Seizure of Irbil by Saddam

Date: August 31, 1996 • Location: Rome, Italy

Saddam Hussein's troops seize Irbil after the Kurdish Masoud Barzani appealed for help to defeat his Kurdish rival PUK.

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was an Iraqi politician and revolutionary who served as the fifth president of Iraq from 1979 until his overthrow in 2003. He also served as prime minister of Iraq from 1979 to 1991 and later from 1994 to 2003. He was a leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, and later, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organization, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party. The Iraqi Ba'ath Party, which initially espoused a mix of Arab nationalism and Arab socialism, quickly diverged into a right-wing ideology known as Saddamism.