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Under fire

27 January 1991

Hussein stood alone in the carpet souk on the eastern bank of the Tigris, fingering his ivory worry-beads and gazing at the huge sun setting behind the Ottoman tenements on the far side of the river. The dying sunlight washed his dishdasha robe a wintry red.

The market square of the souk usually bustled at this time of the early evening as people stopped to gossip or do last-minute shopping on the way home from work. But it was 15 January, the United Nations’ deadline for Iraq’s withdrawal from Kuwait. Baghdad was silent and edgy. The souk was deserted.

Hussein greeted me with far more warmth than our acquaintance merited. I had visited him on and off in his shop over the past five months, using the excuse of fingering a Kurdish bangle, or looking at a carpet, to pick up the rumours and rhythms of daily life in Baghdad. For him, it had been an excuse for a rare talk with a foreigner, something that for an Iraqi is akin to a visit to the confessional.

Now, in this chance encounter, we seemed the only people left in the capital. We walked to his shop under the vaulted roof of the souk. Inside, there was none of the usual salesmanship or the ritual cup of sugared tea. ‘Would you like a whisky?’ he asked, and picked up a half-full bottle of Whyte & Mackay. He poured us two tea glasses full.

Amid the clutter of piled up carpets, silver necklaces, antique frames, heavy Kurdish belts and, beside the ubiquitous picture of Saddam Hussein, a likeness of President John F Kennedy beaten into a copper plate we discussed whether he should stay in Baghdad or take his family to a place safe from American bombs, as other merchants had.

Tareq, who owned the House of Antiquities across the street, had taken his wife and sons to Kurdistan in northern Iraq. ‘The Americans like the Kurds, they won’t bomb them,’ he had said.

Hussein agonised. Baghdad was home; perhaps thieves would come to the empty souk and steal his carpets; but there was no business anyway because everybody was hoarding their money.

We drank another tea glass of whisky, standing up, too edgy to sit down. His wife, five children aged two to 12, younger brother and mother were at home waiting. His children had their school exams on the 20th; if they missed them, it would mean losing a year of school. ‘But perhaps it is better that they lose a year than that they lose their lives,’ he said.

Darkness was falling and we walked out of the shop. He said: ‘If you have any problems you can come to my house. Really.’ For an Iraqi, it was an enormous act of faith. A visit by a foreigner in this tightly controlled society meant a follow-up visit by the security police. But these were extraordinary times. It was a way of saying we were not enemies. I drove back to the Rashid hotel through dark and deserted streets.

Baghdad is normally a bustling city. Although its glorious antiquity was long ago buried under drab concrete, its spirit was irrepressible, even at the height of the first war in the Gulf, when taxis returning from the front with coffins on their roofs raced among the fierce traffic on its highways. To see the city now was chilling.

Many middle-class families had closed their homes and left to stay with relatives in the country after the failure of the talks in Geneva between Tariq Aziz, the foreign minister, and James Baker, the American secretary of state. Others held out, fiddling for good news between the BBC, Voice of America and the pan-Arab station, Monte Carlo.

They had heard the ominous tone in Saddam’s speech on Friday to an Islamic conference in Baghdad. They had heard Joe Wilson, the American chargé d’affaires, dramatically announce as he left on Saturday: ‘This is the last flight out.’ They knew most western diplomats had left with him.

But even illiterate taxi drivers held an irrational faith that Javier Perez de Cuellar, the United Nations secretary-general, might be able to avert war when he arrived to see Saddam at the weekend. ‘Maybe Saddam will leave Kuwait,’ the taxi driver said as he drove me to Perez de Cuellar’s news conference at the airport. When the secretary-general said ‘only God knows’ if there would be a war, it was the last straw. Iraqis knew Saddam was ready to take on the world.

Everybody was jumpy. We lost our way leaving the airport and when we drove up to a checkpoint to ask a soldier for directions, there was an audible click as he flipped the safety catch off his AK-47 and walked up to the car with the barrel pointed through the window.

There were many poignant moments in those days overshadowed by the deadline. The most striking thing perhaps, to somebody who had been visiting Iraq on and off since the crisis began, was the sudden openness of the usually careful and closed Iraqis.

This is a society that usually keeps its head down and offers no political opinions. Most dissidents are dead or in exile. The tiny middle class would, in general, be glad to see Saddam’s regime fall; but the merchants did well out of the war against Iran and reached an accommodation with those in power. The urban poor, who have enjoyed cheap, and even free, housing and subsidised food under Saddam, are compliant to his will. The long war against Iran united society and now I found that his stand against the world was filling many Iraqis with pride as well as fear.

After seeing Hussein in the souk hours before the deadline expired, I went into the Al-wiyah club with Falah, an Iraqi businessman. It is a former British club now frequented by Iraq’s elite, a place of contrasts. A huge Saddam portrait greets arrivals in the club car park, but members still leave their own private bottles of whisky behind the bar, their names printed on them, in the old British club tradition. We were the only customers, but there was still food, some salads and chicken.

Falah spoke over dinner about statistics, trying to put on a brave face that Iraq would somehow continue. He had been helping as a consultant to the government in what he called ‘food security’ since the crisis began. He had managed to cut sugar consumption by 60% by closing down ice-cream and confectionery shops; Iraq was now making its own liquid sugar from dates. Farmers had had to kill most of Iraq’s chickens because of the shortage of grain, but cows had been switched to grass and still gave milk. Wheat was a problem; Iraq produced 4 million tons annually and consumed 6.5 million but increased subsidies for farmers would make up much of the shortage. Meanwhile, rationing filled the gap: his office had made charts of human consumption, added 20% and produced rationing amounts and distributed coupons.

Such statistics are usually impossible to come by; but I had barely the energy to commit them to memory (you don’t take notes in public in Iraq). Falah relaxed, dropped his beloved subject and lapsed into tales of his childhood.

The club was significant to him and to the current situation. He had come here first as a young and proud university student, the first Arab of his generation to visit it, brought by a British professor as a reward for being number one in his class. ‘You realise for us this is much more than a war between Iraq and America. For us, even for the Arabs who are not with Saddam, it is a struggle for our dignity. The West has humiliated us and we see Saddam as a leader who has finally stood up to the West and said we want our dignity.’

On the way home, I went by the French embassy where André Jenier, the last western diplomat in Baghdad, was preparing to leave in proper French style. He had laid out the embassy’s last French cheeses, pâtés and salamis and served champagne until midnight, when he and his few remaining staff clambered into their cars and drove through the night to the Jordanian border.

At the Hotel Palestine, previously the Meridian but now rundown and shabby after a change from French to Iraqi ownership at the start of the economic embargo five months ago, I stopped at a ‘challenge the deadline’ celebration, an Iraqi version of an end-of-the-world party.

Kadum Al-Sahir, a popular singer, was on the floor amid a group of men who danced and waved Iraqi flags. But most of the rest of the hall was filled with sombre beer drinkers, sitting at their tables without much enthusiasm. Most were government recruits; the only guests who seemed to have paid the 20 dinar ($35) entry price were 10 Palestinians who had come in a delegation from Jordan to show solidarity with Iraq. A wedding party had been recruited to build up the numbers.

I went to bed in my room at the Rashid hotel and waited for the worst.

The Americans had announced that the deadline would fall at midnight New York time, 8am local time next day, Wednesday the 16th. When I woke, a heavy fog had settled across the flat city. For a moment, looking out of the hotel window, unable to see anything but white mist obscuring the skyline, I thought perhaps the attack had come and I had slept through it.

Downstairs, among the government ‘minders’ who watched the comings and goings of the few of the 40 or so journalists left at the Rashid hotel, there was premature euphoria. ‘You see, I told you there would not be war,’ said Karim, one of the men from the information ministry.

