Profile of Saddam Hussein

— -- Until his capture on Dec. 13, 2003, Saddam Hussein had been called the quintessential survivor.

For months after President Bush announced the end of major military operations in Iraq on May 1, and with a $25 million reward from Washington on his head, the strongman of Iraq remained unaccounted for.

But the mystery of Saddam's whereabouts was solved when the senior U.S. administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, announced to a press conference in Baghdad on Dec. 13: "We got him."

Saddam was found hiding in the cellar of a home in a town near Tikrit by U.S. forces.

The Iraq war began with a U.S. attempt to kill Saddam in a barrage of satellite-guided bombs and cruise missiles on a leadership compound in Baghdad where he was believed to be spending the night.

But he survived the attack and a number of audio taped messages, purportedly by Saddam, surfaced in news rooms across the Arab world.

In what many U.S. experts said were genuine tapes of the Iraqi leader's voice, Saddam had been calling on his people to resist the occupying U.S. forces.

Master of Survival

Survival — at extraordinary cost — has been a defining factor in Saddam's life.

In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, huddled in an underground bunker with his country smoldering in ruins around him, he seemed buried for good.

U.N. forces had devastated Iraq in the six-week Persian Gulf War: Sewage systems and telephone lines were out, electrical grids were down, and roads were impassable.

Harsh international sanctions and reparation debts hobbled recovery prospects for the oil-rich republic of Iraq. But Saddam resurfaced, unrepentant for the failed invasion of Kuwait and its enormous toll.

Son of Poor Farmers

Saddam grew up in Auja, a village of mud-brick huts northwest of Baghdad. His parents were poor farmers, but inspired by his uncle Khayrallah Tulfah, an Iraqi army officer and crusader for Arab unity, Saddam gravitated to politics as a teenager.

Saddam joined the socialist Baath party when he was 19. He made his mark three years later when he participated in a 1959 assassination attempt against Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Kassim. Saddam was shot in the leg during the botched effort and fled the country for several years, first to Syria, then Egypt.