During the regime of Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the fifth President of Iraq, serving in this capacity from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003...

, the nation of Iraq

Iraq

Iraq ; officially the Republic of Iraq is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern part of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert....

used, possessed, and made efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction

Weapons of mass destruction

A weapon of mass destruction is a weapon that can kill and bring significant harm to a large number of humans and/or cause great damage to man-made structures , natural structures , or the biosphere in general...

(WMD). Hussein was internationally known for his use of chemical weapons in the 1980s against Iranian

Iranians

Iranians may refer to:* Persian people, who are synonymous with the people of Iran/Persia...

 and Kurdish civilians during and after the Iran–Iraq War. It is also known that in the 1980s he pursued an extensive biological weapons program

Iraqi biological weapons program

Saddam Hussein initiated an extensive biological weapons program in Iraq in the early 1980s, in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972...

 and a nuclear weapons program, though no nuclear bomb was built.

After the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War

Gulf War

The Persian Gulf War , commonly referred to as simply the Gulf War, was a war waged by a U.N.-authorized coalition force from 34 nations led by the United States, against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait.The war is also known under other names, such as the First Gulf...

, the United Nations located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi chemical weapons and related equipment and materials throughout the early 1990s, with varying degrees of Iraqi cooperation and obstruction.