Baghdad thought otherwise. Driving around town, I saw only a few knots of men in quiet discussions. Rashid Street, the main thoroughfare, lined with colonnaded mock-Ottoman buildings from the 1930s, was usually packed with cars. Instead, it was a wide deserted avenue at 9am.

Windows were taped over against bombs for the first time. The Mandarin restaurant on Karada Street, once Baghdad’s busiest fast-food joint but closed for months because of a ban on serving meals, had its wide windows taped in large Xs. At the Shorjah souk, Baghdad’s most popular market because of its cheap clothing, household items and canned goods, only four of the 200 stores had opened. One man, hanging up flannel robes from the ceiling of his shop, said: ‘We will open for an hour. If it stays like this, we will close.’ Schools had opened, but with few teachers and fewer students they quickly closed for the day.

There was no sign of backing off by Saddam. The headline of the government newspaper, Al-Jumhuriya, said: ‘We shall never compromise on Iraqi and Arab rights.’ Midday television news showed perhaps the unluckiest people in the world that day: 177 former prisoners of war descending from an Iraqi Airways flight to Baghdad after years of captivity in Iran.

Sources were fast disappearing. I telephoned the foreign ministry to try to see Nizar Hamdoun, the under-secretary. But the ministry’s number had changed and its officials had moved to a new location. The last time I had seen Hamdoun, he was sitting in his office, morosely watching CNN television. ‘I feel like I’m watching a bad fiction movie,’ he had said.

During his tenure as Iraqi ambassador to Washington, Hamdoun had been the architect of the Iraqi–American rapprochement of the 1980s. He still felt Iraq could be America’s best ally in the Middle East. It was the only local power able to enforce stability in the region under Bush’s new world order; it had oil America needed; it was a potentially wealthy market; and it would guarantee American interests. But by 16 January 1991, policy was long out of the hands of thoughtful diplomats such as Hamdoun.

At the ministry of information that evening, the receptionist at the office of Naji Hadithi, the director-general, was watching cartoons. Inside, Hadithi and I watched a film showing Saddam visiting troops in Kuwait. The president looked confident as he had in every appearance that week, although rather awkward as he sat wrapped in a huge greatcoat with troops who looked terrified by his presence. He asked them oddly personal questions. ‘Have you had your dinner?’ he said to one. A long pause … ‘Is this place warm?’ he said to another.

Hadithi switched to CNN and we watched a demonstration of allied fire control in Dhahran, where Saudi, American and British forces are based. A lieutenant-commander was interviewed, saying his men were prepared. Hadithi commented: ‘The only thing missing from this is reality.’

He meant on the allied side. It was a cherished belief of many Iraqis I spoke to, even those who were desperate to avoid war, that if it came to a battle, Iraqi soldiers, hardened in the war against Iran, would defeat their better armed but inexperienced enemy.

As Wednesday evening drew on, Marlin Fitzwater, Bush’s spokesman, caused the first real worry among the foreign press corps. He said any journalists in Baghdad were in danger and should leave immediately. All American print reporters had left on the 14th, but the American television networks remained. Now they started getting prearranged signals from Pentagon sources that an attack was imminent.

Larry Doyle of CBS received the message: ‘Your family is fine but your children have colds.’ Doyle, a veteran journalist who reported on the Vietnam war, put down the phone and said simply: ‘Shit.’

A delegation of journalists hurried to Hadithi’s office. Some wanted to move out of the Rashid hotel, located in central Baghdad near most of the ministries and the presidential palace, all obvious targets for attack. But Hadithi said: ‘We are still here. Our ministry is a dangerous place and yet we did not evacuate.’

John Simpson of BBC Television said in his understated manner: ‘The Americans have 2,000lb bombs which could make things extremely unpleasant.’

Latis Jassim, the information minister, arrived and reassured us. ‘You are safe. This is a commitment on our part. We are willing and eager to offer you the necessary services so that you can report the facts as you see them. But at no time will communications fail completely.’

It was midnight. We went back to the hotel. The attack could come at any moment. Nobody knew how bad it might be. We waited.

I took a small bag down to the bomb shelter below the hotel, just in case. Already women and children were huddled along the walls wrapped in blankets. Somehow the warning had swept through the hotel.

The lights in the shelter flickered. I had to see what was happening. I turned and started up the steps but was met by a flood of panicked people coming down the stairs, women with crying children, Sudanese waiters still in uniform, an Iranian delegation staying at the hotel.

At entrance-hall level, I could hear booms from outside. Upstairs, from the fifth-floor BBC office, we saw out of the window a spectacular display of tracer fire shooting across the sky. Tracers spewed up as if from a Roman candle. Others shot across the sky as if following an unseen and unheard enemy. White flashes illuminated the tops of buildings on which, during the last five months, we had watched the crews of anti-aircraft guns shelter first from the August sun and lately from January’s rain and cold.

Strange video game noises filled the air. The staccato thud-thud-thud of heavy artillery sounded. Bob Simpson of BBC Radio had a microphone out of the open window and leaned on his elbows on the windowsill as he calmly described the spectacular display. Down the hall, a CBS cameraman knelt on the floor, his camera out of the window, and filmed through a down-tilted eye scope.

Huge yellow flashes appeared on the horizon. Something to the right thudded and the impact threw me back across the room. Smoke rose from the building. There could no longer be any suspicion that it was a false alarm or jittery anti-aircraft gunners. It was 2.35am Iraqi time and Baghdad was under attack.

Doyle, spotting the flashes on the horizon, narrated for those of us less knowledgeable about armaments. ‘Those are the big boys, the cute 2,000lb bombs,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately I’ve been through this before. They are just pounding the hell out of that place.’

The bombing appeared to be about 20 miles off, probably at the Rashid military complex. The attack slackened off, then started again at 3.35am. The city, which had remained lit up, went completely black. The anti-aircraft fire stopped and started again in almost 15-minute intervals, sometimes directed above our hotel, filling the skies but seeming to have little effect.

About 4.25am, hotel security guards came into the room and tried to drag us downstairs to the shelter. They settled for taping over the emergency light that had gone on when the hotel lights failed. From below, during a lull, an earnest ABC reporter yelled up: ‘What are your departure plans?’ Somebody yelled down: ‘Up in the air at the moment.’

I wandered back to my room at 6am as dawn broke and the attack appeared to have stopped. A man I had never seen before was asleep in my bed still wearing large boots. I went down the hall and took a nap on the floor of the BBC office.

Morning came cold and misty again when I woke at 7.30am. After the drama of the night, it was strange to see the city skyline unchanged. Smoke from a fire behind the hotel drifted through the hallways. But little damage was visible from the hotel room. We clustered around to hear Baghdad radio for the first communiqué of the war. ‘This is communiqué number one. The mother of battles has begun. President Bush will regret this attack. Victory is near.’ The voice announced the immediate call-up of reserve soldiers born in 1954, 1955 and 1956. The radio returned to martial music.

My driver had disappeared. He was born in 1955 and had been worrying about the call-up for the last month. ‘War is very bad,’ he had said to me. ‘I fought eight years in the war with Iran. No wife, no children. Now maybe I have to go to Kuwait.’ His fears had been realised.

I grabbed a taxi on the street and drove around the city. The first evidence of attack was at the international post and telecommunications building. It had been hit by at least four missiles that had left gaping holes and dangling wires. Chunks of building and glass littered the streets, but no surrounding buildings suffered damage more than broken windows.

A bit further on, the Ba’ath party headquarters had taken a direct hit in the roof. Again, no surrounding buildings were touched. On Abunawas Street, across the river from the presidential palace, a car tilted crazily into a 30-foot crater already filled with water. But, other than that, there seemed to be almost no damage to civilian targets.

Anti-aircraft guns sounded again at 9am and 10am. Soldiers in uniform lined the roads at bus stations trying to flag down cabs or cars to head south to register with their units. The few families that had left it too late to leave stood, suitcases and children in hand, trying to do the same.

