Aziz, Tariq (1936– )

Iraqi politician, deputy prime minister 1979–2003, and foreign minister 1983–91. Saddam Hussein's right-hand man, Aziz was a loyalist who remained staunchly faithful to the Iraqi leader. After 1983, and especially during the Gulf War, Aziz was the chief international spokesperson for Iraqi policy. He visited Egypt in 1983 in the first formal contact between the two nations since 1978. In the summer of 1990 he led Iraq's intimidation of its erstwhile Arab allies, culminating in the invasion of Kuwait in August of that year. Throughout his tenure, Aziz was credited with bringing Iraqi diplomacy more into the mainstream.

Aziz held various journalistic posts and rose to prominence in Iraqi politics after Hussein's Ba'ath Party seized power in 1969, becoming one of the party's leading ideologists and being assigned to serve as minister of information in 1974. He became a member of the Arab Ba'ath Party regional leadership in 1977, deputy prime minister in 1979, and foreign minister 1983–91. Aziz was poised for such high-level posts because of his underground activism on behalf of the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party before the revolution, where he met Hussein, then a member of the Ba'ath's military unit, in the 1950s.

Aziz was born near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul into a Christian family. His birth name was Mikhail Yuhanna, which he later changed to Tariq Aziz. His family moved to Baghdad when he was a young boy and he studied English literature at the Baghdad College of Fine Arts.