Welcome home, boys!
Posted on 07/23/2003 4:40:43 PM PDT by Pokey78
Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein's eldest son who has died aged 39, was probably the most hated and feared man in Iraq after the president himself.
He was infamous not only for numerous violent assaults against his kinsmen and political opponents, but also as football's worst loser: he imprisoned and tortured three Iraqi football stars as punishment for their side's defeat in the 2000 Asian Cup.
Dressed in tailored Italian suits and puffing on his trademark Havana cigar, Uday oversaw all sport and youth activities in the country as head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee - the only one in the world with a prison in the basement of its office.
Nicknamed the "lion cub" by sycophants surrounding the regime, Uday built his power base through his control of Iraq's print and broadcast media, and founded his own paramilitary fedayeen. For four years after the expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait in 1991, Uday enjoyed unprecedented influence in Baghdad, acting as de facto prime minister and head of the paramilitary. At one time he was considered Saddam's heir apparent, but he fell from grace when Saddam lost patience with his philandering, black marketeering and unbridled thuggery.
Uday's reputation for pathological violence first emerged in 1988 and was to bring him into disfavour several times, even in a culture as murderous as Ba'athist Iraq. After a drunken midnight brawl, he murdered Hanna Jajou, Saddam's personal valet and official food taster. An enraged Saddam jailed his errant son and sentenced him to death; but he relented, instead exiling him for a year to Switzerland after the intervention of King Hussein of Jordan.
Seven years later, Uday shot and wounded Saddam's half-brother, Watban Ibrahim, who had just been sacked as interior minister. As a result, Uday's brothers-in-law, General Hussein Kamal and his brother Saddam Kamal, sought asylum in Jordan with their wives, causing grave embarrassment to Saddam. When they returned six months later, a trap was sprung for them by Uday and they were killed in a "gunfight" in Baghdad.
In 1996 there was an attempt on Uday's life while he was on his way to a party in Baghdad, leaving him partially paralysed from the waist down. Later there were reports that he was suffering from depression and was subject to violent rages. By this time he had lost favour with his father, who began grooming his younger - and more sober - son, Qusay, as his successor.
The rivalry between Uday and Qusay had begun when they were teenagers and simmered on into adulthood. In 2000, Uday entered Parliament in a bid to shed his playboy image. Then, in protest at his brother's rise to prominence, in 2001 Uday converted from Sunni, the division of Islam favoured by Iraq's ruling elite, to Shia, the majority sect; but, given his family's long history of repressing the Shia, this was seen as a hollow gesture.
Uday Hussein was born in Baghdad on June 18 1964, to Saddam's wife Sajida, whom he had married the year before. At the time of Uday's birth, Saddam was in prison, and Sajida took the baby to the jail, enclosing messages from his Ba'ath Party colleagues in the baby's nappies.
Saddam was an affectionate, but often absent, father to the young Uday, and doted on his three daughters Raghad, Rina and Hala. Uday, who joined the Ba'ath Party aged 12, was educated with his brother Qusay at the fashionable Al Kharkh Al Namouthajiya School in Baghdad, which, until Saddam became president, was run by Sajida.
Uday's classmates recall that, although he rarely did any work, he always came first in class. When Uday demanded extra time to finish a test, the teachers had to obey him, as he was always accompanied by half a dozen burly bodyguards, most of them ex-wrestlers. Both brothers frequently violated the dress code and broke school rules, driving their limousines on to the school campus.
In 1984, and by now fluent in English, Uday graduated from the University of Baghdad College of Engineering with an average grade of 98.5 per cent. Tutors who failed to give him full marks were tortured and lost their jobs. Uday apparently nursed an ambition to become a nuclear scientist, and claimed to have passed SATs to study at an American university; he later said that his studies were thwarted by the Iran-Iraq war. He subsequently maintained that he had gained a doctorate in Political Science with a dissertation on the effect of post-Cold War conditions on America's superpower status.
