Interrogation of Saddam Hussein age of 20, Saddam Hussein joined the nascent Ba'ath Party, which was founded on a socialist form of Pan-Arabism. After participating in an unsuccessful 1959 assassination attempt on then Prime Minister of Iraq Abd al-Karim Qasim, Saddam became a fugitive, and eventually fled to Syria and then Egypt. Following the Ba'athists overthrow of the prime minister in the February 1963 Iraqi coup d'état, and the counter-coup half a year later, Saddam was jailed in Iraq from 1964 to 1966. The Ba'ath party returned to power after another successful coup in 1968. General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, a relative of Saddam Hussein,
Interrogation of Saddam Hussein became President, and Saddam became his deputy. In 1979, Saddam Hussein displaced General Bakr, and a little more than a year later, he ordered Iraqi troops to invade Iran, starting the Iran–Iraq War that would continue until 1988. Iraq's 1990 Invasion of Kuwait led to the 1991 Gulf War. In 1998, Saddam halted Iraqi cooperation with the United Nations Special Commission weapons inspections imposed on Iraq after the Gulf War, and kept U.N. inspectors out until 2002. In March 2003, the United States led an invasion of Iraq that quickly toppled the government. Saddam fled the capital of Baghdad shortly