Pizzas galore!

Officials said that the Shia-led Government of Nouri al-Maliki, the Prime Minister, would fix an execution date. Majid is set to become the fifth former regime member to hang for alleged atrocities against Iraqis during Saddam's nearly three-decades rule.

An appeals court upheld the verdicts against Majid and his co-defendants in September. Their executions were to have taken place within a month, but were put on hold after Sunni leaders, including Tariq al-Hashemi, one of Iraq’s two Vice-Presidents, started a campaign to spare the life of Tai.

An estimated 182,000 Kurds were killed and 4,000 villages wiped out in Saddam’s campaign of bombings, mass deportation and gas attacks in the Kurdish north of Iraq. Villages still bear the scars of the violence, with piles of rubble marking the places where stone houses once stood, while much reconstruction is also under way.

After he had passed sentence in June, Mohammed al-Oreibi al-Khalifah, the Iraqi High Tribunal chief judge, said: “Thousands of people were killed, displaced and disappeared. They were civilians with no weapons and nothing to do with war."

Majid, in his sixties, was the last of the six defendants to learn his fate in the Anfal case. He muttered only "thanks be to God” before being led from the court.

Saddam’s regime said the Anfal campaign was a necessary counter-insurgency operation during Iraq’s bloody eight-year war with neighbouring Iran. It involved the systematic bombardment, gassing and assault of areas in the Kurdish autonomous region, that witnessed mass executions and deportations and the creation of prison camps.

During his trial, which opened on August 21 last year, a defiant Majid said he was right to order the attacks. “I am the one who gave orders to the army to demolish villages and relocate the villagers,” he said at one hearing. “I am not defending myself. I am not apologising. I did not make a mistake."

Saddam, who also had been a defendant in the Anfal trial, was hanged on December 30, 2006, for ordering the killings of more than 140 Shia Arabs from the Iraqi city of Dujail after an assassination attempt against him in 1982.

Among other members of the toppled regime to be executed is former vice president, Taha Yassin Ramadan, who was hanged for crimes against humanity on March 20 last year. Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti and Awad Ahmed al-Bandar, the ex-chief of Iraq’s Revolutionary Court, were hanged on January 15.

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