President Saddam Hussein

Who are these people with whom we are at war? It is difficult to generalize about 17 million people, but here, based on interviews with Arab experts, is a primer on Iraq -- the country and its people. Look for it daily in the Today section.POLITICAL DO'S AND DONT'SA whisper of criticism about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein carries the death penalty. People have been jailed for spilling coffee on his picture in the newspaper or for leaning against his portrait at a construction site and making it fall.

BAGHDAD -- The location was a secret. The timing was unannounced. The prosecutors were not identified as they stood silently in the chilly marble-and-granite courtroom, facing defendants secured in a steel pen. For all the trepidation surrounding yesterday's televised conclusion of post-invasion Iraq's biggest trial, it was a stooped man with a cane on whom everyone fixated, and he needed no introduction as he appeared to hear his fate. Ali Hassan al-Majid, dubbed "Chemical Ali" for his role in the gassing of tens of thousands of Kurds in 1987 and 1988, was convicted of genocide and sentenced to death by hanging, the seventh associate of former President Saddam Hussein to face the gallows.

Iraqi President Saddam Hussein may be infuriated by President Bush's Kennebunkportian mispronunciation of his name.According to linguistics experts quoted in New York magazine, the name Saddam has two distinctly different meanings, depending on where the accent is placed. With the accent correctly placed on the second syllable, Saddam means "learned one" or "leader."But an Egyptian says the way George Bush pronounces Saddam gives the name "a very vulgar meaning."He says that when "Saddam" rhymes with "Adam," the word means "a boy who fixes or cleans old shoes.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- A jittery Iraqi government locked down the capital and surrounding provinces yesterday ahead of an expected verdict today in the trial of former President Saddam Hussein on charges of crimes against humanity. Iraqi officials canceled all military leaves, ordered the Baghdad airport closed and imposed an indefinite curfew from 6 a.m. today in the capital and the religiously mixed provinces of Diyala and Salahuddin, home to Hussein's birthplace and the Shiite town at the center of his trial.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush said yesterday that the United States would oppose the lifting of the worldwide ban against trading with Iraq until President Saddam Hussein is forced out of power in Baghdad.His statement, along with earlier remarks by the White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, indicated strongly that the United States has decided to try to drive Mr. Hussein from power through a postwar policy of economic strangulation.Implicit in the statements by Mr. Bush and his spokesman was a threat to use the veto authority that the United States holds as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to oppose lifting the sanctions.

Four months before President Bush signed a secret order encouraging closer relations with Iraq, the Defense Intelligence Agency provided detailed information about the network of European companies Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used to buy technology that could upset the balance of power in the Mideast.A classified 1989 document shows that U.S. intelligence knew that British tool-maker Matrix Churchill Corp., which had a branch in Solon, Ohio, played a major role in Iraq's weapons-buying program, yet did nothing to stop its operations.

The battlefield More than 130 American tanks and armored vehicles rolled into Baghdad, crushing a statue of President Saddam Hussein. U.S. troops seized the New Presidential Palace, where a prisoner of war camp was set up. U.S. Marines built a pontoon bridge across a canal as they made their way into the capital city. The U.S. military is testing samples from drums found near Karbala. The drums contain what is suspected to be chemical weapons. Coalition warplanes struck Iraqi positions in the north, fighting to advance on Mosul and Kirkuk, still in Iraqi control.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has proposed almost tripling the $15 million budget for intelligence and covert action to help overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, according to U.S. sources.The request, which would increase CIA spending on the Iraq effort to $40 million, follows a year of U.S. frustration and embarrassment over Mr. Hussein's ability not only to survive the political and military punishment from Operation Desert Storm, but to reconsolidate his singular hold over the country.

U.S. and allied troops face a tougher fight than they think, predict two men who claim ties to the Iraqi leadership. One says he was President Saddam Hussein's bodyguard and hired killer, and the other says he sold Iraq many of its weapons.The bodyguard, who out of fear identified himself only as Capt. Karim, and the arms dealer, Sarkis Soghanalian, told CBS-TV in separate interviews that:* Saddam has a secret underground base where he is hiding much of his air force.Karim, who made this claim, refused to say where the base is, because this would injure "my country" and not hurt Saddam, who is "finished" anyway, Karim said.