At 10.30am I was standing in front of the ministry of information, now deserted despite the minister’s brave words just hours earlier, as a thud sounded and a mushroom of smoke went up from the defence ministry about half a mile away. Two more thuds shook the building. Neither a plane had been visible nor an engine heard. Anti-aircraft fire went up but it was too late.

Driving by the ministry – an old Ottoman building still marked the Abbassid Palace on tourist maps and so secret that a government official once told me it was a museum – I could see flames in the central section. A wing had been flattened as if by a giant fist.

The reaction from soldiers in the barracks across the street from the defence ministry was as surprising as the suddenness of the attack. They stood standing and watching the fire as if it was a show unconnected to them. Nobody seemed to be in much of a hurry to put it out. Like the foreign ministry, the defence department must have transferred its operations elsewhere in the days before the deadline.

As I drove around town, the calm and lack of panic were impressive. Orderly lines formed for bread and cars queued for petrol. It was a far cry from the day after the bombing of the Libyan city of Tripoli, when Libyans crashed their cars into each other trying to flee, the government disappeared and rumours that Colonel Gadaffi had been overthrown filled the capital.

Baghdad’s militiamen had appeared overnight to keep order. In the Amriyah area, a civilian neighbourhood, six teenagers dressed in jeans and jackets walked along the streets with Kalashnikov assault rifles casually slung over their shoulders. A man in a cheap suit and a keffiyeh Arab headdress manned an anti-aircraft gun placed in the bed of a Nissan pick-up truck at a crossroads. But there were no new checkpoints, nor was there hostility towards foreigners.

Saddam came on Baghdad radio at 12.40 in the afternoon, speaking in calm and confident tone: ‘At 2.30am the great duel started. The valiant sons of Iraq, your brothers, sons and fathers, confronted the invaders. Damn King Fahd, the traitor of Mecca, damn the invaders, damn these criminals. We shall win. The dawn will break and they will be damned.’

My taxi driver, taking me back to the hotel, said he was not at the front because he had a piece of shrapnel still in his head from the Iran war. It hurt when the weather got cold. Like most Iraqis that day, he appeared worried but unfazed. ‘I did not think we should have taken Kuwait,’ he said. ‘I don’t agree with this. But the Americans should not come to Iraq. Iraqi soldiers will fight for Iraq and for Saddam. We have fought for eight years against Iran and they cannot frighten us.’

This was the mood of Baghdad under fire. An Iraqi businessman explained to me why people were so calm. Listening for weeks to the propaganda from Washington, they had expected Armageddon. Now that the bombing had come at last and they had survived, he said, their attitude was: ‘Well, if that’s it, we can take it.’

People had even begun to listen for the first time to Iraqi radio, and to believe its propaganda, because they felt that the BBC and Voice of America had lied about allied successes against the air force and missile sites in the first attack.

In addition, the government maintained at least a semblance of control. The city was without water or electricity, and the streets began to smell of sewage and cordite. But soldiers directed traffic in place of traffic lights, papers continued to publish daily, and the television news appeared every night at the same time, with its usual announcer, and on the same television studio set.

Only a few shops opened; and prices were astonishing: I saw a bottle of whisky, a packet of cigarettes and three Mars bars bought for 147 dinars, the equivalent of $441 at the official rate and equal to three-quarters of the monthly salary of a middle-ranking government official.

But in the poor neighbourhoods such as Saddam City, where more people had remained because they had no way of escape, and which the regime regards as its centres of support, government lorries distributed bread under normal ration regulations.

Anti-aircraft fire erupted sporadically during the day. Tracer fire, the thud of guns and falling bombs filled the night, but there were few civilian casualties.

There were makeshift shelters to be found almost anywhere in the city. Driving back to the hotel, I ducked into Baghdad Hotel when anti-aircraft guns went off at the nearby presidential palace. The discotheque had been turned into a bomb shelter and guests were handed candles at the door. People were worried but there was still an air of unreality. ‘Palestine seems closer than it has for 40 years,’ said a Palestinian businessman also sheltering inside.

Baghdad’s survival and the news that Saddam had launched Scud rockets at Israel had many Palestinians and their Iraqi supporters still believing that he would achieve his goal of somehow freeing Palestinian land from Israel.

As the sun set on Friday, I watched two orbs of light streak low across the city skyline, just missing the rooftops, and smash into the Dora oil refinery. A huge ball of fire erupted and smoke drifted back over Baghdad.

Bombing continued sporadically that night and at dawn the refinery had only three instead of four chimneys. The 20-storey communications tower which had lost its top three storeys to an unseen missile on Friday, as if to an invisible hand, had completely disappeared from the skyline by Saturday morning.

On Saturday afternoon, I was gazing idly from a fifth-floor window across the Zawra zoo park opposite the hotel when I suddenly realised that a cruise missile was heading above the trees straight for us. It seemed to be white. I could see its little fins. There was no smoke trail coming from it.

I thought it was going to hit the hotel, and I yelled out. But it turned right and skirted the building, as if following a street map, and hit the old parliament building about half a mile away, sending up a white pall of smoke.

Another cruise landed even closer, disappearing with a deafening crash into breeze-block staff quarters next to the hotel. The huts burst into flames and shrapnel showered the lawn and swimming pool. Glass from broken windows littered the hotel lobby as hotel workers dragged an electronic circuit board into the air-raid shelter, dancing around it, ululating and shouting that they had downed an American plane.

It was a relentless afternoon attack. At least two more missiles hit the Dora refinery again, sparking a fire that lit Baghdad with a beautiful rose glow late into the night.

Conditions at the Rashid hotel were becoming primitive. Electricity remained off and journalists worked at night by candlelight. Sanitation had broken down, toilets could not flush, and we had been washing in the swimming pool.

The officials minding us had had enough. They had stayed in the shelter for days and had not seen their families nor been able to contact them by telephone. They were worried about our safety and about the detail of what we were reporting. We were ordered to leave.

On Saturday night, as I packed and sat up late with other journalists discussing our departure, a Palestinian friend stopped by to say farewell. An articulate, educated man, he was trying to explain why so much of the Arab world had come out in support of Saddam despite his invasion of Kuwait and oppressive policies at home.

‘You must understand that if Saddam goes, no Westerner will be safe walking down an Arab street. I will pick up a machinegun and fight the Americans. A year ago I would have told you I hated Saddam and his regime. But he has become a symbol for us. Saddam is the result of the humiliation of the war of 1967 and of all the humiliations we have suffered from the West. If we let you destroy Saddam now, you will destroy all of us Arabs again.’ He added: ‘It is a question of dignity. Saddam came along with his rockets and stood up to you and we said, “Why not?”’

I rose at 5am to the incongruous sounds of a cock crowing and another barrage of anti-aircraft fire, this time a light and sparkling scattering of shots of tracer into the air. The government newspaper headline read: ‘Hussein rockets answer the call of Palestine. The road to Jerusalem is open.’ Uniting under attack behind Saddam, people might even believe this hyperbole.

Downstairs the taxi drivers demanded the exorbitant sum of $3,000 a car to the Jordanian border, because a convoy of cars that had left on Saturday had been bombed near the town of Rutba in the western desert.

We drove out of Baghdad on the deserted highway, past military camps on the city’s perimeter that appeared surprisingly intact, with anti-aircraft guns still manned on mounds along their boundaries. Government army lorries trundled south towing anti-aircraft guns, but there was little other traffic. The journey through flat, unbroken rocky desert was uneventful. Iraqi guards stamped exit visas into our passports at the desolate border station of Trebeil. Among the shabby breeze-block buildings we left behind the stacks of abandoned cheap luggage from earlier refugees and drove across the no man’s land into Jordan.

Ghosts of war stalk Basra’s empty streets

SOUTHERN IRAQ

23 August 1992

The fat singer in the smoky gloom of the Eastern Nights Club in Basra was just getting into her stride when the lights went up. The laughter at a table of rich merchants died instantly.

