Word: tikrit
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...says a senior Bush adviser, "they may turn to fighting each other." The advisers believe postwar stability in Iraq and the region is better served if the country's next ruler is "someone in the clan" -- one of Saddam's close associates, probably a relative from his hometown of Tikrit...
...Guards, first organized in the late 1950s, became Saddam Hussein's creation in the 1970s, when they were commissioned to serve as his bodyguards. His original recruits for the Guard units were from his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq, and today the Guards' titular head is Hussein Kamel Hassan, 37, Saddam...
...origins of Saddam's killer instinct go back to his roots in Tikrit, 100 miles north of Baghdad. Born in 1937 the son of peasants, he was orphaned at the age of nine months and raised by an uncle, an army officer named Khairallah Talfah, who hated Britain's domination of Iraq's puppet monarchy. At his knee, the boy learned the ways of intrigue and sneak attack, until Talfah joined in an abortive anti-British coup in 1941 and was imprisoned. Saddam did not attend school until the age of nine and later, when he applied for admission...
...roots of Saddam's totalitarian impulse can be traced to the northern Iraqi town of Tikrit, where he was born in 1937 to an impoverished peasant family. Fatherless, Saddam spent much of his youth with his maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah, an army officer who in 1941 supported a failed attempt to topple Iraq's British-controlled monarchy. Talfah's five-year imprisonment instilled in the young Saddam a profound bitterness that would give rise to a nationalistic fervor and an acute desire to rid not only Iraq but also the entire Arab world of foreign influence...
...climax of the parade, the residents of Tikrit wheeled out a simple cabin, and people dressed in the robes of ancient Babylon and Assyria prostrated themselves before it. When the cabin split open to reveal a palm tree from which 53 white doves were released, Saddam appeared to a wave of applause...