'Chemical Ali' killed in Basra attack
By Tini Tran
Associated Press
BASRA, Iraq — Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali" by opponents of the Iraqi regime for ordering a 1988 poison gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds, has been found dead, a British officer said today.
Associated Press
Maj. Andrew Jackson of the 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment said his superiors had confirmed the death of the man who was President Saddam Hussein's first cousin and one of the most brutal members of his inner circle.
Ali Hassan al-Majid apparently was killed on Saturday.
Al-Majid apparently was killed on Saturday when two coalition aircraft used laser-guided munitions to attack his house in Basra. Jackson said the body was found along with that of his bodyguard and the head of Iraqi intelligence services in Basra.
Saddam had entrusted al-Majid with defense of southern Iraq against invading coalition forces.
Jackson said the discovery of al-Majid's body was one of the reasons the British decided to move infantry into the southern Iraqi city because they hoped with the top Iraqi leadership gone there, resistance might fall apart.
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Believed to be in his fifties, al-Majid led a 1988 campaign against rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq in which whole villages were wiped out. An estimated 100,000 Kurds, mostly civilians, were killed.
He also has been linked to the bloody crackdown on Shiites in southern Iraq following a 1991 uprising after the Gulf War. He served as governor of Kuwait during Iraq's seven-month occupation of the emirate in 1990-1991.
Group Capt. Al Lockwood, spokesman for British forces in the Gulf, said the death of Chemical Ali would show the people of southern Iraq "that the regime is finished. It is over, and liberation is here."
While coalition troops knew that command and control has been destroyed, al-Majdi's death "shows that that last vestige of terror that existed in southern iraq is probably gone as well."
Human rights groups had called for al-Majid's arrest on war crimes charges when he toured Arab capitals last January seeking to rally support against mounting U.S. pressure on Saddam's regime.
"Al-Majid is Saddam Hussein's hatchet man," Kenneth Roth, head of Human Rights Watch in New York, said at the time. "He has been involved in some of Iraq's worst crimes, including genocide and crimes against humanity."
In 1988, as the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war was winding down, he commanded a scorched-earth campaign called Anfal to wipe out a Kurdish rebellion in northern Iraq. Later, he boasted about the attacks, including the March 16, 1988, poison gas strike on the village of Halabja, where an estimated 5,000 people died.
During April 1991 peace talks in Baghdad, the Kurdish delegation leader, Jalal Talabani, told al-Majid that more than 200,000 Kurds lost their lives in the Anfal campaign. Al-Majid replied that the figure was exaggerated and the dead were not more than 100,000, according to reports published in the Arab press.
After Iraq's 1991 Shiite Muslim uprising was crushed, Iraqi opposition groups released a video showing al-Majdi executing captured rebels with pistol shots to the head and kicking others in the face as they sat on the ground.
He was no less brutal with his own family.
His nephew and Saddam's son-in-law, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel, was in charge for many years of Iraq's clandestine weapons programs before defecting in 1995 to Jordan with his brother, Saddam Kamel, who was married to Saddam's other daughter. Both brothers were lured back to Iraq in February 1996 and killed on al-Majdi's orders, together with other family members.
