The massacre was committed in retaliation to an earlier assassination attempt by the Iranian-backed Islamic Dawa Party against the President of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.

Following his capture and subsequent trial during the Iraq War, Saddam Hussein was hanged on 30 December 2006 for crimes against humanity in connection with his involvement in the Dujail massacre.

The Shia-dominated town of Dujail was a stronghold of the Islamic Dawa Party, an Islamist organization involved in the Iranian-backed insurgency[citation needed] against Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist regime in Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War.

[2] On 8 July 1982, Saddam Hussein visited Dujail to make a speech praising local conscripts who had served Iraq in the ongoing war against neighbouring Iran.

[3][4] Saddam Hussein personally interviewed two of the captured attackers before he ordered his special security and military forces to round up all suspected members of the Islamic Dawa Party who lived in Dujail, along with their families.

[4] On 14 October 1982, the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council ordered the retitling of the roadside farmland to the Ministry of Agriculture and the compensation of the owners for their loss.

[6] Held in detention at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, 138 male adult detainees and ten juveniles were tried before the Revolutionary Court after they confessed to having taken part in the assassination attempt.

[10] After nearly two years in detention, around 400 detainees, primarily family members of the 148 who had confessed to involvement, were sent into internal exile in a remote part of southern Iraq.

On 23 July 1984, Saddam signed the court documents authorising the executions and ordered the razing of the homes, buildings, date palms and fruit orchards of the convicted.

Two of the four Ba'ath Party officials who were executed for the massacre lived in Dujail, and the roadside farmland razed included land that belonged to both.