An unsmiling officer in khaki swept through the beads hanging across the door followed by eight soldiers, who fanned out between tables draped in red velvet and dotted with bottles of Scotch. The customers froze. They knew that last month Saddam Hussein executed 42 merchants for profiteering.

The officer scanned the room, but he had no interest in the traders or the soldier sitting with a buxom prostitute. His eyes fell on a table of eight young men.

Two soldiers moved forward, ordering the men to their feet with the flick of a Kalashnikov. The officer pulled out battered papers. The first passed and was motioned to sit; the second was led away.

‘Oh, he didn’t even have time to change his clothes,’ lamented Ishar, a young prostitute. A second glance told the story: the arrested man still wore his olive army trousers under a white shirt and maroon jacket. He was a deserter. Four more of his companions were led away.

As the soldiers left, there was a moment of silence. Then the manager strode to the dance floor and, with a grandiose flourish, restarted the band and the singer. The lights dimmed and laughter flooded the room again – the forced laughter of relief.

Basra, capital of the south and home to Iraq’s Shi’ite majority, is a city under siege. Whereas Baghdad has been largely rebuilt since the Gulf War, Basra still bears the scars of allied bombing and the rebellion that saw officials of the ruling Ba’ath party slaughtered in the streets and government buildings and hospitals looted and torched.

Today, fear of Iranian infiltrators, army deserters and fugitive rebels empties the city’s streets after 9pm. Food is scarce and expensive. The factories, port and oil plants are closed; its hospitals desperately short of medicine and filled with malnourished babies.

Fifty life-sized statues of dead heroes of the Iran–Iraq war line the corniche on the Shatt al-Arab, their arms pointing across the water towards the old Iranian foe. Locals, fearful of the enemy within, joke that they should point in every direction.

The man charged with keeping order in Basra is Brigadier General Latif Omoud, a governor who sits behind a desk with 10 telephones. It is impressive, but unconvincing.

The city’s telecommunications have not been restored since the end of the Gulf War 18 months ago, and a line has to be installed to each number he wants to call. ‘The pink telephone is for my girlfriend,’ he joked.

Dressed in a neatly pressed uniform and with his hands manicured, Omoud appears unbowed by the calamitous state of the city he took over after Iraqi forces crushed the Shi’ite rebellion in March last year.

He has not been amused, however, by the news that Britain, France and the United States were preparing to enforce an air exclusion zone south of the 32nd parallel to protect the Shi’ites in the southern marshlands from destruction by Saddam.

Any Iraqi plane or helicopter that flies will risk being shot down. Since Basra is 100 miles south of the 32nd parallel, Omoud was angry and perplexed. The general, who sees himself on the front line with Iran, claims to have quelled the ‘security problem’ in Basra.

But the road south from al-Amarah to Basra remains a no-go zone at night; checkpoints are attacked, soldiers killed and civilians robbed. It will get much worse, said Omoud, if the allied plan is enforced.

‘We have arrested many infiltrators in Basra,’ he said. ‘They come from Iran to commit acts of sabotage. We should be allowed to fly our planes and helicopters to counter the Iranian menace.’

He made no apology for the attacks on the marshes, insisting they were a haven for rebels and Iranian agents. The West, Omoud said, was short-sighted: ‘The Iranians are still interested in exporting their revolution.’

Then the governor was off, speeding away in his armoured white Mercedes followed by a jeep with a mounted machinegun and two cars full of soldiers. Behind him, sweltering in the 53°C heat, bricklayers continued rebuilding his governor’s garrison, which had been gutted during the rebellion.

The real picture in the south is difficult to piece together in a tightly controlled nation of nervous people. But it is clear that the government has won the upper hand in the war with the 30,000 rebels in the Hawaiza marshes, a 6,000-square-mile swampland of waterways and reed banks.

The attacks against insurgents in the marshes, according to diplomats in Baghdad and interviews in Basra and al-Amarah, began around 21 July. There is little doubt they were brutal. Diplomats believe that Iraq used helicopter gunships and artillery against the marsh Arabs but has not sent in ground troops because of the treacherous terrain.

The rebels had little chance. Besieged, they were killed or forced to flee or surrender. Many civilian marsh dwellers also died. The season favoured the army; in July and August the marshes dry up, making operations easier. One source said 9,000 rebels had surrendered or been captured.

The few townspeople in al-Amarah willing to talk say the roads are too dangerous to travel at night. At the Saddam Hussein general hospital, Dr Ayad Abdul Aziz said there had been constant attacks on civilians and soldiers in the area near the marshes.

But operations by the Iraqi army seem to have ended. The military appears to be in defensive positions. Nightly on Iraqi national television, captured rebels make their confessions.

One Iraqi, a PoW from the Iraq–Iran war, claimed he had been forced to fight for Iran: ‘It was decided to start a sabotage campaign. I received verbal instructions to go on a fact-finding mission in Iraq. We needed information on the security status. I carried false identification, money and a pistol.’

He said he met rebels who had plentiful supplies of explosives and weapons, and sent back information to Iran. The interviewees show extraordinary calm while making their confessions; it is widely assumed they are executed afterwards.

‘Of course they are calm,’ said one Iraqi viewer last week. ‘They know it is the end of their lives.’

Critics are silenced as Saddam rebuilds Iraq

BAGHDAD

4 October 1992

Arc lights on the roof of the National Conference Palace shone through the night and into the pink dawn last week as construction workers hammered and welded round the clock to repair the bombed building. It might have been an unremarkable scene in a city recovering from 43 consecutive days of air attack, except for one thing: it was the last important building to be restored.

Little more than 18 months after the Gulf War ceasefire, you have to scour the back streets of Baghdad for any sign of the heavy bombing it underwent. Iraqi engineers have repaired all but one of the bridges destroyed during the hostilities and rebuilt the 14-storey central telephone exchange on the bank of the Tigris, bombed so often that by the end of the conflict it was just a concrete shell with steel and wires curling from the windows. Gutted ministries have been reconstructed, rubble removed.

The main power plant, which was lit almost nightly by flashes from explosions, is working at 90% of its pre-war capacity. Soon after the bombing ended, an engineer at the plant said it would take at least two years to get it working again; but there was not one blackout during the blazing hot summer, when Baghdadis ran their air-conditioning at full blast.

The list of achievements goes on. Oil production is back to about 800,000 barrels a day, although United Nations sanctions prohibit Iraq from selling its petroleum abroad. Restored refineries supply more than enough petrol and heating oil for Iraq’s domestic needs and exports to Jordan. Iraqi experts say they could now pump 2 million barrels a day.

The six-lane highway from Baghdad to the Jordanian border, littered with craters from nightly raids, is now a smoothly surfaced superhighway. Three weeks ago the evening news showed Saddam Hussein congratulating workers for finishing repairs on the presidential palace.

In fact, much of the current construction in Baghdad is of new buildings. Enormous villas are sprouting in the wealthy Mansour district, financed by war profits. Newspapers report the progress of the Third River project, the construction of a 350-mile canal that will drain the rising water in the Tigris-Euphrates basin to reclaim land.

Yesterday, Saddam announced that construction would resume, using Iraqi designs and expertise, of an enormous petrochemical complex which the war forced foreign companies to abandon. When finished, it will be the largest in the Middle East.

What happened? Just 18 months ago, Saddam sat in a windowless bunker, wrapped in a heavy woollen greatcoat because there was no heat and in dim light because even the president had to rely on a diesel-fuelled generator for electricity. Outside, his country lay in ruins. The electricity grid was destroyed. Sewerage and water systems, telephones, even traffic lights did not work. His oil refineries were reduced to tangled machinery and holed tanks. He had just been kicked out of Kuwait, his army was in disarray, a rebellion raged in 14 of his 18 provinces, and much of his air force was parked on the territory of his enemy, Iran.

