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Reports Emerge That Judge Who Sentenced Saddam Hussein to Death Has Been Killed by ISIS

Judge Raouf Abdul Rahman, who was ethnically Kurdish, led the Supreme Iraqi Criminal Tribunal during Saddam’s trial in 2006.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The judge who sentenced former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to death in 2006 has reportedly been killed by ISIS militants, according to local media reports and social media postings from former Iraqi aids and Jordanian officials.

Ibrahim al-Douri, an aid to the ex-Iraqi president and a key figure among Sunni militants, posted on his Facebook page that ISIS had captured and killed Judge Raouf Abdul Rahman.

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A Jordanian MP, Khalil Attieh also posted on Facebook that Rahman had been killed in revenge for sentencing Saddam Hussein to death.

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His death has been neither confirmed nor denied by Iraqi officials yet, but reports have been widely circulating in Arab media in the past several days.

Judge Raouf Abdul Rahman

Attieh wrote on his Facebook, "Iraqi revolutionaries arrested him and sentenced him to death in retaliation for the death of the martyr Saddam Hussein. So far the Iraqi government has not confirmed the death of Judge Rahman, but they have refused to deny the kidnapping."

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The Egyptian site, Al Mesryoon, reported Rahman’s death last Wednesday, with others saying that he had been killed on June 16.

Rahman was from the Iraqi Kurdish city of Halabja, which was the site of an infamous chemical attack allegedly ordered by Saddam in 1988. Rahman was seen as biased in the trial against Saddam and his capture and killing by ISIS was allegedly in revenge for this.

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He was also allegedly detained and tortured in the 1980s by Saddam’s Sunni forces.

If the reports of the judge’s assassination turn out to be true, it could signal a growing policy of retaliation by Sunni militants towards members of Iraq’s former ruling Shiite government.

Photo via Wikimedia

Follow Olivia Becker on Twitter: @obecker928