Posted on 01/11/2003 6:07:06 AM PST by knighthawk
Saddam Hussein: Portrait of a dictator as a young man
National Post reporter Patrick Graham recently visited Al-Ouja in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein grew up. He also travelled to Syria, where he found Ibrahim Zobedi, one of the few to have been friends with Saddam in his youth and lived to talk about it.
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Ibrahim Zobedi leans back in his chair and recalls his childhood friend, Saddam Hussein.
"We used to go fishing with dynamite and the fishermen would always tell us to make sure our stomach and legs were out of the water," says Mr. Zobedi of his childhood in the 1950s. "Of course, Saddam would do the opposite and stand in the river up to his chest."
There are few who remember the young Saddam Hussein, in part, according to Mr. Zobedi, because most have been killed, often under mysterious circumstances.
Mr. Zobedi no longer lives in Iraq. He fled years ago, fearing for his life. "I found him a good friend," he says nonetheless.
The two met at school when Mr. Zobedi, who is four years younger than the Iraqi President, was six and living in Tikrit. Despite his father's disapproval, Mr. Zobedi used to visit Saddam and his family in their one-room mud brick house in the village of Al-Ouja on the banks of the Tigris river.
The ancestral village was a tough town, a kind of Iraqi Corleone.
"Al-Ouja means 'not straight' or 'crooked' because the people who came from the village stole and killed," he said. "They were a byword for bad people. All Saddam's relatives were killers or thieves."
But Mr. Zobedi enjoyed hanging out with his friends, becoming something of a mascot for the young toughs who scared off other people from nearby Tikrit.
"When you walk with someone like that, no one can touch you," says Mr. Zobedi, not without some fondness. "I was the only outsider who would and they appreciated that and treated me like a brother."
In the 1940s and 1950s, Al Ouja was a small, poor village.
"Al-Ouja was only mud houses, only a few, now it is a dream," he says.
Today, the mud houses are gone. The road leading off the highway runs past two artillery emplacements. On one a sign reads. "Dawn USA" (perhaps unwittingly prophetic) in whitewashed stones. The other bears the message, "Long live the leader Saddam Hussein" in Arabic script. A three-sided mural of Saddam in a suit guards the overpass.
Palm trees line the divided road that runs past walled houses and then dips down into a small depression where it meets a five-metre-high wall and pair of enormous gates. On the other side of the gates, the road continues.
Presumably, somewhere in the distance, the original one-room house has now been obliterated, like so much in Saddam's past, and replaced by a palatial mansion.
Nearby, the President has built a small suburb of a dozen walled houses and a small, beautiful sandstone mosque for his relatives, on land where many of them once farmed or tended sheep. Today, they run the country.
The river itself is blotted out by kilometres of high walls punctuated by glassed-in watchtowers that protect three palaces the size of parliament buildings. The entrance to each compound is marked by enormous gates reminiscent of Mogul emperors.
In Tikrit, Mr. Zobedi's boyhood home, there are few people on the streets, but everywhere you look are portraits, painted or mosaics, of Saddam Hussein in many different roles -- firing his pistol, doffing his homburg, smiling from behind purple sunglasses.
Originally, Mr. Zobedi made friends with Adnan Khairallah, Saddam's younger cousin and future brother-in-law. Adnan went on to become one of Iraq's most popular leaders, after Saddam himself, which some say led to his death in a mysterious helicopter crash in 1989.
Mr. Zobedi remembers sitting around with Saddam, Adnan and another friend as teenagers, when they decided to write down what they hoped to become in the future. Mr. Zobedi wanted to become a famous poet and eventually published a book of poems. Adnan hoped to become a successful general, while a third hoped to be a famous scientist.
Saddam wrote that he wanted a jeep, a hunting rifle and a pair of binoculars. "We asked him again what he wanted to be," Mr. Zobedi says. "He said, 'No -- I just want these things.' "
He says Saddam was something of a loner --independent, stubborn and insecure. He seemed to be thinking all the time and felt nobody liked him. In part, Mr. Zobedi says, this was the result of his stepfather's hatred of the young man, which caused him to leave home and move to Tikrit.
"When I go back to that time, I remember he was quiet and lonely," he says. "He was nothing special. He didn't like it when we talked about girls -- he thinks it a weakness to fall in love. I remember Adnan singing and Saddam said: 'This is a weakness. Why do you sing?' "
When Saddam moved to Tikrit with his uncle Khairallah Tulfah, Adnan's father, he was ridiculed for being a poor student.
"His uncle respected me because I studied hard, but when Saddam came back from school he laughed at him and called Saddam a dummy," Mr. Zobedi says.
