EARLY LIFE

Saddam was born in the village of Al Awja, near Tikrit. His father, Hussein Abd al Majid, died while Saddam was still in the womb, so Saddam was raised by his maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah, in Baghdad.

In 1957 Saddam became an organizer for the Baath Labor Union, which represented construction, garbage collection, and river transport workers in Iraq and Syria. The Arab Bureau of Investigation suspected that the Baathists were also engaged in smuggling and other illegal activities, but did little about it. At the time, the ABI was far more concerned with investigating corruption among two other, much more powerful Iraqi labor unions: the Royal Order of Hashemites, which was controlled by the Hashem family, and the Free Officers Union, led by retired Iraqi state police colonel Abd al Karim Qasim.

THE LABOR DAY MASSACRE AND THE RISE OF THE BAATHISTS

On the morning of July 14, 1958, the Hashem clan leader Faisal II was on his way to a Labor Day celebration when he was approached outside his Baghdad home by a group of men in police uniform. Faisal, his bodyguards, and several other Hashem family members were ordered to stand against a wall with their hands raised; when they did so, they were machine-gunned. By the time the real police arrived on the scene, reports were flooding in from all over Iraq of other Hashemites being murdered or simply disappearing.

It was widely believed that Abd al Karim Qasim had organized the massacre, but local law enforcement would do nothing against him, and federal agents found their own investigation stymied at every turn. Meanwhile, the surviving Hashemites decided to take matters into their own hands. An orgy of violence ensued, with the Hashemites taking the worst of it; by the end of the year, most members of the clan had either died or left Iraq.

In October 1959 masked gunmen ambushed Qasim as he left the Free Officers Union Hall. This was only the most recent of a series of attempts on Qasim’s life, and like the previous attempts, it failed. What was different was that this time the attackers were not Hashemites, but Baathists. Five of the six gunmen were killed by Qasim’s bodyguards; the sixth escaped. An hour later, Saddam Hussein showed up at a nearby hospital with a bullet wound in his leg. He claimed to have been mugged.

Qasim went into seclusion and Baathists began to die in large numbers. Saddam boarded a plane to Egypt, where he remained for the next four years. In interviews he has said he went to Cairo University to study law, “something I had long planned to do,” and that his departure from Iraq on the eve of a major gang war was a coincidence in timing.

The Free Officers and the Baathists traded bullets and bombs until February 1963, when Qasim was caught in another ambush and shot 82 times at close range. Following Qasim’s death, ABI agents—having received a mountain of incriminating evidence from an anonymous source—swooped in and arrested over two hundred Free Officers, effectively breaking the union’s back. Most of the professions that had been represented by the Free Officers now switched their allegiance to Baath.

In March 1963 Saddam Hussein returned to Baghdad and was appointed secretary treasurer of the Baathists. In 1968 he was promoted to union vice president. Finally, in 1979, after the surprise resignation of union president Ahmed Hassan al Bakr, Saddam was elected leader of the Baathists, a position he holds to this day.

PHILANTHROPIST, NOVELIST . . . AND PROFESSIONAL DEFENDANT

1979 also marked the first time Saddam was indicted by the federal government. The case, which concerned the bribery and intimidation of workers on an oil pipeline between Kurdistan and Iraq, never went to trial. A furnace malfunction at the hotel where the government’s witnesses were sequestered flooded the guest floors with carbon monoxide, asphyxiating four dozen people.

In 1982 the government tried again, accusing Saddam of having rigged the election in which his uncle Khairallah became mayor of Baghdad. On the morning of the second day of jury deliberations, the jury foreman was found hanged in a courthouse restroom. An alternate juror was summoned and deliberations continued; Saddam was acquitted.

By 1986, with two additional acquittals to his name, Saddam had become a national celebrity. He gave regular press interviews and went on television to proclaim, with a wink, his innocence. He suggested that his legal troubles were a result of “high and mighty persons in Riyadh” failing to understand “the rough and tumble nature of life in Iraq.”

In 1987 Saddam established the Saddam Hussein Foundation, a charitable trust that gave money to schools, mosques, and hospitals, and the Baath Union Scholarship Program, which helped Iraqis from poor families attend college. Federal prosecutors, noting that Saddam’s personal charity donations exceeded his declared income by a factor of ten, charged him with tax evasion. He was found not guilty . . .

In December 1998 Saddam held a press conference to announce he was publishing a pulp-fiction novel. “For years, government lawyers have been telling outrageous stories about me,” he said. “I thought it was time to try telling one of my own.” The book, Zabibah and the King, concerns a labor organizer from Tikrit who reluctantly turns to a life of crime after his mistress, Zabibah, is murdered by gangsters; in due course, having exacted revenge on the killers, he becomes the (benevolent) king of the underworld.

The Baghdad Post called Zabibah and the King “sublime,” but most other reviews were lukewarm at best, and initial sales were disappointing. Then the Baghdad district attorney attempted to use the book as the basis for a murder conspiracy charge, arguing that the climax of the story was a thinly fictionalized account of the killing of Abd al Karim Qasim that included details only someone privy to the murder plot would know. A grand jury rejected the DA’s request for an indictment, but the resulting publicity pushed Zabibah onto the bestseller lists.

Saddam Hussein has since written three sequels to Zabibah, also bestsellers: The King’s Castle (2001), The King and the City (2003), and The King Says Devil, Begone (2006). According to Saddam’s literary agent, a fifth “King” novel is nearing completion; state and federal prosecutors are said to be eagerly awaiting their advance review copies.

FACTS ABOUT SADDAM HUSSEIN

·

He married his cousin

Sajida Talfah

in 1963. They have five children, including two sons,

Uday

(b. 1964) and

Qusay

(b. 1966).

·

In 1986 Saddam married a second wife,

Samira Shahbandar

. Owing to “friction” between her and Saddam’s first wife, Shahbandar lives abroad in an undisclosed location. It is not known whether she and Saddam have any children.

·

Saddam’s eldest son, Uday, was arrested in 1988 for pistol-whipping a valet outside a Baghdad discotheque. He has had numerous other run-ins with the law since, and unlike his father, he has not always been successful at avoiding jail time. Most recently, he spent three months in

Abu Ghraib

for assaulting a model he had been dating.

·

Saddam’s personal net worth is not known, but he and his family have extensive property holdings, including at least seven houses in Baghdad. In addition to the salary he draws as head of Baath and the royalties from his novels, his primary declared source of income is what he describes as a “small” import/export business he “runs on the side . . .”