Second, this reinforces the view of Uday as an utter psychotic.
Regards, Ivan
Posted on 04/19/2003 4:15:31 PM PDT by MadIvan
ON Thursday morning Ahmad Khammas, a tailor, put on one of his finest suits and set off to visit his shop. Last month he had closed it for the first time in more than 50 years when coalition bombs began falling on Baghdad and he was worried that it might have been looted.
Khammas, a diminutive, silver-haired 74-year-old, had not ventured out since the start of the war and his face wrinkled with distaste as he stepped onto the street and sniffed: buildings were burning and a sooty aroma hung in the air. A tank was parked on his doorstep, an American soldier in its turret.
Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader, had gone and with him some of the tailor’s most valuable clients. His suits may have been made to last, but the tailor of Baghdad has known that his careful craftsmanship was often tainted with blood.
“Many of my customers have ended up dead,” he said, referring to clients felled by assassins or firing squads. “It is very sad. But when I lose customers there are always others to replace them. Governments come and go, but people always want suits.”
He opened his premises on Rashid Street in 1948, when Iraq was ruled by a monarch, and became the court’s favourite tailor until the royal family was murdered in 1958.
His subsequent adoption by Saddam’s entourage and senior officials of the ruling Ba’ath party was more uncomfortable.
“I was careful never to give them anything that was not good,” said Khammas, as he undid the 10 padlocks on the shutters of his shop. “And I made sure that suits for them were produced extra quickly.”
It began with a visit to his shop by several of Saddam’s senior lieutenants in 1992. “They cordoned off the entire street while I measured them all,” said Khammas.
It was just as well that the tailor had put up the obligatory poster of Saddam. On another counter, however, a poster advertising English cloth struck a different note.
Under the slogan “Utterly British”, it depicted an Englishman in a bowler hat and pin-striped suit pointing his brolly at the bottom of a reclining blonde clad only in Union Jack hot pants.
The Saddamites eyed it with interest, Khammas recalled, but made no comment about his exclusive use of “good quality” cloth from a country that had just helped the United States to evict their armies from Kuwait.
The tailor’s visitors that day included Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as Chemical Ali for his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds; Taha Yassin Ramadan, the stocky vice- president; and Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the ginger-haired second-in-command of the revolutionary command council.
“They said, ‘We bring you greetings from Saddam, who has generously offered to pay you handsomely to make us some suits’,” Khammas recalled. “I made each of them two suits. They were ready in 10 days. That is a record for me.”
Al-Douri, regarded as Saddam’s right-hand man, had a “bit of a paunch”, Khammas recalled, even though senior officials were warned that they could be punished if they went above a set weight. Al-Majid, despite his fearsome reputation, was polite and friendly and, like most of his comrades-in-arms, requested a pinstriped, double-breasted suit like the one in the British poster.
The bill was paid in cash a few weeks after the suits were collected and the men returned several times over the years to order replacements. The last time Khammas saw any of them was last year, when al-Douri dropped in to order an Arab tunic.
Saddam, however, was not so lucky with his clothes. He apparently tried in vain to get the tailor to make him a suit but would not agree to be measured. Instead he sent one of his Italian suits, asking Khammas to make copies: “I said I couldn’t make copies but would have to measure him if I was going to make him a suit.”
Saddam’s aides kept returning to his shop and Khammas kept insisting that the leader would have to be measured. Eventually they gave up. “Thank God — I did not like that man,” said Khammas of the famously paranoid dictator. “He did not want any contact with strangers.”
According to the tailor, none of the double-breasted suits by Canali found in a closet at one of the leader’s palaces last week fitted him properly: “His collars rode up on his shoulders and the trousers were too long.”
This was such a problem that an official photographer once told Khammas he was finding it difficult to photograph Saddam at his desk without his suits looking rumpled. “I told him to make Saddam sit on the bottom of his jacket to straighten it out,” Khammas recalled. The photographer later disappeared.
Nor, according to Khammas, was dress sense a quality possessed by Uday, the dictator’s temperamental elder son. “I once saw him in a red and black jacket,” sniffed Khammas in disgust. “Can you imagine? One half red and one half black.”
The lack of sartorial elegance went hand in hand with an execrable taste in art and home furnishings found by American troops last week.
At the same time more evidence was emerging of the curious tribal nature of the regime’s inner workings and the manner in which Saddam adjudicated personally in petty disputes. When one of his official poets complained that a neighbour’s son had whistled at his younger sister while ogling her through her bedroom window, both families were hauled in front of the leader.
“I was so worried that all I remember is his high red boots and angry red eyes,” said the mother of the offending teenager. Her neighbour ended up spending two years under house arrest.
The tailor, reflecting traditional Baghdad society’s scorn for Saddam and his peasant origins, spoke with nostalgia of the old days at court. In the 1960s the trend continued for a while and Khammas found himself tailor to presidents, including Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, under whom Saddam served as vice-president.
As lapels grew wider, Saddam consolidated his power until declaring himself president in 1979. Khammas vividly remembered the announcement of a plot against Saddam. At a party convention a list of alleged plotters was read out and about 500 senior members of the party ended up in front of the firing squad. “I lost a lot of good customers in that purge,” said the tailor.
The knowledge that so many of his customers were dying in his suits has never dented the pride he takes in his work. Whatever government emerges from the rubble, he is confident that his role as the tailor to rulers will endure as long as his eyesight.
“They say that in London the tailor is king,” he said. “Well, so it is here in Baghdad.”
Second, this reinforces the view of Uday as an utter psychotic.
Regards, Ivan
This tailor is rather humorous. 500 party officials get killed and he "lost more good customers".
“Many of my customers have ended up dead,” he said, referring to clients felled by assassins or firing squads. “It is very sad. But when I lose customers there are always others to replace them. Governments come and go, but people always want suits.”
A philosopher and a tailor. :)
How much does this tailor charge now for a suit because I want him to make me a suit. Why because I like to wear suits that is why.
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