Types of socialism and encourages the institution of a form of direct democracy based on popular committees. Critics charge that Qaddafi uses these committees as tools of autocratic political repression in practice. Scholars have highlighted the similarities between the Islamic economic system and socialist theory. For example, both are against unearned income. Islam does allow private ownership of natural resources and large industries, which are owned collectively, or at least encouraged to be so. The Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party rules Syria (and ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein), based on a tradition of secular, non-Marxist socialism. Ba'thist beliefs combine Arab Socialism, nationalism, and Pan-Arabism.
Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations Kuwait in August 1990, Osama bin Laden offered to defend Saudi Arabia by sending mujahideen from Afghanistan to repel Saddam's forces. After the Gulf War, bin Laden continued to criticize Saddam's Ba'ath administration, emphasizing that Saddam could not be trusted. Bin Laden told his biographer that "the land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother." Saddam Hussein was a Ba'athist, and Ba'athism is a movement which combines pan-Arab nationalism with secularism and Arab Socialism. It is therefore very much at odds with political Islamism. The ideological founder of Ba'athism, Michel