf War, bringing a U.S.-led international coalition into direct conflict with Iraq. Coalition forces drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait within weeks in early 1991. After the defeat, Iraq faced more than a decade of international sanctions that severely damaged its economy and made everyday life much harder for ordinary Iraqis.
At the same time, Saddam remained in power and quickly crushed uprisings by Shiite communities in southern Iraq and Kurdish communities in the north. That entire era came to an end in 2003. In March of that year, a coalition led by the United States and the United Kingdom invaded Iraq.
The governments supporting the invasion argued that Saddam’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction and could pose a serious threat, but no such stockpiles were ultimately found. Iraqi forces were quickly overwhelmed, and Baghdad fell within weeks. With the capital under coalition control, Saddam’s government collapsed. Saddam himself disappeared, beginning a massive manhunt that lasted for the next nine months.
American forces searched across Iraq for the former president and other senior members of his regime. To help identify the people they were looking for, U.S. forces distributed a deck of playing cards showing the faces of the most wanted figures from Saddam’s government. Each card represented a different person on the list, and Saddam was given the ace of spades, making him the most recognizable target in the deck. Despite the massive search, he remained hidden for months.
The search finally ended on December 13, 2003. Acting on information provided by local informants, U.S. troops raided a farm near Tikrit, Saddam’s home region. They discovered him hiding inside a small underground hiding place that soldiers later nicknamed a “spider hole.” It was so narrow that it gave him barely enough room to crouch inside.
When soldiers pulled him out, Saddam had a long, unkempt beard and looked very different from the powerful ruler Iraqis had seen for decades. Capturing him was only the beginning. Iraq’s new authorities now had to decide how to put the former dictator on trial. Instead of sending him to an international court, Iraq’s interim government created a special domestic court to prosecute him and other senior officials from his former regime.
The court was first called the Iraqi Special Tribunal and was later renamed the Iraqi High Tribunal. It was made up of Iraqi judges and prosecutors, while American legal advisers provided assistance behind the scenes. The arrangement became controversial because critics argued that the presence of American advisers raised questions about how independent the Iraqi judicial process really was.
Prosecutors decided not to begin with the largest and most complicated crimes committed under Saddam’s rule. Instead, they chose a case that was narrower and easier to document. It centered on the town of Dujail, a mostly Shiite farming community about 60 kilometers north of Baghdad. In July 1982, Saddam had visited Dujail when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade.
The attack was part of the wider opposition to Saddam’s rule among some Shiite communities in Iraq at the time. Saddam survived the attack, but his government responded with a massive crackdown on the town. Hundreds of people from Dujail were arrested, including children. After years of imprisonment and abuse, approximately 148 men and teenage boys were sentenced to death following secret trials and were eventually executed. Other residents were imprisoned for years, and some were tortured.
Entire families were also forced out of their homes and relocated to a remote desert area. The punishment was not limited to the people accused of taking part in the attack; it affected the wider community. Dujail was chosen as the first case partly because there was unusually strong documentary evidence connecting Saddam and his government to what happened.
Important government records had survived, including documents carrying Saddam’s own signature on orders connected to the executions. That paper trail gave prosecutors a much clearer path to proving responsibility than they would have had with larger and more complicated campaigns. The Dujail trial began on October 19, 2005, inside a heavily guarded courtroom in Baghdad’s Green Zone.
The Green Zone was a fortified area of the capital where the Iraqi government and coalition forces had their main offices after the 2003 invasion. The trial was broadcast on television in Iraq and received international coverage, giving ordinary Iraqis their first long look at their former president sitting in court and being forced to answer for his actions. Saddam often used the hearings to challenge the court itself.
He argued that the tribunal had no legitimate authority to judge him because Iraq was still under foreign occupation. He frequently shouted at the judges and, at one point, went on a hunger strike to protest the way the trial was being conducted. The danger surrounding the trial did not stop at the courtroom doors. At least three defense lawyers connected to the case were assassinated while the proceedings were underway.
Because of the threats, the lawyers who remained had to work under heavy security and sometimes appeared in court only briefly before leaving again. The judges also faced pressure. The original presiding judge, Rizgar Amin, resigned partway through the trial after Iraqi government officials criticized him for being too lenient toward Saddam. Amin often allowed Saddam to speak for long periods and did not always stop him when he interrupted or challenged the court.
