
Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri (1 July 1942 – 25 October 2020) was the leader of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party from 3 January 2007, succeeding Saddam Hussein. al-Douri founded the Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order on 30 December 2006 as a Ba'athist insurgent group, and he emerged as the top leader of Iraqi nationalist rebels during the Iraq War following Saddam's downfall and execution. al-Douri was reported dead on 19 April 2015 during the Second Battle of Tikrit, but his death was unconfirmed. His death from natural causes was reported by the Ba'ath Party in October 2020.
Biography[]

al-Douri at an interview
Al-Douri was born in Tikrit in the Kingdom of Iraq, the same birthplace as Saddam Hussein. He aided Hussein in executing the coup of 1968 and was made the Deputy Chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council of the new Iraq in 1979, and served as a sort of right-hand man for Hussein, who became the dictator. Al-Douri escaped an assassination attempt on 22 November 1998 and was reluctantly allowed out of Austria after seeking treatment for leukemia in 1999.
In the Iraq War of 2003-2011, Al-Douri was responsible for leading Baathist resistance to the interim government and the NATO occupying forces, and not only did he fund the rebellion, but he also forged an alliance between the renegade Iraqi army and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Al-Qaeda, and other Islamist movements. He hid between Tikrit and the villages of Hawija and Dour, and Al-Douri owned a villa in the area. The Iraqi government was close to capturing him, but in 2014 he commanded the ISIS Offensive in northern Iraq, overunning Nineveh, Saladin, Kirkuk, and Diyala provinces. After the fall of Mosul, Ba'ath generals Azhar al-Obeidi and Ahmed Abdul Rashid were appointed as the governors of Mosul and Tikrit. However, the Ba'ath Party declared war on the Islamic State soon afterwards, although some cooperation still existed.
During the Second Battle of Tikrit in early 2015, al-Douri was killed by the Iraqi Army at the al-Alaas oil fields in Hemreen to the east of Tikrit. Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq claimed to have killed him and transported his body to Baghdad, but Iraq did not have his DNA and the Ba'ath Party denied his death. Months later, an audio recording was released of al-Douri describing the events since his reported death, proving that he was alive. On 25 October 2020, the official Facebook account of the Ba'ath Party reported al-Douri's passing, saying that he, as a "knight" of the Ba'ath Party and the Iraqi National Resistance, had "dismounted".