Since then, Iraq has been rebuilt without money from oil exports, without the teams of foreign experts that once staffed the military and civilian industries, without the $4 billion of assets frozen in overseas banks, and under strict sanctions that ban the import of spare parts or construction materials.

The key to the revival is Saddam. According to those around him, he did not even falter in the face of devastation so massive that allied leaders believed his downfall to be inevitable. Saddam never, ever, gives up, they say. This mentality was a liability during the Gulf crisis, when he refused to leave Kuwait, but it was crucial to the rebuilding of Iraq. He went from the Mother of all Battles to the Mother of all Reconstructions without missing a beat.

Saddam emerged unrepentant from his bunker and ready to rebuild. The 53-year-old president knows his people well. He needed to remove the daily reminders of the war, and his responsibility for it. ‘I don’t want to see any war damage in the capital,’ an Iraqi official quoted him as saying. In a dictatorship as absolute as Iraq, such an order concentrates the mind. Construction crews began working 24 hours a day, even on Saturday, the Muslim Sabbath.

Saddam was fortunate in the resources he commanded. When UN sanctions were imposed in August 1990, Iraq had two years’ supply of spare parts in storage. There were millions of dollars in overseas slush funds, which his brother, Barzan al-Tikriti, Iraqi representative to the UN in Geneva, used to buy spare parts that were smuggled in through Jordan. Perhaps most important, Iraq is home to the best educated and disciplined people in the Arab world. He had no need for foreign technical expertise.

Saddam identified himself with the reconstruction effort. News programmes regularly broadcast East-European-style footage of him inspecting repaired factories.

A special Order of the President was created to reward those who excelled in the rebuilding effort, and the annual conference of the ruling Ba’ath party was named the Jihad (Holy War) of Reconstruction Congress.

Nothing proved too insignificant for Saddam’s attention. During a nationally televised meeting, he advised education officials to ‘give special attention to sanitary facilities for students. The student who cannot go to the bathroom all day because it is dirty cannot concentrate.’

There has been no let-up in the momentum. Saddam warned his ministers last month: ‘From now on, those government officials who fail in their responsibilities will be considered as being involved in economic sabotage. Stringent measures will be taken against them, similar to the strict measures taken against the traitors who were involved in profiteering and monopoly.’ It was an undisguised reference to the 42 merchants executed in July for profiteering.

The success of the reconstruction has won Saddam the admiration of his greatest critics. Ordinary Iraqis, who love their bridges and modern buildings the way Europeans love their nation’s art treasures or scenic vistas, are proud that Iraq has rebuilt its infrastructure quickly, and without outside help.

The country still has serious problems, though. Inflation has wrecked the economy, with prices spiralling higher almost daily – last week rice sold for 8½ dinars ($25) a kilo, a spare tyre for 2,000 dinars. The country’s future wealth is mortgaged to old debts and war reparation. On Friday, the UN security council voted to seize $1 billion of Iraq’s frozen assets to pay for UN operations.

But the dissatisfaction of Iraqis with their financial lot is irrelevant. Along with his bridges, Saddam has reconstructed his formidable security apparatus. The army has been restored to 40% of its pre-war capacity, with about 400,000 troops under arms; the ubiquitous Mukhabarat security men are back on the streets. The south is under undeclared martial law; generals have replaced civilians as governors in every southern province.

Saddam’s success has also undermined Washington’s attempts to persuade Iraqis to oppose the regime. I heard again and again in Baghdad, albeit in hushed tones, that Saddam and Bush had a secret deal: why else would the allied forces have stood by as the Republican Guard crushed the rebels?

In case anyone in Baghdad needed a reminder that Saddam’s rule has been restored as surely as his capital, they need only look to the shore of the Tigris in the exclusive Adamiya district of Baghdad. An enormous building, designed on the lines of a Sumerian palace, has begun to emerge from its scaffolding. It is a new presidential palace.

Shadow of evil

IRAQ

22 January 1995

Latif Yahia spat in the mirror when he saw himself for the first time after being forced to undergo plastic surgery. But it was too late. He now looked exactly like Uday Hussein, the eldest son of the Iraqi president.

He spent the next four years as Uday’s double, a time he now refers to as ‘years of blood’. He was trapped at the heart of one of the most secretive, paranoid and brutal regimes on earth, learning its secrets while treading a tightrope between the pampered privileges of the inner circle and the terror of knowing that he could be shot at any moment.

Yahia has now spoken for the first time about how he was tortured into taking on the role, how he was turned physically and mentally into a terrible imitation of Saddam’s murderous and licentious son, how he eventually escaped, and how he is now trying to exorcise the evil persona that entered him.

He has also revealed that Saddam, like Stalin and Churchill, has his own series of doubles, who are forced to undertake potentially dangerous public appearances. The present ‘Saddam’ replaced one who was assassinated in an attempt on the dictator’s life.

Yahia attended public parties and football matches in his assumed role and posed with soldiers at the Kuwaiti front so that Uday would face no danger but the Iraqi people would believe Saddam had sent his son to serve in the Mother of all Battles. Yahia survived nine assassination attempts.

Only once did he give thanks for his hated new identity. When Yahia finally fled Iraq, soldiers manning checkpoints leaped out of the way and saluted as he sped north in his Oldsmobile, also a double for one of Uday’s cars.

He came to think of himself as a monster. The man he had to impersonate is feared as much as his father in Iraq. He is a spoilt, brutal playboy who flies into uncontrollable rages when crossed and whose violent excesses are covered up by the security forces.

Uday even fell out with his father when he beat to death Saddam’s favourite retainer in a drunken rage in 1988 and was briefly exiled to Geneva. Father and son now appear to be reconciled; last year, Iraqi exiles reported that Saddam had executed three senior military officers after they suggested Uday was not up to the job of defence minister that his father wanted to give him.

Since the Gulf War, Uday has tried to make his image more serious by founding Babil newspaper and a radio and television station that broadcasts popular western entertainment. But Yahia witnessed the sinister private activities of Saddam’s son, which he said included earning millions of pounds from black-market deals in whisky, cigarettes and food while normal Iraqis suffered under international sanctions, and entertaining friends with torture videos shot in his father’s prisons.

Yahia’s story is fascinating, not just as the tale of a man pushed to unbelievable psychological limits, but also because it gives a remarkable insight into the most secretive of worlds, the life of Saddam Hussein and his family.

Now in Vienna as a political exile, the 30-year-old refugee is trying to recover his lost identity. It is disconcerting to meet him. He still looks exactly like Uday, still dresses in the same sharp European suits the dictator’s son favours, sports the same heavy gold jewellery and black Ray-Ban sunglasses. He smokes a Cuban cigar with the same motions and has the same beard that distinguishes Uday from other Iraqis, who have only moustaches.

He is soft-spoken and polite, but old habits die hard. Taking out a cigar, he holds it until somebody lights it, even though the retainers that swarmed around him in his old role as Uday are long gone. He has, however, stopped beating his wife: the violent streak he picked up from his double now sickens him.

Yahia wants to destroy Uday, but he has not changed his appearance because he has no other identity, a dilemma that would have fascinated Sigmund Freud, who lived in the same Vienna street where Yahia’s hideout is.

Yahia’s case is like none Freud ever came across. He grew up in Baghdad, the son of a wealthy Kurdish merchant, and attended the exclusive Baghdad High School for Boys. Uday was in the same class and the two boys resembled each other. ‘But I did not welcome looking similar,’ he said. ‘Uday had very bad manners with people even then.’

After graduating from Baghdad University in 1986 with a law degree, he went off to fight in the Iran–Iraq war, like most young Iraqi males. He was a first lieutenant serving in a forward reconnaissance unit in September 1987 when he received a presidential order to report to Baghdad.

Uday welcomed him in an ornate salon in the presidential palace. There was chit-chat about their schooldays and polite questions about his family before Uday came to the point. ‘Do you want to be a son of Saddam?’ he asked. Wary, Yahia answered: ‘We are all sons of Saddam.’