He was eventually replaced by Raouf Abdel-Rahman, a Kurdish judge who took a much stricter approach. Abdel-Rahman frequently argued with Saddam and ordered him removed from the courtroom more than once because of his disruptive behavior. On November 5, 2006, the Iraqi High Tribunal found Saddam Hussein guilty of crimes against humanity for his role in the Dujail crackdown and the killings that followed.
He was sentenced to death by hanging. Several other former regime officials were convicted in the same case. Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, had been head of Iraq’s intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, during the Dujail crackdown and received the same death sentence. Awad Hamed al-Bandar, who had headed Iraq’s Revolutionary Court and had signed the death sentences against the Dujail victims in 1982, was also sentenced to death.
Other defendants received lighter punishments, including prison sentences, depending on what the court found they had done. Because Iraqi law required death sentences to be automatically reviewed, Saddam’s case immediately went to the Appellate Chamber of the Iraqi High Tribunal. The appeals court reviewed the verdict and rejected Saddam’s challenge on December 26, 2006.
It upheld both his conviction and his death sentence. Under Iraqi law, the execution could then be carried out within thirty days of the appeals ruling. The authorities did not wait long. Saddam would be executed just four days later. Two days before his execution, a letter attributed to him appeared on the website of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party.
The letter addressed the Iraqi people and presented Saddam’s coming death as a sacrifice for Iraq. It also called on Iraqis to put aside their divisions. However, it has never been completely clear whether every part of the letter was written personally by Saddam or whether some of it was edited or released by people loyal to him. The letter spread widely and added to the growing sense that his execution was becoming an important political and symbolic event, rather than simply the final step in a criminal case.
Saddam also made one final request. He asked to be executed by firing squad instead of hanging. His argument was that, as Iraq’s former commander-in-chief, he should be given what he considered a more honorable military-style execution. The authorities rejected the request.
Hanging was the normal method used for carrying out death sentences for serious crimes under Iraqi law, so the decision stood. Security was another major concern. Iraq was still in the middle of a violent insurgency that had followed the 2003 invasion, and thousands of Iraqi civilians and coalition soldiers had been killed since the war began. Because of this unstable situation, Iraqi and U.S.
officials kept the exact location and timing of Saddam’s execution secret. On December 29, 2006, officials met and finalized the plan. Saddam would be executed at dawn the following morning. Before sunrise on December 30, 2006, guards transported Saddam Hussein to Camp Justice, an Iraqi military facility in the Kadhimiya district of Baghdad.
Kadhimiya was a predominantly Shiite area and an important religious center, home to the Kadhimiya Shrine. The execution was planned as a tightly controlled operation, with only a small number of people allowed inside the chamber. One of the people selected to witness the execution was Munqith al-Faroon, an Iraqi prosecutor who had helped build the case against Saddam.
Al-Faroon later said that fourteen Iraqi officials were present inside the execution chamber, along with three hangmen whose job was to carry out the sentence. Before entering the execution chamber, officials collected mobile phones from everyone who was supposed to be present.
The purpose was to prevent unauthorized photographs or recordings and to make sure the government controlled what images of the execution reached the public. But that security measure ultimately failed. At least two phones still made it into the room. Once inside, guards brought Saddam to the gallows, where the rope had already been prepared, and placed the noose around his neck.
Iraqi state television later broadcast an official recording of the final moments. The footage contained no audio and ended before Saddam actually fell through the trapdoor. But one of the phones recorded both video and audio. As Saddam stood on the gallows with the noose around his neck, some of the men inside the chamber began chanting the name of Muqtada al-Sadr, a powerful young Shiite cleric who had become one of the most influential figures in post-2003 Iraq.
The chant carried strong political meaning because the Sadr family had a long and bitter history with Saddam’s regime. Muqtada’s father, Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, was a senior Shiite religious leader who was assassinated in 1999 along with two of his sons. The killings were widely blamed on Saddam’s government.
By the time Saddam was executed in 2006, Muqtada al-Sadr had built a powerful political and military movement, including the Mahdi Army militia, and had considerable influence within the government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. That background made the chanting inside the execution room especially significant. Saddam was not simply standing before a group of executioners in silence.
