Biography
Kamel rose through the military ranks to become the Supervisor of the Republican Guard, Iraq's elite military forces, in 1982. He later became the Minister of Industries, heading the Military Industrialisation Commission and supervising Iraq's weapons development programs from 1987.
He married one of Saddam Hussein's daughters, Raghad Hussein, and lived in Iraq until 1995. On August 7 of that year, Kamel and his wife defected from Iraq, along with Kamel's brother, Col. Saddam Kamel al-Majid, and the brother's wife, Rana Hussein, another of Saddam Hussein's daughters. In a September 21, 1995 interview with CNN, Hussein Kamel explained:
This is what made me leave the country, the fact that Saddam Hussein surrounds himself with inefficient ministers and advisers who are not chosen for their competence but according to the whims of the Iraqi president. And as a result of this the whole of Iraq is suffering.
Jordan granted asylum to the Kamels, and there they began to cooperate with UNSCOM and its director Rolf Ekéus, the United States' CIA and the British MI6. Kamel provided the inspection teams with a wealth of information.
Kamel confirmed what inspectors had been able to ascertain shortly before his defection, that Iraq had operated a biological warfare program prior to the Gulf War, providing locations for large amounts of undeclared technical documentation. The defection appears to have had a psychological impact in Baghdad due to uncertainty over what Kamel would reveal: soon afterwards, inspectors were invited to revisit weapons sites and new documents were turned over for examination.
Read more about this topic: Hussein Kamel Al-Majid
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