In 1987 Uday took over the Iraqi Olympic Committee and turned it into the Ministry of Youth, abolishing the official youth ministry in the process. His headquarters was a 10-storey building in east Baghdad with watchtowers for gunners on its outer walls and a prison in the basement. Uday began to use this base as a platform from which to interfere in many facets of Iraqi life, including the national sport of soccer.
Players who failed to score goals, or to stop rival strikers from scoring, were often sent to prison. The telltale sign of such punishment was that player-prisoners had their heads shaved by their warders.
After returning from exile in Switzerland, following the murder of Jajou, Uday was soon rehabilitated, and resumed his position as chairman of the Olympic Committee. He sat out the first Gulf war, and began to build a business and media empire, also profiteering from the black market as UN sanctions against Iraq began to bite.
His Babel newspaper was described as Iraq's only independent family newspaper, and under its umbrella he developed profitable enterprises in television, transport, hotels and food processing. By early 1994 Uday was chairman of the country's football association and journalists' union. In March of that year he was made leader of the Sadamyoun, teenagers indoctrinated in special schools to worship Saddam. It soon had 25,000 members as well as a militia; this too was headed by Uday, and gave him a military power-base to match that of his brother. It was a sign of his father's approval when Uday assumed control of the entire Iraqi media and campaigned successfully for the removal of the figurehead prime minister, Ahmed Hussein.
Uday's media empire included Iraq's most popular radio station, Voice of Iraq FM, and its sister TV station, Youth TV, both of which adopted westernised programming, in contrast to the ponderous style of the official, state-owned broadcast channels.
Although his brother Qusay adopted the mantle of heir apparent, Uday survived as a political figure. But he continued his brutal behaviour. In June 1997, a month after his discharge from hospital following the attempt on his life, he shot dead a young bodyguard; and a week later he was reported to have killed a young woman he had tried to seduce at the presidential palace.
In 1999 one of Iraq's star soccer players, Sharar Haydar Mohammad al-Hadithi, told the western media that he had been tortured on Uday's orders. The next year, after Iraq's 4-1 defeat in the quarter-finals of the Asia Cup, the Iraqi team's goalkeeper Hashim Hassan, its defender Abdul Jaber and striker Qathan Chither were beaten and whipped for three days by Uday's bodyguards at his Olympic Committee headquarters.
In 2001 Uday was elected to the Iraqi Parliament for a Baghdad constituency, receiving a reported 99.9 per cent of the vote. Public proof of his physical recovery came when Iraqi television showed him swimming in the Tigris river.
Uday Hussein married, in 1984, his cousin Saja, the daughter of his uncle Barzan Ibrahim, but the union lasted only six months before Saja went to join her father in Geneva, after taking a savage beating from her husband. There were no children.
Qusay Hussein, who has died aged 36, was the younger son and heir apparent of Saddam Hussein; he commanded Iraq's intelligence and security services and two elite military units, the shock troops of the Republican Guard and the praetorian Special Republican Guard.
Rarely seen in public, the secretive Qusay was also in joint control of the country's weapons of mass destruction from the early 1990s, according to the British government dossier published last September. The Special Republican Guard, or Golden Division, which he commanded, was a 15,000-strong well-paid force recruited from Tikrit, Saddam's home town, to protect the Iraqi president and his extended family.
Qusay Hussein emerged from relative obscurity after the liberation of Kuwait by the American-led forces in 1991. He oversaw the brutal suppression of an uprising against the regime by Shia Muslims in the south of Iraq. His older brother had originally been seen by Saddam as his successor, but the playboy Uday fell from grace during the early 1990s.
After proving his ruthlessness against the Shia in 1991, Qusay rose rapidly through the ruling Ba'ath Party structures and soon dominated the military and security leadership. He led a crackdown against the al-Dulaym tribe in 1995, and quashed another local Shia revolt in 1997. To help Saddam eliminate threats to his regime, Qusay would resort to blackmail and forced confessions. He personally authorised the interrogation, jailing and execution of political prisoners and their families. Periodically, over the past 14 years, he was alleged to have ordered mass executions of thousands of prison inmates.