Some of the people around him were openly invoking the name of a political and religious figure whose family had suffered under his rule. The moment turned the execution into something far more politically charged than the calm, silent scene shown on state television. The chanting continued as Saddam stood on the gallows.
He responded by challenging the men and asking whether they considered their behavior an act of bravery. Another voice in the room told him to go to hell. The argument continued for several seconds before the trapdoor opened and Saddam Hussein fell through it. Within hours, the unofficial cell phone recording was spreading across the internet.
Al Jazeera, a Qatar-based satellite news network watched across the Arab world, obtained a copy and broadcast it to millions of viewers. The difference between the two versions of the same event was impossible to miss. The reaction inside Iraq quickly split along the same sectarian lines heard in the recording.
For many Sunni Iraqis, the chanting confirmed a fear that had been growing since Saddam was removed from power: that the new Shiite-led government was using the justice system to settle old sectarian conflicts instead of delivering fair punishment. By late 2006, Iraq was already suffering from extreme violence between Sunni and Shiite communities.
Car bombings, revenge killings, and death squad attacks were killing more than a thousand people in some months. The leaked video did not create this division, but it exposed it to the world in the most direct way possible. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki ordered an investigation into two related questions. The first was why the guards inside the execution room had been allowed to taunt Saddam and chant political slogans during what was supposed to be a formal state execution.
The second was who had secretly recorded the event and allowed the footage to reach the outside world within hours. Sami al-Askari, an adviser to al-Maliki who had personally witnessed the execution, spoke to reporters afterward. He admitted that those inside the room had been caught off guard by what happened and acknowledged that the incident had created a damaging image of Iraq’s new government, both inside the country and internationally.
At the same time, he rejected claims that the leaked video proved Saddam’s trial had been unfair. He argued that Saddam had been given a fair trial and had been treated properly during his execution, and that too much attention was being placed on the chanting instead of on the crimes for which Saddam had been convicted. Al-Faroon, the prosecutor who had witnessed the hanging, gave the most detailed public description of what happened inside the room.
He said he personally shouted at the guards to remain silent while they were chanting. His voice could also be heard on the leaked recording telling them to stop. Al-Faroon described the behavior as spontaneous, saying that no one had organized or ordered the chanting in advance. According to his account, the guards simply decided to do it themselves in the final moments.
The question of who filmed the recording was harder to answer. Al-Faroon said he personally saw two government officials holding mobile phones and recording the execution. They were using the same lighting that had been set up for the official government recording. He said he did not know their names, but believed he could recognize them if he saw them again.
He also believed the two men had managed to get their phones through security with help from their bodyguards, who may have secretly brought the devices into the execution area after the phones had supposedly been confiscated. Reports at the time suggested that Al-Faroon had identified Mowaffak al-Rubaie, al-Maliki’s national security adviser and a close aide to the prime minister, as one of the men holding a phone during Saddam’s final moments. Al-Faroon later denied making that specific accusation.
He told reporters that he had been misquoted and had never directly named al-Rubaie as the person responsible for the recording. Journalists also tried to contact al-Rubaie for a response, but were unable to reach him. His office said he was in the city of Najaf and was unavailable. On January 3, 2007, four days after Saddam’s execution, Iraqi authorities announced the first arrest connected to the leaked recording.
An adviser to al-Maliki, speaking to reporters anonymously, said that the person arrested was an official who had supervised the execution. The official was being investigated over what had happened inside the execution room. Later that same day, al-Rubaie confirmed that more people had been taken into custody. He said three people were now under arrest in connection with the leaked recording.
According to his statement, the person believed to have been mainly responsible for filming the execution had been detained and was being questioned about why he had recorded it in the first place. But the arrests never produced a complete public explanation. The Iraqi government did not release a full account showing exactly who recorded the footage, why they recorded it, or how the video reached the internet so quickly.
Conflicting statements from government officials and the use of anonymous sources in media reports made it difficult to establish exactly what had happened. Saddam’s body was returned to his family on December 31, 2006, one day after his execution. He was buried in Al-Awja, the small village near Tikrit where he had been born. He was laid to rest near the graves of other members of his family in a private and relatively quiet ceremony.