‘Well, I would like you to be a real son of Saddam, working with me. I don’t want you as protection but as my double.’

Yahia recalled: ‘I was afraid. I knew this was a government of criminals. So I asked him what would happen if I agreed, and what would happen if I refused. Uday told me that if I agreed, “all that you dream will happen”. He said I would have money, servants, houses, women. If I refused, he said, “We will remain friends”.’

Uday left him alone, desperately trying to think up an excuse. When he returned, Yahia had formulated what he thought was a diplomatic way out. ‘All Iraqis want to serve the president,’ he said. ‘I am serving my president as a soldier and I would not like to be more than that.’

Uday’s eyes reddened in rage; he tore the military epaulettes from Yahia’s shoulders and called in security officers. Yahia was blindfolded, driven for an hour in a car (later he would realise he had only been driven around the presidential grounds), and imprisoned in a tiny cell that was painted entirely blood-red.

‘I suffered every kind of torture,’ Yahia recalled. He said he was beaten with a cable, hanged from the ceiling by his hands, fed only bread or rice and water at different times of day so that he would become disorientated. He was told that if he continued to refuse, he would spend the rest of his life in the cell. After a week, he cracked.

Four days later he signed papers promising he would act as Uday’s double and reveal nothing about his activities. The contract ended with a warning: any violation and the penalty was death by hanging. Two weeks later, surgery began at the Ibn Sina hospital in the palace complex. Dentists removed his front teeth and replaced them with teeth like Uday’s; doctors cut a cleft into his chin.

‘I hated myself,’ he said. ‘All my family and friends hated Saddam; so looking like his son, I was disgusted with myself.’

He began his ‘special education’: 16 hours a day watching videos of Uday walk, dance, drive, talk, get in and out of cars, light cigars, drink Scotch. A trainer would then take him through each movement over and over 20, 30, 40 times, day after day until he got it right.

‘I never drank before, or smoked, or danced. I was very correct with people,’ Yahia said. ‘I had to learn to drink Dimple (Uday’s brand of whisky), smoke cigars and talk differently. And I had to learn to be rude with people, like him.’ He also learned intelligence and sabotage techniques, and was taught to check under cars before getting into them.

After six months of intensive training, Yahia made his first public appearance as his double at a football match at the People’s Stadium, where he was surrounded by people who knew the president’s son. With a trainer by his elbow every moment, even driving the black Mercedes 500SL that was Uday’s favourite car, Yahia passed muster. He remembers thinking when he arrived back at the sumptuous villa Uday had given him: ‘Latif Yahia doesn’t exist any more.’

Four lost years followed. Yahia appeared as Uday and travelled with him to London, Geneva and Paris. Whenever Uday wanted a suit – he preferred Christian Dior and Yves St Laurent – he bought two: one for himself, one for Yahia. Uday owned more than 100 luxury cars, and selected them daily to match the colour of his suit.

Outside Baghdad, Yahia would travel in a security convoy as Uday, sometimes with as many as 72 bodyguards. By the time of the Gulf War, Saddam had so much confidence in Yahia that he used him in a cruel confidence trick against his own people. Every Iraqi remembers the visit by Uday to troops on the Kuwaiti front; in fact it was Yahia, sent there with a television crew to counteract truthful reports that Saddam’s family had fled to safety outside Iraq.

During the years of their ‘partnership’, Uday gave him only one rule: ‘Don’t touch my girls.’ At one point, Uday sent him to prison for 21 days because a girlfriend of Uday’s became angry with Yahia, and told the president’s son that he had tried to seduce her. When he was released, his double gave him a Mercedes by way of apology.

Uday often beat his guards, so in public Yahia would have to do the same. He had to learn to curse people; now, in an embarrassed voice, he repeats Uday’s favourites. ‘I would have to say “Your mother is a whore” and things like that,’ Yahia said.

Gradually his public life merged with his private; he is ashamed to admit that he began to beat his wife, Bushra. ‘I would kill Uday if I saw him again,’ Yahia said. ‘I would cut his body into small pieces and feed it to dogs. He made out of me a criminal like himself.’

Yahia was at a party on the river Tigris given for Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of the Egyptian president, when Uday committed one of his worst outrages. Uday hated Kamel Hanna, his father’s favourite retainer, for serving as the go-between for Saddam’s mistress, Samira Shahbandar, wife of the president of Iraq Airways. When Hanna failed to invite Uday to the Mubarak reception, he threw a party nearby out of spite; hearing shots at midnight, he crashed drunkenly into Hanna’s celebration.

Uday saw Hanna firing into the air, Yahia recalled, and ordered him to stop shooting. ‘I only take orders from the president,’ Hanna replied. The night degenerated into violent chaos. Uday cut Hanna’s neck and beat him, then downed pills at the thought of his father’s anger. Both were taken to hospital, where Uday met Saddam waiting for word of his aide.

‘Saddam grabbed Uday by the shirt and said: “If Kamel dies, you die”,’ Yahia said. Hanna died that night, but Uday’s mother intervened to save her son. Yahia worried that he would be executed instead of Uday, but there had been too many witnesses.

Life was not all misery. Yahia had three villas, six luxury cars, all the money he wanted, beautiful women in droves. ‘But I was always afraid,’ he said. ‘I was afraid Uday would kill me. I was afraid of being killed instead of Uday. Nine times I suffered assassination attempts.’

The attempts to kill him were sometimes by family members outraged that Uday had dishonoured their women, sometimes by political opponents. Once, he recalled, an outraged man burst into Uday’s office at the Special Olympic Committee, which he headed, claiming he had raped his young daughter. The father said he had killed his daughter because of the dishonour and wanted satisfaction from Uday.

‘Uday pulled out his pistol and shot him on the spot,’ Yahia recalled. ‘I sat in his office, six metres away. I was not shocked. I had seen it before. I knew I could do nothing.’

Yahia described a permanent atmosphere of fear in the presidential palace. Even those closest to Saddam refrained from speaking openly; everyone was afraid that they would be reported as disloyal, and the penalty was death.

He said Qusay, Saddam’s younger son, who now heads the presidential intelligence agency, was the Iraqi president’s favourite and heir apparent. ‘Uday never called his father “dad”,’ Yahia said. ‘Even in private he addressed him as “your excellency”.’

One of the few people with whom Yahia could relax was Saddam’s double, Fawaz al-Emari. He was the second man trained to impersonate the Iraqi president; his predecessor was killed posing as Saddam in 1984.

Emari had undergone far more extensive surgery than Yahia. His face had been entirely remodelled in Yugoslavia, and Russian doctors in Baghdad had operated on his vocal cords so he would speak exactly like Saddam. ‘Sometimes when I met him, for a moment I would be afraid, thinking he was Saddam. And we were good friends,’ said Yahia.

He and Emari would practise target-shooting together in the palace grounds, which included a swimming pool, cinema, theatre, hospital and sports centre. ‘We spoke about general matters, but never about what we really felt or our activities. We were both too afraid one would betray the other,’ he said.

Both doubles had to undergo weekly medical examinations. Doctors at the presidential palace would check that they were still the same weight as their masters, that their health was good, and that their surgery work remained sufficient for impersonation.

Saddam’s double remains in the palace to this day, a virtual prisoner of his identity. ‘Fawaz had a much more difficult life than me,’ Yahia said. ‘At least Uday went out all the time to restaurants, parties and discos, so I could. Saddam never did these things so Fawaz never could. He could not even go outside and walk on a street looking like Saddam; he would have been killed. He was banned from ever leaving the palace except when he was working.’

Work meant big formal occasions, including a hugely publicised swim by ‘Saddam’ in the Tigris on 26 July 1992. The swim was staged to prove that the president was alive and in good spirits despite the devastation of the Gulf War. In fact, he was afraid to appear in public and exposed his double to danger instead.