Blessed with a quarter of the world's known oil reserves, Iraq has more than enough latent wealth to pay its way back from the dark ages into which it was plunged by six weeks of U.S. and allied bombing, say Middle East analysts.But whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his associates, or even the Baath Party leadership itself, will be able to stay the distance is open to question.Even if Mr. Hussein's Republican Guard loyalists manage to quell and contain the postwar rebellion in the southern provinces, as State Department officials believe they will, many Mideast specialists say the Iraqi leader's days are numbered.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The night before, guards separated men from women, children from adults, before reading a list of names "like the day of judgment." As morning broke, soldiers loaded those who had been called onto windowless buses, taking them into the desert. The Kurdish detainees were tied, blindfolded and their identification papers were taken away. Then the guards opened fire. "All around us was dirt and smoke," a witness recalled yesterday, testifying in the genocide trial of Iraqi former President Saddam Hussein.

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and his co-defendants, one in pajamas, were forced to appear in court yesterday without their attorneys in a session marked by frequent shouting matches. Amid the chaotic din of the three-hour session, prosecutors presented documents suggesting that upper echelons of his government and security apparatus knew about and directed the persecution of villagers in Dujail, where Hussein was the target of an assassination attempt in 1982.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The long-awaited trial of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has been slated for Oct. 19, more than a year and a half after his capture by U.S. troops in a mud-walled bunker near his hometown of Tikrit. The former dictator faces a long list of charges for alleged crimes against humanity stemming from his 25-year rule, but his first trial will focus on a 1982 crackdown on Shiites in the village of Dujail, 50 miles north of Baghdad, that led to the execution of 158 people, 15 of them without trials.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Almost two years after the fall of Baghdad to U.S. forces, Iraq's new democratically elected National Assembly named a former Kurdish resistance leader as the nation's president. Deposed President Saddam Hussein watched a videotape of the televised proceedings from his jail cell in Baghdad as his longtime nemesis, Jalal Talabani, leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, accepted the largely ceremonial post and urged his countrymen to end sectarian and ethnic divisions.

TIKRIT, Iraq - U.S. soldiers have arrested the wife and daughter of Izzat Ibrahim, a former Iraqi general who is believed to have been helping loyalists to deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein regroup and coordinating intensified attacks against the U.S. led-coalition, Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno said yesterday. The two women, along with the son of Ibrahim's doctor, were detained by soldiers from the Army's 4th Infantry Division in a raid on a house near Samarra late Tuesday and were being held for interrogation.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - With still no sign of President Saddam Hussein, American Special Forces captured one of his half-brothers, a former intelligence chief who is the third on a list of 55 Iraqis wanted by U.S. authorities to be captured so far. Other ghosts of the old regime are emerging: Relatives of about 700 Iraqi soldiers killed in the war picked through shallow graves yesterday at a military hospital in southern Baghdad, as another mass grave of 1,600...

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- In his first personal appeal to President Clinton, President Saddam Hussein has urged him to open a new chapter in U.S. relations with Iraq."

AMMAN, Jordan -- Jordan's King Hussein reaffirmed his nation's tilt toward Iraq yesterday at an evening news conference, saying that Iraqi missiles bound for Israel do not violate Jordanian airspace, although Israeli warplanes bound for Iraq would."

The battlefield More than 130 American tanks and armored vehicles rolled into Baghdad, crushing a statue of President Saddam Hussein. U.S. troops seized the New Presidential Palace, where a prisoner of war camp was set up. U.S. Marines built a pontoon bridge across a canal as they made their way into the capital city. The U.S. military is testing samples from drums found near Karbala. The drums contain what is suspected to be chemical weapons. Coalition warplanes struck Iraqi positions in the north, fighting to advance on Mosul and Kirkuk, still in Iraqi control.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq's defense minister said yesterday that U.S. forces could encircle "great parts of Baghdad" in as little as five to 10 days, but that the ensuing battle could last two months or longer, with paramilitary groups loyal to President Saddam Hussein joining regular troops to mount a street-by-street defense of the city of 5 million people. "For us, Baghdad will become the cemetery where the enemy will be buried," Gen. Sultan Hashim Ahmed said at a news conference. "We will teach the United States and the British and their allies a lesson they will never forget."