Baghdad - The Iraqi presidency approved the execution of Ali
Hassan al-Majid, cousin of former president Saddam Hussein, for
killing thousands of Kurds in Anfal campaign in 1988, media reports
said Friday.
The death sentence of al-Majid is to be implemented in the coming
30 days, said the official Iraqi television channel al-Iraqiya.
Reports said the execution warrant was signed by President Jalal
Talabani and his two deputies.
On June 24, 2007, Iraq's Special Tribunal sentenced Al-Majid,
whose nickname is Chemical Ali, along with two other defendants
former defence minister Sultan Hashim Ahmad and former assistant to
the Iraqi army's chief of staff, general Hussein Rashid Mohamed al-
Takriti - to death on charges of genocide.
Between 50,000 and 180,000 people were killed, by various
estimates, in the Anfal campaign waged by Saddam against Kurds in
northern Iraq in the waning days of the Iran-Iraq war.
In the campaign, the Iraqi army carried out a scorched-earth
policy, including poison gas attacks and mass executions, against
hundreds of villages in the Kurdish region in the 1987-1988 period.
Al-Majid, who defended himself by saying he was only following
Saddam's orders, launched the attack against the Kurds on grounds
that the campaign was aimed at Iranians who were allegedly centred in
Kurdish areas and were threatening the national stability of Iraq.
During the reign of Saddam, al-Majid acted as his right-hand man
when it came to striking down insurgents of any shade and getting rid
of rivals.
In the course of his career as minister, commander and advisor to
Saddam, al-Majid was one of the key figures in the regime. He played
an instrumental role in the attacks on Iraq's Kurdish areas during
the 1980s, the invasion of Kuwait and the suppression of the Shiite
rebellion in the south in 1991.
Since the mustard and nerve gas attacks on the Kurdish village of
Halabja in 1988 during which an estimated 5,000 Kurds were killed and
which he oversaw, al-Majid has become notorious among Iraqis as Ali
al-Kimawi or 'Chemical Ali.'
Al-Majid, who like Saddam, is from a humble background and has had
hardly any formal education, was born in Tikrit in 1941.
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