Shadowy Figures of the Baath Party

Aziz was born in 1936 in the northern city of Mosul to a family of little means. He was originally named Michael Yuhanna but changed his name to Tariq Aziz (literally "glorious past"), which he thought would be more acceptable to the Muslim majority. He started his political activities in 1958 when he began cooperating with Michel Aflaq, the cofounder of the Baath party.

Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian, and Salahaddin Bitar, who was born in a Muslim family in Damascus, founded the Baath Party in Syria in the 1940s. Aflaq became the main ideologue of Baathism, which advocated Arab unity, socialism, and anti-colonialism. The Arab Socialist Party of Akram Hourani merged with the Baath Party in 1953.

The party's main ideological objectives were secularism, socialism, and pan-Arabism. It was founded with the intention of suppressing the Islamist ideology that was becoming popular in the Middle East at the time. 

Aflaq, Bitar, and Hourani were the three main figures of the Baath Party. They wanted to give their party an Arab identity, therefore they chose the slogan "Unity, Freedom, and Socialism".

Due to Aflaq's close relations with U.S. intelligence agencies, Iraq was plentifully supplied with arms. Aflaq played a significant role in persuading France to sell five advanced aircraft armed with laser-guided missiles to Iraq.

Tariq Aziz was very interested in Aflaq's ideology, as were Saddam Hussein, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, and Abd al-Salem Arif, who became the pillars of the Baath Party in Iraq.

Under the patronage of Saddam, Aziz began to rise through the ranks of the Iraqi political establishment. He served as a member of the Regional Command from 1974 to 1977 and became a member of Saddam's Revolutionary Command Council in 1977. In addition, he had worked at several Iraqi newspapers, and was chief editor of two, al-Jamaheer and al-Thawra, the Baath Party newspaper.

During his time at the foreign ministry he made serious efforts to foster relations with international organizations in order to present a favorable image of the hated regime.

During the U.S. attack on Baghdad, Tariq Aziz hid in a building in the al-Mansour district with Saddam Hussein and his sons Uday and Qusay. Fifteen minutes after Aziz suddenly and inexplicably left the building, U.S. forces bombed the hideout of the deposed dictator, but the assassination attempt failed because Saddam had suspected treachery and left the building ten minutes after Aziz.

After 40 years of friendship and cooperation with Tariq Aziz, Saddam discovered that his trusted aid had contacts with U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies.

HJ/HG

End

MNA