Posted on 12/31/2006 6:45:30 AM PST by COUNTrecount
She was relaxing in the Dazzle beauty salon awaiting a hot stone body scrub when she got the call.
It was obviously something important or her personal assistant would not have risked invoking her volcanic temper by passing her the mobile phone mid-treatment.
Indeed it was. On the end of the line was a lawyer telling her that Saddam Hussein had lost his appeal and would hang by the end of the week.
And the tall, slim woman who paled as she received this news was the tyrant's redoubtable eldest daughter Raghad.
There was much arm-waving, cursing and shrieking. But as a member of staff noted when she recounted the story to another customer, this kind of behaviour from Raghad is hardly unusual.
In the beauty salon, and elsewhere in the Jordanian capital Amman, the 39-year-old mother of five, who is nicknamed "Little Saddam' because her temperament so closely resembles that of her father, is much-feared.
And like her father during his brutal reign, she is used to getting her own way, although unlike him she has relied on nothing sharper than her tongue.
Number 16 on the Iraqi government's most wanted list, Raghad took charge of family affairs after the capture of the dictator, assembling the international team of lawyers to defend him.
On the death of her brothers Uday and Qusay, killed by US troops in July 2003, Raghad and her sister Rana fled Iraq for neighbouring Jordan where, protected by paramilitary police officers, they are guests of the royal family.
It is not clear how much of her father's money Raghad escaped with, although if the stories about his ex-wives fleeing with millions in cash and gold bars are to be believed, she is unlikely to have been neglected.
Given her father's notoriety, one might expect Raghad to lead an anonymous, if not a humble, life in exile, especially as her mother Sajida and Saddam's three other wives all but disappeared without trace following the fall of Baghdad and are said to live under assumed names.
But Raghad, not one to shrink from the public gaze, went on TV on more than one occasion, at least in the months immediately after her father's capture, to defend him.
Of his arrest, she said: "Saddam was tranquillised when captured. He would be a lion even when caged. Every honest person who knows Saddam knows that he is firm and powerful."
To the annoyance of Jordanians, Raghad enjoys a conspicuously extravagant lifestyle in Amman, largely funded, it is claimed, by her hosts.
Driven wherever she pleases by bodyguards, she has an almost comical appetite for designer clothes and accessories and shops with a gusto that would earn approval from the high-spending wives and girlfriends of England's footballers.
"She buys shoes by the sack load," said a woman close to Raghad's tight circle of friends.
"But the store owners are wary of her because she can be a difficult customer and nothing is ever good enough for her. There's a shop in Amman called Boutique de Francais that she goes to frequently where the staff are terrified of her."
Raghad is said to have a penchant for Gucci handbags and £400 Sergio Rossi boots and pays for them - or rather, her personal assistant pays for them - with a thick wad of crisp US dollars.
It is perhaps not surprising then that Raghad was pampering herself in a beauty salon rather than engaging in, say, a humanitarian act on behalf of her troubled people when she learned her father's fate last week.
If not out shopping she can often be found in Dazzle, or in the Iraqi-owned ladies' gym above it - Body Design - where she works out most mornings.
They are in Amman's upmarket district of Abdoun, an area populated predominantly by wealthy Iraqi exiles.
Raghad, an avid Hello! reader, also has her hair styled three times a week and is said to have received cosmetic surgery - nose, breasts, bags under the eyes - at the Amman Surgical Hospital.
It is indeed a life straight out of Footballers Wives and a far cry from that of her father, who languished in Camp Cropper in his last years on earth.
It is also a lifestyle that is hard to reconcile with her role as self-appointed head of the family and chief defender of Saddam.
What is more remarkable still is that it was Saddam who ordered the assassination of Raghad's husband, Hussein Kamel, after he disclosed Iraqi weapons secrets to MI5 and the CIA.
He was killed in 1996 after being persuaded to return to Iraq from Jordan, believing himself to have been pardoned. The husband of Raghad's sister Rana suffered the same fate.
Raghad's appeals on behalf of her father have surprised her family. "It is not the Arab way for a woman to speak out like this," one of Raghad's cousins told The Mail on Sunday.
"The family do not like it. And they do not like the way she wears his name like one of her designer labels."
Even at the international school her children attend in Amman she is known to drop Saddam's name while chatting with other mothers.
"I remember telling her that I was taking one of my kids out of the school and moving her to the British international school because she was struggling with English," said one mother.
"I asked how her children were getting on with English and she said they were doing great. Then she said something extraordinary: 'Can you really imagine the grandchildren of Saddam Hussein not being able to speak English?'
The mother added: "All the mothers avoid her like the plague although she tries very hard to be friends."
So what now for Little Saddam? With her father gone she will no longer have a legal team to manage and will find herself with time on her hands. How will she ever fill it?
If she has nice titties, she can do anything:)
I bet she gets an offer for a Reality TV show
I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear you say that! :P
Funny that you should say that. Albeit it an ugly one.
I was pondering the effect that money and power has on weak, ordinary plain women who actually believe that money can substitute for character.
The hollywood types seem to escape the irony: this sad woman is a caricature of themselves.
Why is this news? The same Press that will not show people diving off the World Trade Center, or the VICTIMS of the mass murders, now have all the stories of grief on the murders family. What is the next thing we will hear, he was a great guy that loved animals and was a vegetarian.
She looks nice. She would look better decomposing in a culvert.
She could teach children in Los Angeles as an option.
Teach them what? I'd like to teach this stupid, stuck-up broad a thing or two myself! People like her are a complete waste of space.
She can teach at CSUN. She will fit right in. I need to go there sometimes to use their engineering facilities. I wonder what she's like when she get's worked up:) I got American women worked up around there with my US flag stickers on my truck. I teased a bunch of gals there just for fun. 99% get nice smiles going. They always seem to have chomped on a lemon as they walk around in the morning.
She sounds a lot nicer than my ex wife.
"A more recent photo..."
This pic should win some award, LOL!
Guess Cameljockey was already taken??
Pray for W and Our Troops
Interesting she wanted him buried in Yemen- Yemen being the original homeland of the bin Laden clan and one of the regions where Saddam Hussein sent weapons to avoid UN arms inspectors.
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