Saddam Hussein

Saddam's Iraq combined the Revolutionary Command Council, Ba'ath Party organisation and security agencies in a system of close political supervision. Captured government documents record how surveillance, detention and repression were processed through routine correspondence and chains of command. The Anfal campaign against Kurdish communities demonstrates the catastrophic consequences of that machinery. Studying the bureaucracy makes mass violence more intelligible as organised state action, rather than treating it as a sequence of disconnected personal outbursts.