Yahia made the decision to flee almost a year after the allies liberated Kuwait in February 1991. His relationship with Uday had become increasingly tense.

‘We were at a party at the Rasheed hotel,’ Yahia recalled. ‘Uday was invited by the president to receive four medals for his role in the Mother of all Battles. I joked, “You are not worth receiving these: I was in Kuwait instead of you.” Uday said there was no difference, but he was not happy with me.’

The danger sign came the next night at another party, when Uday’s ‘love-broker’, who procured girls for the president’s son, upbraided Yahia for refusing to sell him a car. Then Uday also turned on Yahia.

The master apparently sensed that his double was going to make a break for freedom and decided to stop him. As Yahia stepped from a lift into the lobby of the Babylon hotel in Baghdad the next morning, Uday suddenly appeared and shot him. The bullet hit him high in the chest, missing vital organs.

Bleeding heavily, he says, he managed to get to his car and drive north towards the UN-protected safe haven in Kurdistan. To his surprise, Iraqi guards had not been alerted. ‘At every checkpoint, nobody stopped me, they just waved me through. I would see them saluting in my (rear-view) mirror.’

Yahia has the scars to support his story: a round wound in the top of his right chest, an exit hole out the back. As he approached Kurdistan, he needed urgent medical treatment and feared the reception he would get from the Kurds. ‘I could not go directly to Kurdistan. If the Kurds saw me, they would think I was Uday and kill me. So I abandoned my car in the woods, and went to a friend’s house. I am from a Kurdish family, so they helped me.’

Through the Kurdish underground, he reached the American operations headquarters in the Kurdish town of Zakho. The Americans, wary at first, flew in four intelligence officers to debrief him. His wife, who had gone into hiding, was helped out by the same Kurdish underground, and their baby daughter was smuggled to Jordan by friends.

With the help of the Americans, he was granted political asylum in Vienna where many Iraqis live. But an import-export company he set up has failed to prosper and, because of Vienna’s close connections with Baghdad, the city has a high number of Iraqi government representatives. Any one of them, he fears, might be a potential assassin.

His anxiety heightened last September when he received a letter from the Iraqi embassy saying he had been granted an amnesty and should return to Baghdad. The message came on his personal fax machine, even though he is living in hiding and gives the number only to close personal friends.

Yahia is afraid to send his daughter, Tamara, now five, to school in case his whereabouts can be traced through her. He keeps his wife, daughter and Omar, their 18-month son, with him even at the office.

Most of all, he finds it difficult to recover any sense of himself. ‘Uday stole my life, my future, my identity,’ he said. His wife agrees. Watching videos of Yahia posing as Uday in Baghdad, she shivered when she saw the man on the screen roughly grab a tissue proffered by an aide.

‘He changed so much in his manners,’ she said. ‘Before, he was a normal person, but after he was tough and violent. He would hit me or kick me, and many times I thought of getting divorced. But I know now he is trying very hard to recover himself.’

Blood feud at the heart of darkness

8 September 1996

Terrible deaths in the family of Saddam Hussein illlustrate the brutality of a tyrant still powerful enough to shake the world. Marie Colvin reports from Oman.

In the glistening marble and gilt palace of Hashemiya, high on a hilltop overlooking the Jordanian capital, Ali Kamel, nine, spent many hours of his exile drawing brightly coloured pictures for his grandfather. Ali never learnt why he was living in this strange place. He was too young to be told his family had fled there in terror of the grandfather he loved: Saddam Hussein.

Hussein Kamel, Ali’s father, had been the Iraqi tyrant’s closest adviser. He had risen from lowly bodyguard to head of military procurement, and had been put in charge of rebuilding his country after the Gulf War. Kamel even married Saddam’s favourite daughter, Ragda. But he fell out with the dictator’s son, Uday, a thug who had repeatedly killed on impulse.

In August last year, Kamel was in such fear of his life that he took Ragda, Ali and his two daughters across the barren Iraqi desert to seek safety in Jordan. Other members of the family accompanied him in a fleet of black Mercedes.

There was a brother, Saddam Kamel, who had been responsible for the dictator’s personal security. His wife Rana, Saddam’s second daughter, came too, clutching their three children. A second brother followed, with a sister, her husband and their five children.

The family’s terrible fate, details of which are disclosed here for the first time, gives a chilling insight into the methods used by Saddam to retain power despite isolation from the world and hatred at home.

The defection of so many family members was a devastating blow to the tyrant. In the days that followed he retaliated: scores of Kamel’s relatives and followers disappeared. For months afterwards Saddam plotted his revenge with the cunning and lethal aggression that was so much in evidence again last week in his latest challenge to the international order.

Kamel’s family settled comfortably at first into the luxury of the palace provided for them by King Hussein of Jordan. Stuffed with Persian carpets and other finery, it provided them with a secure home behind the shelter of tall, white stone walls.

Ali took lessons from a private tutor. Although the boy did not excel in his academic work, it did not take him long to work out that all was not well with his parents. Kamel had expected to be seen by the world as the potential successor to Saddam. But he had too much blood on his own hands. The Americans came only to pump him for information about the Iraqi military establishment. Even the Iraqi opposition shunned him.

Early in February, Ali often saw his father walking in the palace garden despite the cold and rain, speaking on his cellular telephone. Hussein Kamel had become so disillusioned with exile that he had begun discreet negotiations to return to Baghdad.

It was part of Saddam’s game plan that he responded by making strenuous demands. Not only would Kamel be obliged to return millions of dollars he had hidden in a German bank; he would also have to provide a detailed written account of everything he had told his western interrogators, a lengthy process for a man who was barely literate.

His departure was precipitated by the growing impatience of his hosts with public statements in which he criticised the king. On the first day of the Muslim feast of Eid, he was visited by Prince Talal of Jordan, who told him he was ‘free to go’, the unspoken message being that he had outstayed his welcome.

Kamel strapped a pistol to his hip, drove to the home of the Iraqi ambassador and sat in animated discussion with him in the reception hall. Then they went to the embassy and telephoned Baghdad.

Once he was sure that Kamel had fulfilled the conditions set for his return, Saddam sent a video of himself, in which he promised he had forgiven his son-in-law. ‘Come during the feast,’ he said. ‘The family will be together.’ He implored him to bring all his relatives back with him. A written amnesty followed from the Iraqi leadership council.

Kamel made his decision abruptly. ‘We are going home,’ he announced to a family gathering. Ragda and Rana, suddenly frightened, began crying. At the last moment, Ragda telephoned her mother, seeking reassurance. But the phone was answered by Uday, who, in his latest outrage, had shot an uncle in the leg in an argument over an Italian car that he wanted to add to his collection of classics.

Ragda begged her brother to tell her the truth: would they be safe if they came home? ‘Habibti [Arabic for my love], I give you my word,’ he said.

Hours before he left, Kamel telephoned one of his few friends to say goodbye. The man, a fellow Iraqi, was appalled. ‘You know you are going to your death,’ he said. Kamel bragged that he had obtained personal assurances from Saddam. ‘To this day, I don’t know why he trusted Saddam,’ the friend said last week. ‘He was one of them. He should have known.’

Arriving at the border, the returning defectors were greeted by a smiling Uday in sunglasses and suit. The men were separated from their wives and children. Kamel would never see Ragda and Ali again.

With his brothers, he was taken to one of Saddam’s presidential palaces, where they were rigorously questioned about their experiences in Jordan and their contacts with western representatives and opponents of the Iraqi regime. After three days, they were released and went to the home of Taher Abdel Kadr, a cousin. Here, they were joined by two sisters and the women’s children. But their relief and jubilation were short-lived. Within 48 hours, they learnt from a statement broadcast on television that their wives had denounced them as traitors and had been granted divorces.

As dawn filtered through the windows of their villa on 20 February, a cousin who still worked at the presidential palace woke them with the news that they had been betrayed. He brought weapons. Grimly, the Kamels prepared for their assassins as the children slept on.

Their killing was a family affair. While army vehicles and police cars blocked off the neighbourhood, an armed gang led by Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s second son, surrounded the house. Uday and Qusay were accompanied inside by the former husband of one of Kamel’s sisters. He showed his loyalty to Saddam by opening the firing on his family’s house.

The attack, carried out with assault weapons, was ferocious. Although Kamel’s men fired back, they were swiftly overwhelmed. Some of the family were killed in the initial onslaught; others when the armed men entered the house. They included Kamel’s elderly father, all the women and at least five young children, gunned down in their nightclothes.

Outside in a parked Mercedes sat Ali Hassan Al-Majeed, a cousin of Saddam’s who had earned the nickname ‘The Hammer of the Kurds’ after gassing villages in northern Iraq with chemical weapons in 1989. Al-Majeed was on a mobile phone, describing each step of the assault to Saddam as it happened.

‘We have 17 bodies,’ he said. The only member of the family who was missing was Kamel himself. Saddam barked: ‘I want his body.’

As bulldozers were brought in to destroy the house, Kamel, naked to the waist, wounded and bleeding, burst from a hiding place inside and appeared at a door brandishing his personal pistol and a machinegun.

He had barely fired a shot before he was riddled with bullets. When the gunfire ceased, Al-Majeed walked up to the body and emptied his pistol into it. He dragged Kamel by one foot through the sand, yelling to his men and to neighbours cowering behind closed doors: ‘Come and see the fate of a traitor.’ The bulldozers moved in and the house was razed.

The massacre was a vivid reminder to the people of the ruthlessness of the regime under which they live. If Saddam was willing to eliminate close and even innocent members of his own family in such a fashion, there was no limit to what he could do to them.

During the summer, however, came two further reminders of the apparent futility of resistance. In June a member of the presidential bodyguard fired shots at Saddam and was executed. Less than a month later, according to western diplomats and Iraqi exiles, a rebel group of Iraqi officers planned to kill Saddam by bombing a presidential palace from a plane that was to have taken off from Rasheed airport in Baghdad.

The conspiracy was discovered and hundreds of members of Saddam’s armed forces were arrested. Between 1 and 3 August, 120 of the officers were executed.

Iraqis have grown used to atrocities since Saddam came to prominence. His first known political act was an attempt in 1959 to gun down Abdel-Karim Qassem, then the Iraqi leader. When he became president 20 years later, he began by accusing 21 senior members of the leadership of treason. He formed a firing squad with his remaining colleagues, and together they shot all the condemned men.

In the years that followed, his people learned to voice their opposition only to close friends and family. Criticism of Saddam is punishable by death, and the security services are ubiquitous. Iraqi couples do not even speak in front of their own children for fear they might innocently repeat something and bring down the wrath of the regime.

The long series of confrontations into which Saddam has led Iraq has made life immensely difficult in a country whose citizens should be as pampered as those of Saudi Arabia. Iraq, unlike most Arab states, has both oil and water. Two huge rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, nourish the land, and before the imposition of United Nations sanctions following the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Iraq earned $10 billion a year by lifting 3m barrels of oil a day.

Much of the money was spent on creating not comfort, but the largest army in the Middle East. Within a year of taking power, Saddam ordered the invasion of Iran, starting a bitter war that lasted for eight years and left 1 million people dead.

The attack on Kuwait was another miscalculation. The 43 days of allied bombing, supported by Arab countries afraid of his might, destroyed not only military sites but roads, bridges, oil refineries, communications, sewage facilities and the rest of an extensive infrastructure built by oil revenues.

Last week’s conflict, in which Iraqi support for one group of Kurds against another provoked two waves of bombardment with American cruise missiles, was by no means the first test of the allies’ resolve since the Gulf War. But after previous confrontations, Saddam has simply waited out his enemies. Those close to him say he is proud to have outlasted in office both George Bush and Margaret Thatcher, who led the coalition against him in 1990.

The few who have risen in revolt have been crushed, but his inner circle has tightened around him and now consists almost solely of relatives from Tikrit, his home town.

According to Arab dignitaries who have visited Saddam, he has become so paranoid about his security since the Gulf War that he maintains 250 safe homes. The staff in each house prepares dinner every night as if he is to arrive; nobody knows where he will sleep until he shows up at the door.

The Kamel clan was not the first to betray him. Last June he was shaken by a coup attempt led by the powerful Dulaimi clan from his Sunni heartland that had been a pillar of his armed forces. Provoked by the torture and death of a clan member accused of involvement in a previous coup attempt, General Turki al-Dulaimi led his troops in a bold but suicidal march on Baghdad. The rebels were defeated in a day.

It has not escaped the attention of most Iraqis that while the latest confrontation has occurred less than six years after the Gulf War, the reaction around the world this time has been quite different. America’s use of missiles was backed wholeheartedly only by Britain, Canada and Germany. Although he lost a few isolated radar and anti-aircraft batteries, Saddam succeeded in dividing the coalition that had been ranged against him.

The main reason for the change was the nature of Saddam’s offensive. He did not roll his army across an international border and occupy another country, but sent a limited force of tanks and infantry into Arbil, a Kurdish city 12 miles inside the Kurdish ‘safe haven’ patrolled by allied jets.

He was also invited in by the Kurdish faction that represents the majority of Kurds, the Kurdish Democratic party (KDP). Other Middle Eastern countries saw the American intervention as a blatantly inconsistent piece of interference in an internal problem. The United States had not objected when Turkey sent 35,000 troops into northern Iraq last year to attack bases of rebellious Kurds; nor when Iran sent 3,000 troops across the border into northern Iraq last month.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia, among the countries that are the closest allies in the Middle East, refused Washington permission to launch strikes from their soil. The Arab League, for once in agreement, denounced the attacks on Iraq.

Just as striking, the first criticism of the American bombing came from a Gulf newspaper, condemning the action and saying that all Arabs should oppose it ‘as a matter of honour’. It was the first time since the Gulf War that any paper in the region used the word ‘brothers’ to refer to Iraqis.

France was critical and Britain was unable to get a resolution denouncing the Iraqi incursion through the UN security council following strong opposition from Russia. By the end of the week, Saddam’s tanks were still dug in in northern Iraq and the allied coalition was in tatters.

For now, Saddam may have little choice but to accept the establishment of a security zone inside its territory by Turkey, which says this is needed to fight Kurds battling for independence from Ankara. He should not be expected to be quiescent forever, however. He has every prospect of increasing his power and has a lot of grudges to settle. Those who know Saddam say the one certainty is that he never forgets and never forgives.

For the ordinary Iraqi, life seems likely to get harder. While the so-called ‘war rich’ who have profited from the black market in Baghdad continue to work on new palaces, most people are worried about food prices driven to new peaks by the crisis.

Privations, large and small, continued last week. People had to shower at 4am because electricity cuts meant there was no water during daytime. In a hospital in Baghdad, surgeons who no longer had paediatric surgical equipment operated on children with adult-sized instruments. ‘It is butchery,’ one doctor agonised.

Saddam’s offensive put into limbo a UN-negotiated deal that would have enabled him to sell oil for food. There now seems little hope of relief in the near future.

Life is more comfortable but barely less bleak for Saddam’s two daughters and their six young children. They were not in the villa where Kamel and his other relatives were killed, but face a dark future.

The two young widows were forced to move into the house of their mother’s sister, where they are virtual prisoners. They cannot go out. Their children were taken away and they have been told they may never see them again. Sources in Baghdad said Rana, who was close to her husband Saddam Kamel, tried to kill herself and had to be hospitalised.

Ali, his sisters and cousins are living a sequestered life in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein’s birthplace. Ali may still be drawing pictures for his grandfather in vain. He and the other children are being raised to know that their parents were traitors.