Colonel General Ali Hassan al-Majid al-Tikriti (Arabic: علي حسن المجيد التكريتي, romanized: ʿAlī Ḥasan al-Majid al-Tikrītī; c. 1941[a] – 25 January 2010),[7] was an Iraqi military officer and politician under Saddam Hussein who served as Defense minister, Interior minister, and chief of the General Security.
[a] He was a member of the Bejat clan of the Al-Bu Nasir tribe, to which his elder cousin Saddam Hussein also belonged.
He initially became an aide to Iraqi Defense minister Hammadi Shihab in the early 1970s after joining the Ba'ath party.
At a videotaped assembly of Ba'ath party officials in July 1979, Saddam read out the names of political opponents, denouncing them as 'traitors', ordering that they be removed one by one from the room; many were later executed.
[14] During the late stages of the Iran–Iraq War al-Majid was given the post of Secretary General of the Northern Bureau of the Ba'ath Party, in which capacity he served from March 1987 to April 1989.
He was known for his ruthlessness, ordering the indiscriminate use of chemical weapons such as mustard gas and the extremely potent and toxic nerve agents sarin, tabun, and VX, against Kurdish targets during a genocidal[9] campaign dubbed Al-Anfal ("Spoils of War").
He signed a decree in June 1987 stating that "Within their jurisdiction, the armed forces must kill any human being or animal present in these areas.
[18] Al-Majid was appointed Minister of Local Government following the war's end in 1988, with responsibility for the repopulation of the Kurdish and Assyrian region with Arab settlers relocated from elsewhere in Iraq.
Following the Iraqi defeat in the war, he was given the task of quelling the uprisings in the Shi'ite south of Iraq as well as the Kurdish and Assyrian north.
In December 1998, however, Saddam recalled him and appointed him commander of the southern region of Iraq, where the United States was increasingly carrying out air strikes in the northern no-fly zone.
[14] He based himself in the southern port city of Basra and in April 2003 he was mistakenly reported to have been killed there in a U.S. air strike.
[20] In 2006, he was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity for his part in the Anfal campaign and was transferred to the Iraq Special Tribunal for trial.
[23] He was unapologetic about his actions, telling the court that he had ordered the destruction of Kurdish villages because they were "full of Iranian agents".
"[25] During the trial, the court heard tape-recorded conversations between al-Majid and senior Ba'ath party officials regarding the use of chemical weapons.
Responding to a question about the success of the deportation campaign, Ali Hassan told his interlocutors: I went to Sulaymaniyah and hit them with the special ammunition [i.e. chemical weapons].
[26]During the next few days of the trial, more recordings of al-Majid were heard in which he once again discussed the government's goals in dealing with the Iraqi Kurds.
Ali Hassan's defense claimed that he used such language as "psychological and propaganda" tools against the Kurds, to prevent them from fighting government forces.
The presiding judge, Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa, told al-Majid: "You had all the civil and military authority for northern Iraq.
[30] He then entered into a legal row with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and as a result the Americans refused to hand any of the condemned prisoners over until the issue was resolved.
[31] On 2 December 2008, al-Majid was once again sentenced to death, but this time for playing a role in killing between 20,000 and 100,000 Shi'ite Muslims during the revolt in southern Iraq that followed the 1991 Gulf War.
[34] The situation was similar on 17 January 2010 prior to 9 am (GMT); a fourth death penalty was issued against him in response to his acts of genocide against Kurds in the 1980s.
Alongside him in the trial was former defense minister Sultan Hashem, who was also found guilty by The Iraqi High Tribunal for the Halabja attack and sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment.