Saddam's cruellest killer, Chemical Ali, to be executed

A compromise was agreed under which Al-Majid alone is to be executed while no decision has been reached on the two generals, who are popular in the Sunni community. All three men are currently held by the Americans on behalf of the Iraqi government.

The Kurds and the Shia, who together make up 80 per cent of the Iraqi population, are very keen to see the end of Chemical Ali, since he was Saddam's chief enforcer who ordered the murder of some 180,000 Kurdish civilians during the Anfal campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan in 1988.

He is a man without redeeming qualities. A cousin of Saddam, he owed all his power to the former Iraqi leader, who was hanged at the end of 2006, and was wholly loyal to him. He assisted Saddam's purge of rivals within the Baath party in 1979 and was put in charge of Kurdistan in the late 1980s to crush rebellion with wholesale massacres of civilians in areas which were seen as offering support to the Kurdish guerrillas.

Al-Majid was made Interior minister during the Shia uprising of 1991 when he personally assisted in hunting down surviving rebels. In 1996 he led a gang of tribal gunmen to kill General Hussein Kamel, the son-in-law and cousin of Saddam, who had fled to Jordan and then unwisely returned to Iraq under the mistaken impression that he had been forgiven.

In later years Al-Majid was sidelined by Uday, Saddam Hussein's eldest son, but he was seen by Iraqis as the most brutal member of a brutal regime. He was only saved from execution last year because the Americans and Sunni politicians said his two co-defendants, also sentenced to death, had simply obeyed orders as soldiers.

General Sultan Hashem, who is very popular in his home city of Mosul, in northern Iraq, had surrendered to the Americans in return for a promise that he would be well treated. Even among Sunni there is little sympathy for Al-Majid.