5. Osama Bin Laden
Osama Bin Laden was the mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. Bin Laden was also indicted over the 1998 embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya. He was wanted by numerous countries for his ties to terrorist activities, and many attempts were made to capture him. On April 29, 2011, U.S.
President Barack Obama authorized the CIA to conduct a raid, dubbed “Operation Neptune Spear”. In the late evening of May 1, 2011, (EDT), the president announced that bin Laden had been killed in the operation.
The entire raid, including intelligence sweeps of the compound, was completed in less than 40 minutes.
His body was taken and biometric facial recognition tests were performed. Subsequent genetic testing supported the preliminary identification. On May 6, 2011, al-Qaeda confirmed that bin Laden was dead. They also vowed that they would continue attacking the U.S. and its allies.
4. Saddam Hussein
In July 1968, when the Baath Party again gained power, Saddam became vice-president. Over the next decade, Saddam grew increasingly powerful. On July 16, 1979, the president of Iraq resigned and Saddam officially took his place.
Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq with a brutal hand. He used fear and terror to remain in power. From 1980 to 1988, Saddam led Iraq in a war against Iran, which ended in a stalemate. Also during the 1980s, Saddam used chemical weapons against Kurds within Iraq, including gassing the Kurdish town of Halabja. This action killed 5,000 people, in March 1988.
In 1990, Saddam ordered Iraqi troops to invade the country of Kuwait. In response, the United States defended Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War, and on March 19, 2003, the United States attacked Iraq. It was during the fighting that Saddam fled Baghdad. On December 13, 2003, U. S. forces found Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole in al-Dwar, near Tikrit. After a trial, Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death for his crimes, and on December 30, 2006, Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging.
3. Haj Amin al-Husseini
Mohammad Amin al-Husayni (born 1895 or 1897; died July 4, 1974) was a Palestinian Arab nationalist and Muslim leader in the British Mandate of Palestine.
As early as 1920, he was active in opposing the British in order to secure the independence of Palestine as an Arab state, and led violent riots opposing the establishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. From 1921 to 1948, al-Husayni was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, using the position to continue his promotion of Palestinian nationalism. As a passionate antisemite, al-Husayni encouraged his followers to “kill the Jews wherever you find them”.
During World War II, he collaborated with the Nazis and, in 1941, met the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler in Germany. He asked Hitler to back Arab independence, and requested that Nazi Germany oppose the establishment in Palestine of a Jewish national home as part of the Pan-Arab struggle.
According to an American report, al-Husayni energetically recruited Muslims for the Waffen-SS, the Nazi Party’s elite military command. After the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and subsequent Palestinian exodus, his claims to leadership became discredited and he was eventually sidelined by the Palestine Liberation Organization, losing most of his remaining political influence. He died in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1974.
2. Idi Amin
Idi Amin Dada Oumee (born in 1924, in Uganda) was the military officer and president (1971-79) of Uganda. Amin also took tribalism, a long-standing problem in Uganda, to its extreme by, allegedly, ordering the persecution of Acholi, Lango and other tribes.
Reports indicate the torture and murder of 100,000 to 300,000 Ugandans during Amin’s presidency. In 1972, Amin began to expel Asians from Uganda.
He said God had directed him to do this (actually, he had been angered by the refusal of one of the country’s most prominent Asian families, the Madhvanis, to hand over their prettiest daughter as his fifth wife).
Over the years, Ugandans would disappear in the thousands, their mutilated bodies washing up on the shores of Lake Victoria. Amin would boast of being a reluctant cannibal— he said human flesh was too salty.
He once ordered the decapitation of political prisoners to be broadcast on TV, specifying that the victims “must wear white to make it easy to see the blood.” One of Amin’s guards, Abraham Sule, said “[Amin] put his bayonet in the pot containing human blood and licked the stuff as it ran down the bayonet. Amin told us ‘When you lick the blood of your victim, you will not see nightmares.’ He then did it.”
1. Ruhollah Khomeini
Ayatollah Khomeini was the religious leader of Iran, from 1979 to 1989. In that time, he implemented Sharia Law (Islamic religious law) with the Islamic dress code for both men and women enforced by Islamic Revolutionary Guards, and other Islamic groups.
Opposition to the religious rule of the clergy, or Islam in general, was often met with harsh punishments. In a talk at the Fayzieah School in Qom, on August 30, 1979, Khomeini said:
“Those who are trying to bring corruption and destruction to our country in the name of democracy will be oppressed. They are worse than Bani-Ghorizeh Jews, and they must be hanged. We will oppress them by God’s order and God’s call to prayer.”
Following the People’s Mujahedin of Iran operation Forough-e Javidan against the Islamic Republic, Khomeini issued an order to judicial officials to judge every Iranian political prisoner and kill those who would not repent anti-regime activities. Many say that thousands were swiftly put to death inside the prisons.
The suppressed memoirs of Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri reportedly detail the execution of 30,000 political activists. After 11 days in the hospital for an operation to stop internal bleeding, Khomeini died of cancer on Saturday June 4, 1989, at the age of 86.
