BASRA REVOLT?: Whenever President Saddam Hussein finds himself in a crisis, there is usually one man he turns to - Gen Ali Hassan al-Majid.
Yesterday there were reports that Gen Majid, Saddam's cousin and close aide, had brutally suppressed an uprising in Basra.
There were also suggestions that fighting had broken out in the city between pro-Saddam factions after Gen Majid ordered the execution of a Shia Ba'ath party leader.
While these reports are difficult to verify, there is little doubt that Gen Majid is once again performing his favourite role - that of Saddam's chief executioner.
Gen Majid has long been a member of Saddam's inner circle, and is one of the few people the Iraqi president still trusts.
Shortly before war broke out, Saddam gave the general the task of defending southern Iraq from invading coalition forces. It was a tough assignment. So far he appears to have made considerable impact, inflicting casualties on American and British forces as they struggle towards Baghdad.
The degree of his military success seems to have surprised British officers. But few people inside Iraq would have made the same apparent mistake of underestimating Gen Majid.
When Saddam Hussein became president in 1979, Gen Majid was already a fanatical Saddam loyalist. He first demonstrated his flair for brutality as head of Iraq's secret police, the mukhabarat. In the late 1980s Gen Majid consolidated his reputation when Saddam sent him to northern Iraq to sort out the rebellious Kurds.
Gen Majid decided to attack Kurdish villages using chemical weapons, earning himself the nickname Chemical Ali. In a tape captured by Kurdish rebels, Gen Majid declared: "I will kill them all with chemical weapons! Who is going to say anything? The international community? F---k them!"
A chain-smoking, pot-bellied officer with no educational qualifications, Gen Majid's genocidal ruthlessness impressed Saddam, who rewarded his cousin by making him interior and then defence minister.
During the last Gulf war, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Gen Majid was appointed Kuwait's new governor. He wasted little time in systematically looting the country, and executing and torturing many of its citizens.
"He is a criminal. He is a thug," Mr Mudhar Shawkat, a leading member of Iraq's opposition, said yesterday. "He is someone who will look you in the eyes. If he doesn't like what he finds he has you killed." He added: "Saddam trusts him because he has committed many terrible and horrible crimes. Al-Majid knows that when Saddam goes he will go, too."
He rarely ventures out in public, preferring to stay in villas in Baghdad or Tikrit, where he and Saddam grew up.
Just before war broke out thousands of Kurds poured out of Kirkuk following rumours that Gen Majid had dropped in for a visit. "Last time he came in 1991 thousands of people disappeared," one refugee said. "We never saw them again."