He was also credited with directing the negotiations between Iraq's foreign minister Naji al-Sabri and the UN. Major decisions, such as the moves to allow the return of UN weapons inspectors in the autumn of 2002, were planned by Qusay and his father.
Qusay Hussein was born in 1966 in Baghdad, the second son of Saddam Hussein and his cousin Sajida, whom the dictator had married in 1963. Largely ignored by his father during his early childhood, Qusay was educated at the Al Khararkh Al Namouthajiya School with Uday. Until Saddam became president, the school had been run by his wife, whose presence, and the high standard of education offered, made it a place for the children of the elite.
Classmates of the two brothers said that, while Uday was "loud and vulgar", his younger brother was "quiet and calculating". Both boys received special treatment and seldom obeyed school rules, often violating the dress code. They were always attended by security men, because of the fear of assassination or kidnap, and rode around the city in flashy motor vehicles. On leaving school, Qusay studied Law at Baghdad University.
The Iraqi security directorate that became Qusay's fiefdom included the hated mukhabarat (secret police), which claimed a higher percentage of the national budget than any similar service in the world. Qusay succeeded Saddam's cousin and son-in-law, Saddam Kamel, as head of the Republican Guard in 1986 when the latter fell out of favour.
To promote support for the war with Iran, Qusay embarked on a high-profile tour of Iraqi military bases, always arriving in a battle tank while his brother took a helicopter.
During the mid-1980s, Qusay formed a close relationship with the capable internal security chief General Abd Hamid Hamud, and he later made an ally of Iraq's foreign minister Naji al-Sabri, who successfully masterminded the re-establishment of diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia after the Gulf war. These two men formed the basis of an emerging power base for Qusay, who always harboured ambitions of succeeding his father.
In 1988 forces under Qusay's control executed more than 2,000 people who had been jailed for their anti-government views. In a similar incident on April 26 1998, the pattern was repeated when Qusay visited Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. According to a former member of the Iraqi security service, Khalid al-Janabi, Qusay's death squads started the killing of prisoners at 6am, with one shot to the head to economise on bullets, while other inmates were taken to the gallows in a special "hanging hall". By 9pm, 2,000 inmates were dead.
As head of the security service, Qusay deployed other, more subtle, methods of intimidation. There was a squad of some 90 women officers which was used to entrap unsuspecting men who were later blackmailed.
After the first Gulf war, Qusay's Special Security Organisation was made responsible for hiding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programmes, during the 15-day period when Iraq was instructed by the UN to produce a list of its arsenal. Over the next four years his staff did its job so well that the UN Special Commission (Unscom) was ready to declare its task done and to leave Iraq.
While Saddam retained full control of the Iraqi military machine, Qusay regularly presided over it in the late 1990s. The UN Special Rapporteur to Iraq said that Qusay supervised or ordered military attacks against civilian settlements in southern Iraq in 1998, and carried out mass arrests to quell and intimidate the population.
His reputation for brutality was no doubt behind several attempts by opponents of the regime to kill him. On August 1 2001, attackers fired on Qusay's motorcade in Baghdad, wounding him in the arm. The assailants were killed when security forces destroyed their car with a rocket-propelled grenade.
Qusay's emergence in a more political role became apparent in 2001 when he was elected one of two deputy commanders of the ruling Ba'ath Party's military bureau; he also became a member of the Ba'ath Party regional command.
He was behind moves to repair diplomatic ties with Kuwait, and, with his ally the foreign minister, he marginalised old-time Saddam loyalists such as Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister.
In 1985 Qusay married Sahar, the daughter of General Maher Al Rashid, a Sunni Muslim and fellow clansman from Tikrit. The marriage was dissolved after producing three children.
After that, U.S. troops called over loudspeakers at 10-minute intervals for anyone else to come out. "Surrender yourselves or face harsh military action," came the words in Arabic, Hazim said.
Those who had barricaded themselves inside responded with gunfire from the upper floors, witnesses and neighbors said.
The totally evil nature of these two monsters doesn't come through at all...
You know, that says a lot about life under Saddam.
Enough said. Incest is best.
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