Aziz Saleh Al-numan
One of Saddam’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ and briefly governor of Kuwait
AZIZ SALEH AL-NUMAN, the “King of Diamonds”, who has died aged 82, figured among the elite of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq most wanted by the Americans; his death reduces to four the number still alive of the so-called “dirty dozen” in the deck of cards issued by the US Defence Intelligence Agency in 2003.
The others have been executed or killed in fighting, or have succumbed to natural causes. They include the four “aces” – Saddam, hanged in 2006, his sons, Uday and Qusay, who died in a gun battle with US forces in Mosul in 2003, and Abid al-hamid Mahmud, the president’s personal secretary, who was hanged in 2012. The band of Ba’ath Party henchmen from Saddam’s long dictatorship is ever-diminishing.
Aziz Saleh al-numan al Khafaji was born on July 1 1941 in Nasiriyah, a city in southern Iraq near the ruins of the ancient city of Ur.
Al-numan was governor of Karbala from 1976-79 and of Najaf from 1979-86 – both cities, along with Kufa, considered Iraq’s holiest sites by Shia Muslims. Himself a Shia, he proved, however, to be a notorious persecutor of his fellow believers, first during the Iran-iraq War, then in quelling the uprising by Shias in the south of the country in 1991 after the American-led coalition had driven Iraq out of Kuwait.
It is estimated that tens of thousands died and nearly two million were displaced during this brief and brutal campaign. Following it, the regime stepped up its draining of marshes in the Tigris-euphrates basin and the forced relocation of Marsh Arabs.
After his governorships in the south, al-numan served as minister of agriculture and agrarian reform from 1986 to 1987.
Following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, al-numan was appointed governor of the emirate, succeeding Ali Hassan al-majid, known as “Chemical Ali” because of his use of poisonous gas in the campaign against the Kurds in 1988.
Al-numan held the post for three months of a seven-month occupation in which Kuwait saw whole neighbourhoods destroyed, hundreds of people killed or tortured, more than half the population displaced and, as a parting Iraqi shot, the setting alight of about 700 oil wells, creating an inferno of flames and black smoke.
At the time of the Us-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 he was the ruling Ba’ath Party’s regional command chairman, responsible for West Baghdad.
He was captured hiding in his sister’s house near Baghdad in May that year, despite reports of his relatives publishing an advertisement in one of the capital’s newspapers saying that he had died of a heart attack. At the time he was the highest card, No 8 in the American pack – the suit order being spades, clubs, hearts and diamonds – to be arrested.
In 2011 he was transferred from US to Iraqi custody, along with four others, two of Saddam’s half-brothers, a former defence minister and a former general. They were the last among over 200 Iraqis whom the Americans had held at Camp Cropper, a detention centre near Baghdad airport that had been transferred to the Iraqis as part of the US withdrawal from the country the previous year. It was there that Saddam had been held before his execution in 2006.
Al-numan was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. Given his record, it was expected that he would be executed. He remained, however, in custody until his death in Abu Ghraib, the prison near the capital made notorious during the Iraq War by human-rights violations committed by the US Army and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Aziz Saleh al-numan, born July 1 1941, died January 30 2024