Saddam Hussein's cousin and the man believed to be responsible for gassing more than 100,000 Kurds in Northern Iraq is the object of a search and destroy mission by allied troops.

Ali Hassan Al-Majeed, also known as Chemical Ali, is blamed for a series of chemical attacks in 1988 on the Kurds in northern Iraq, which killed 100,000 people.

United States marines recently launched a raid on his suspected headquarters in the town of Shatra, just north of Nasiriya, using laser-guided bombs, tanks and helicopter gunships.

Al-Majeed is believed to be a key figure in organising paramilitary attacks on allied troops and supply lines.

The Americans raided Shatra at dawn after a tip-offs that Al-Majeed and other senior Ba'ath party members were there. Marines who carried out the raid had been heading north for Baghdad, but turned round to mount the operation to help secure the supply lines, according to military sources.

Precision bombs hit four targets in Shatra before tanks, armoured personnel carriers and helicopter gunships firing machine guns moved in.

Al-Majeed, a first cousin of Saddam, gained notoriety as 'Chemical Ali' after the 1988 massacre in the town of Halabja, where an estimated 5,000 Kurds were gassed.

He was then the secretary-general of the northern Ba'ath party and codenamed the brutal attack "Anfal" after a Koranic verse justifying the pillage of infidels' property.

A tape recording of a meeting at which he spoke about the impending genocide later emerged. In the tape he is heard saying: "I will not attack them with chemicals just one day, but I will continue to attack them with chemicals for 15 days."

He later led Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, which prompted the 1991 Gulf  War, and was believed to have been a key figure in the bloody repression of a rebellion in Basra once the war was over.

In the following years, he played a leading role in the persecution of Iraq's Marsh Arabs that saw their villages bombed and their men and women tortured.

Executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, says: "Al-Majeed is Saddam Hussein's hatchet man. He has been involved in some of Iraq's worst crimes, including genocide and crimes against
humanity."

Al-Majeed, reports say, has now been given the task of defending the south of Iraq, prompting fears he could use nerve agents against advancing allied troops.

His reputation in Iraq is fearsome and sinister even by the standards of  Saddam's regime. A former head of Iraq's secret police, the Mukhabarat, he was sent to Basra by Saddam where he stamped his authority on the city by shooting a man dead on the street.

rediff.com Senior Editor Shyam Bhatia is the co-author of Saddam's Bomb, on Iraq's search for
nuclear weapons.