BAGHDAD: Saddam Hussein went to his death betraying no hint of regret that the overarching ambition and belligerence that drove his rise to power from impoverished beginnings had also brought about his downfall and execution.

Born in the town of Tikrit in 1937 and raised without a father, he displayed ruthless cunning and a taste for brutality as he propelled himself to absolute power in Iraq.

But his appetite for conflict, which saw him invade neighbouring Iran and Kuwait and defy former U.S. allies who accused him of developing nuclear and chemical weapons, destroyed Iraq's oil-rich economy and finally felled him.

His rule crumbled when U.S. forces swept into Baghdad in April 2003, tearing down a statue of Saddam in the centre of the city in scenes that symbolised the dictator's fall from power.

He had vowed to go down fighting, as his notorious sons Uday and Qusay did when they were killed in a raid by U.S. troops.

But he gave up without firing a shot -- captured by American soldiers in December 2003 in a hidden pit near a simple shack in an orange grove close to his hometown of Tikrit.

“I am the president of Iraq, and I want to negotiate,” he told the soldiers who found him.

The hut where he had been staying consisted of one room with two beds and a fridge containing a can of lemonade, a packet of hot dogs and an opened box of Belgian chocolates. Several new pairs of shoes lay in their boxes scattered around the floor.

A U.S. general said he was caught “like a rat” and many Arabs who had admired his defiance of the United States were shocked by his failure to fight back.

Iraqis who lived for years under the gaze of proud Saddam statues and posters saw humiliating images of him in custody, mouth held open by a probing medic, an unfamiliar beard streaked grey and dishevelled after months on the run.

Saddam was sentenced in November to hang for crimes against humanity for killing, torture and other crimes against 148 Shi'ites after a 1982 attempt on his life in the town of Dujail.

An appeals court upheld the ruling on Tuesday and he was hanged in Baghdad on today .

In a letter written after his sentencing in November, he said: “I offer myself in sacrifice. If my soul goes down this path (of martyrdom) it will face God in serenity.”

RUINOUS WARS: Violence was part of his life from the beginning: he was often beaten as a child.

He joined the pan-Arab, secular Baath party while still in his teens and in October 1959 was involved in an attempt to kill the country's prime minister, Abdel-Karim Kassem.

According to his own account, Saddam was wounded in the botched assassination bid but managed to swim across the Tigris river to evade capture, dig a bullet out of his leg and flee the country. He returned to Iraq four years later.

In 1968, Saddam became the power behind the throne when the Baath party seized power, and in 1979 he became president.

A year later he launched a ruinous eight-year war with Iran that killed hundreds of thousands.

In 1988, as the war was drawing to a close, Iraqi forces launched a poison gas attack on the Iraqi Kurdish town of Halabja, killing some 5,000 people.

Yet Saddam's Iraq remained tacitly backed by the United States as a bulwark against Iran until 1990, when he invaded Kuwait, turning his Western and regional allies against him.

Saddam declared that Iraq was ready for “the mother of all battles” but his forces were routed and driven from Kuwait.

The United States, however, chose not to send forces to Baghdad to depose Saddam and he remained firmly in control of Iraq, brutally suppressing a Shi'ite uprising.

His violence could also be turned against family members who betrayed him. In 1995, the husbands of Saddam's daughters Raghd and Rana fled with them to Jordan. A year later Saddam persuaded them to return, and within days both men had been killed.

For some years, U.S. policy was to contain Saddam but after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, U.S. President George W. Bush chose Iraq as the next target in his “war on terror” after Afghanistan. Saddam was toppled within three weeks of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.

After fleeing Baghdad he spent eight months on the run, issuing occasional audiotapes taunting his pursuers and urging Iraqis to resist the forces of a man he had dubbed “the criminal little Bush”.

Following his capture, Saddam spent his final three years in U.S. custody, the spartan life in a U.S. military cell a far cry from the extravagant luxury of palaces where the bathrooms were famously fitted with gold taps.

When his Dujail trial opened in October 2005, he appeared in a neat suit and was defiant from the start, insisting “I am the president of Iraq” and denouncing the U.S.-backed court.

Playing to a televised gallery and for his place in history, he told the court in July in a typically bravura performance that as a military officer he deserved to be shot, not hanged.

In his final days in a U.S.-run prison, he called on Iraqis to stop fighting each other and instead focus on killing Americans, projecting the image of a father figure in a country formed by European colonial rulers from a patchwork of ethnic and religious communities.

As president, he appealed variously to Arab nationalism, Islam and Iraqi patriotism and would appear in the traditional clothes of an Iraqi peasant, military uniform or Western suits.

In court appearances he appeared tireless in a sober suit and clutching a Koran. His lawyers and co-accused respectfully called him “Mr. President”.

During the trial he said: “Even if they put me in hellfire, God forgive me ... I would say, 'Fine, for the sake of Iraq.'

And I will not cry, for my heart is full of belief.” —Reuters