The Special Republican Guard, also referred to as the Republican Guard Special Protection Forces, comprises up to 26,000 men. The Ba'athist military command structure reports directly to Saddam Hussein, and is responsible for securing the presidential palaces and protecting Saddam Hussein.

The Republican Guards expanded rapidly during the Iran-Iraq War, providing protection for all presidential sites, offices and personal residences of Saddam Hussein. The guard provided the president a 24/7 bodyguard force at home and during his travels.

The Special Republican Guard is organized into four brigades. Three of the brigades guard the northern, southern and western routes into Baghdad. Outside of the personal protection of the president, the Republican Guard includes both an artillery and air defense command to thwart a large-scale attack.

Born near Tikrit in 1937, Saddam Hussein aspires to be the next Joseph Stalin from a very early age. He manages to rise to fame and infamy at 22 by attempting to assassinate the prime minister of Iraq, Abdel-Karim Qassem. Sentenced to death for the failed plot, Hussein flees first to Syria, then Egypt.

After the 1968 Ba'athist Coup in Iraq, Saddam Hussein comes home to begin his career as Chief of Iraq's Security Services, a position he leads with a ruthless iron fist. Political opponents, government officials, and thousands of political prisoners are executed on Hussein’s orders. Within a year, Saddam Hussein transforms himself into one of the most feared leaders the world over.

After staging a palace coup, Hussein forces Iraq’s president Bakr to resign. (Later, ex-President Bakr dies under suspicious circumstances.) Hussein swears himself in as president, and takes swift action to purge the Ba'ath Party of any potential enemies.

In 1980, Saddam Hussein sends 200,000 Iraqi troops across the Iranian border, initiating what will become a bloody, eight-year conflict. During this time, Hussein orders the use of chemical weapons against Iranian forces. By 1988, he again wages chemical weapons—this time against his own people, the Iraqi Kurdish population.

Hussein campaigns against the Kurds by making 180,000 people disappear and ordering the destruction of 4,000 villages. Hussein also gasses the Kurdish town of Halabaja, killing 5,000 people and injuring 10,000. On Hussein’s orders, Kurdish villages on the Turkish border are gassed, where thousands more are killed.

In 1990, Saddam Hussein orders the invasion and destruction of Kuwait, and within a year, he directs a bloody suppression of Kurdish and Shi'a insurgencies in northern and southern Iraq. An estimated 30,000 to 60,000 Iraqis are killed at his behest.

Saddam Hussein is a ruthless man of power and might, accrued through a well-placed fear of random executions and ruinous retributions against politicians, religious leaders, indigenous groups, and whole regions of his own people.