Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri: the King of Clubs is back, and he may yet prove to be Saddam Hussein's trump card

Now, after a decade as a fugitive, and believed by many to be dead, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri - one of the late Iraqi dictator's most trusted acolytes - appears to have re-emerged as the spiritual figurehead of a resurgent movement dedicated to restoring Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party to power.

The 70 year-old, on whose head the US set a $10m bounty and who helped Saddam lead his 1968 coup, is thought to be leading a group of regime die-hards blamed for a major upsurge in violence across the country.

Last month, in some of the fiercest fighting since US troops left Iraq, gunmen attacked Iraqi army units in northern Iraq, set up their own checkpoints, and even briefly routed troops from a small town north of Baghdad, which they declared to be "Iraq's first liberated territory".

Overwhelmingly drawn from the Sunni Muslim minority, their stated goal is to topple the Shia-dominated government of President Nouri-al Maliki, which they believe has been left vulnerable since the departure of US troops from Iraq 18 months ago.

Mr al-Douri's militia is thought to have been the main backers of the which was sparked by a heavy-handed crackdown on an anti-government protest in Hawija, a dusty town in what US troops used to call the "Sunni Triangle".

The clashes, which claimed the lives of nearly 200 people, including at least a dozen soldiers, prompted warnings that the country was at risk of "civil war" again.

Diplomats fear they could plunge Iraq into an even worse version of the sectarian conflict that cost an estimated 30,000 lives between 2006-7 - this time without the US military there to stop it.

Last week, those warnings gained further urgency when a series of bombs ripped through first Shia neighbourhoods and then Sunni neighbourhoods around Baghdad, killing some 130 people. While nobody claimed responsibility for them, they appeared to be a deliberate attempt to raise sectarian tensions.

That, certainly, seems to be the intention of Mr Al-Douri, who surfaced in a video posted on the internet earlier this year, sitting behind a desk with a Saddam-era flag on it.

Wearing an olive-green Ba'athist uniform, he called for the overthrow of Baghdad's new "Persian" government - a reference to Mr Maliki's closeness to the Shia regime in neighbouring Iran.

"The people of Iraq and all its nationalist and Islamic forces support you until the realisation of your demands for the fall of the Persian alliance," he said, speaking in a slow, rasping whisper.

While his voice suggests a man no longer in the prime of life, any comparisons it might invite with Don Corleone in the Godfather are not unreasonable, according to Dr Michael Knights, an Iraq expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, "Al-Douri is the last top-tier Ba'athist leader still at large, and the godfather of the surviving Ba'athist mafiosi," said Dr Knights.

"He is a veteran coalition-builder. His word, his networks of contacts, the favours he can call in, are his main resource as a leader."

The notion that a septuagenarian like Mr al-Douri is still free to cause trouble is all the more remarkable given his ill health. Diagnosed with leukemia back in the 1990s, and believed to be in need of regular blood transfusions, many assumed that he would not survive long when he went on the run after the collapse of Saddam's regime.

Some reports had him dead or dying, others claimed that a sympathetic Arab Gulf state had taken him in for a comfortable, but clandestine retirement.

As such, there was much scepticism when, in 2004, US commanders in Iraq said that Mr al-Douri was one of the key backers of the escalating insurgency.

Claims by Paul Wolfowitz, the then US deputy defence secretary, that he was "probably funding terrorism" were dismissed as an attempt to find a scapegoat for mounting anti-US feeling. During his early years on the run, Mr al-Douri also issued only a few unauthenticated statements via audio recordings, adding to the speculation that he was already dead.

Now, though, it seems that US officials were right all along. The video evidence that he was still alive first surfaced online last year, showing him delivering a long rant against Iran, with which Iraq fought an eight-year war under Saddam.

Given the reports that he needs regular dialysis, Dr Knights believes that Mr al-Douri's role today is more as insurgent figurehead than operational leader.

But few would doubt his commitment to the Ba'athist cause. Born, like Saddam, to humble roots in city of Tikrit - his father was an ice seller - he was one of the regime's original hard men, feared almost as much as "Chemical Ali" Hassan al Majid, who gassed 5,000 Kurds in the city of Halabja in 1988. He also acted as Saddam's envoy abroad, where his ferocious features and hostile manner left their own unique mark on Iraqi diplomacy.

Prior to the first Gulf War in 1991, he warned Iraq's Kurds not to cause trouble, saying "If you have forgotten Halabja, I would like to remind you that we are ready to repeat the operation." In early March 2003, amid last minute talks to stop the Iraq war going ahead, he famously branded a Kuwaiti diplomat a "monkey" and told him: "I curse your moustache" - a grave insult in the Arab world.

US commanders believe that Mr al-Douri has spent much of his time on the run in neighbouring Syria, where President Bashar al-Assad's regime offered logistical support for the anti-American insurgency. However, with Syria now in the grip of civil war, it is thought he may now be using safe-houses around the northern city of Mosul, where US troops first reported attacks by his militia group back in 2009. Last month, Iraqi troops hunting for Mr al-Douri searched his old villa near Tikrit.

Known as the Naqshabandi Army, after an Islamic religious sect, Mr al-Douri's militia is believed to number up to 5,000 volunteers, many of them veterans of the anti-US insurgency.

Iraqi officials say that it has also successfully infiltrated the Sunni community's "Arab Spring" protest movement, which sprang up last year to campaign for greater Sunni representation in the government.

The protest movement, which claims that Sunnis are now treated as second-class citizens by government and the police, has held huge demonstrations in recent months former flashpoint cities like Fallujah, once notorious as the "graveyard of the Americans".

But hopes that the protest movement would stay peaceful were undermined last month by the raid on the protest camp at Hawija near Kirkuk, in which at least 44 people were killed. While the government has claimed its troops were fired upon first, the deaths have proved a recruiting sergeant for Mr al-Douri's militia, with many Sunnis around Hawija and other cities now saying they are joining up.

"Their goal is to defend Sunnis and to fight pro-Iran Iraqis," said one Sunni protest organiser in Fallujah. "Our protesters now need real armed protection."

Such talk will no doubt be welcomed by Mr al-Douri, who could pose a real threat to Iraq's future were his militia to become the recognised defenders of the Sunni protest movement. The King of Clubs may yet prove to be Saddam's trump card.