Soon, Saddam learned how to be respected. Mr. Zobedi says Saddam slipped out one night and rode a horse to the house of a teacher who had beaten him. When the door opened, the young teenager shot and wounded the teacher's brother and then rode away. The teacher accused Saddam, but when the police went to his house, they found him asleep in his bed. The teacher packed up and left town.
"When he tried to kill his teacher in 1952, his uncle began respecting him," Mr. Zobedi says. "He realized that killing was the right way to go about getting respect from his family. This later encouraged him to try and assassinate the president of Iraq. The whole family and the atmosphere in the village was not normal. Normally, if you steal, people treat you badly. But in Al-Ouja if you steal they respect you and if you kill they respect you more."
According to Mr. Zobedi, Saddam first murdered in October, 1958. The victim was Saadoun al-Tikriti, a cousin of Saddam's and communist party chief in Tikrit, who wanted to demote uncle Khairallah, the most important person in Saddam's life after his mother, from his position in the government. After the murder on a dark street with no witnesses, Saddam and his uncle were arrested and held for six months, but let go for lack of evidence.
Before the killing, Saddam had made a show of borrowing money from his victim in a café, to show they were friends.
Not surprisingly, Saddam by that time had already earned a bad reputation.
"My dad used to send people to spy on me to see if I was talking to Saddam -- he thought I must be doing something bad if I was with him. But I found him to be a very good friend."
When Saddam and Adnan moved to Baghdad with his uncle, Mr. Zobedi followed. One day, he found a wallet full of money and tracked down the owner, who was overjoyed to get it back. Later, when he told his visiting father the story, Saddam dropped by the coffee house.
"He said, 'If it was given to me, God would not have found it,' " Mr. Zobedi says. "This is Saddam."
One of the great -- and often embellished -- episodes of Saddam's official biography is his participation in the attempted assassination of the Iraqi leader General Abdul Karim Qassem in 1959. Mr. Zobedi saw Saddam the next day.
"He was wounded. I was surprised because I didn't even think he was in the Baath party. I was at the time but I learned later he was just becoming a party member."
There are few existing pictures of the young assassin because he burned most of his photos before fleeing the country. But according to Con Coughlin in his biography Saddam: King of Terror, after the assassination attempt authorities found a high school photo of the glum-looking student and distributed it to police stations around the country.
Mr. Zobedi met up with the future President again in the mid-1960s after Saddam returned from Egypt, where he was exiled after the assassination attempt. At the time, Mr. Zobedi worked at a radio station in Baghdad and Saddam worked across the street at the ministry of agriculture.
"When the Baath party came to power in 1968, they treated me very well -- especially his uncle Khairallah. He used to visit me and ask if there was anything I needed."
Mr. Zobedi last saw Saddam in 1973 when he was vice-president. It was a disturbing encounter.
"Because of that meeting, I left Iraq. He was sitting there," says Mr. Zobedi pointing less than a metre away. "And when I looked at him he looked away. I thought -- he doesn't want me. He wants to be a big player and he wants no friends from his childhood who remember when he was nothing -- that he had no talent and was nothing special. And after I left, I found out that many of his childhood friends were killed in car accidents or at night. I was right -- he wanted to get rid of these old friends."
Only one of their childhood friends -- Nabil, the one who dreamed of being a famous scientist, but who became a nurse and eventually an ambassador instead -- still lives in Iraq.
Mr. Zobedi is still in the radio business, but now he broadcasts into Iraq from an opposition-run station in a nearby country. He met with the National Post during a brief visit to Syria in the fall.
"I never thought I would be away so long," he says.
Mr. Zobedi's attitude to his old friend is a curious mixture of nostalgia and distrust.
What does he think Saddam will do now?
"He is waiting in Baghdad for the [United States]. If you go, he will fight you. He will not resign. He won't even give power to his son. If he felt his son was a threat, the son wouldn't last one minute."
Some aspects of his character haven't changed.
"If you advise him to do one thing, he will do the opposite -- just to show you. When he invaded Kuwait, some said he would pull out. But I knew he wouldn't. He thought [former U.S. president George] Bush might not fight."
Would Saddam use chemical weapons?
"Absolutely," he says, "especially if he felt that this was the end. Unless, of course, the people who take orders don't do it. He will not give up his weapons and they will not find what he wants to hide. Westerners think everybody is normal and think normally.
"He is abnormal -- you have to understand -- he is dangerous."
He does not hold out much hope for his childhood playground of Al-Ouja if there is war.
"It will be wiped out 100%. You will see just buried ground. People will come from all over Iraq to do something against Al-Ouja."
Middle East list
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One less place for us to expend bombs.
And somehow Fredo became the Don.
Bump.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/820198/posts
A truly evil and dangerous man.
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