Blood Brothers

A coming-of-age party is a touching occasion observed in almost every world culture. Some kids get a Camaro for their sweet 16, while others get a gold watch or a fat envelope of cash.

The sons of Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi dictator, got Beretta pistols, full clips, and a sitting duck.

The execution chamber deep in the bowels of al-Nihayyah (Palace of the End) was an ancient room that stank of blood, shit, and fear. Inside, a middle-aged man stood swaying and trembling. In 1979, Saddam Hussein arrested dozens of Iraqi politicians during his bid for absolute power. The public servant in the basement had been tortured for days, his fingernails plucked out with pliers.

The heavy iron door clanked open, and in walked a squad of Mukhabarat, Saddam’s secret police. With them were two skinny teenagers trying to look tough as nails. Anyone moved to chuckle, however, would have been well advised to consider the two guns the boys were holding in front of them.

“Ustav, ustav!” exclaimed the guards, shouting “master” to the two adolescents. Suddenly, the prisoner knew the boys’ identities. His stomach churned with dread. These were the sons of Saddam Hussein: Uday, 15, tall for his age, with bulged-out eyes and protruding teeth; and Qusay, 13, smaller, but the image of his father at the same age.

As an official read a list of crimes, the boys raised their guns and took aim. Before the politician could utter a word, their first shots slammed into his torso, throwing him against the wall. The police escort then drew their own weapons and fired. As dozens of bullets riddled the body, it jerked spastically. The boys kept firing until the body was nothing more than a bloody lump and some tatters of cloth.

Uday, glassy-eyed and giggling moronically, was transfixed by the mangled corpse and continued pulling the trigger on his empty gun. Qusay, eerily calm as if his pulse had not risen above a resting rate, turned to the guard next to him. He asked in a whisper, “Do you have any more bullets?”

The Lion and His Cubs Saddam Hussein is our generation’s Adolf Hitler. In the 22 years since he took total control of this ancient land of 22 million people, he’s conducted a war with Iran, invaded Kuwait, and waged a genocidal campaign against his own people. Saddam’s reign of terror, however, may be coming to a close.

Last year Asharq al-Awsata, an Arab newspaper, reported that the Iraqi leader is terminally ill with lymph cancer. Like Hitler, Saddam has killed every real or imagined rival. Who could possibly succeed one of the most feared men on earth?

The two men maneuvering to rule Iraq are virtually unknown outside the Middle East. They are the two brothers who underwent their bloody rite of passage more than 20 years ago. Uday (“you-die”), 37, and Qusay (“coo-sigh”) 34, are scions of a criminal enterprise masquerading as government. In Iraq it’s called the Issaba. In Sicily it’s called the Mafia. Uday and Qusay are the sons of its don of dons.

Using exclusive interviews with former cohorts, Maxim has pieced together an inside portrait of the two men who are competing to rule Iraq. Their deadly, escalating battle for power may have catastrophic consequences—not just for the Iraqis but for every person on the planet. World leaders are just beginning to glean the truth. The sons of Saddam, they fear, may turn out to be far more dangerous than their notorious father.

The Boys From Tikrit The roughly shorn sheep, its feet tied with cord, sensed what was coming. Its bleating turned into a continuous wail. Eight-year-old Uday glanced around the arid countryside, hoping the screams wouldn’t alert the shepherd. Uday motioned to his playmate to grab hold of the sheep’s head and twist to strangle the animal’s cries.

First Uday made deep cuts in the tendons of the legs and along the back. He took his time with the genitals before disemboweling the sheep, slowly pulling out its intestines, watching the terror and pain in the animal’s eyes. His technique had been improving. He could sometimes make the session last an hour before putting out the eyes and finally slashing the throat. Later he told friends that “the blood really interested me.”

Tikrit, where Uday and Qusay were born, is 100 miles northwest of Baghdad, not far from Al Awja, the tiny village where Saddam was born in 1937. It is a former Roman outpost and reportedly the birthplace of the legendary Muslim warrior Saladin. It is a region renowned for violence. A favorite saying in Tikrit, particularly by Saddam’s clan, the Albu Nasir, is “Kill him and end his news.”

As a boy Saddam Hussein roamed these filthy streets with an iron pipe he used to fend off his enemies. An accomplished and charismatic street thug, his gifts were encouraged by Albu Nasir elders. It was decided to groom him for future power.

Saddam rose through the ranks of the Pan-Arab Ba’ath party and in 1968 engineered a coup that made him number two behind President al-Bakr. He then built up a police state that forced al-Bakr into retirement in 1979. Hussein “accepted” the presidency and announced the discovery of a plot. Not surprisingly, the plotters turned out to be Saddam’s enemies and competitors. All were quickly eliminated.

Although he fawned over his three daughters, Saddam was determined that his sons be the inheritors of his rule. From an early age, the brothers underwent training. Sitting enthralled in front of the TV like normal kids watching cartoons, the brothers watched torture videos of the Iraqi police “disciplining” dissidents: forcing a victim’s jaw open until it broke, injecting water under the skin until it ripped. On special occasions, the boys were even allowed to watch the rape videos, used for official blackmail.

It was a bright Baghdad day in the late ’70s when a black Porsche 928 roared into the courtyard of the exclusive, all-boys Baghdad School. Behind the wheel was 14-year-old Uday, one foot on the dash, a Cuban cigar in his mouth, and a trashy, peroxide blonde draped across his lap. When he stepped out of the car, his outfit of jeans and a T-shirt contrasted sharply with the jacket-and-tie uniforms worn by the other boys. Though Qusay was delivered by Mercedes limousine every morning, he copied his brother’s attire, though he often topped his outfit off with a crown of laurel leaves.

Uday dragged his girlfriend into his math class. The professor was outraged at this lack of decorum but could say nothing. He’d heard about the elderly professor who gave Uday a low mark and the next day was dragged out of class by the teenager’s bodyguards and beaten with cricket bats.

The professor started the class. Within a minute, Uday was up, walking his girlfriend to the door. “For the offense of boring me,” Uday warned the teacher as he reached the door, “when I become the ruler of Iraq, I’m going to have you shot.”

The Party Animal By 1984 disturbing stories of the 20-year-old Uday’s violent behavior were leaking out from his inner circle. There was the time Uday made a group of gypsy singers stand in a line, drop their pants, and sing while he fired a machine gun over their heads until they urinated from fear. Others whispered of the time Uday and his cronies had ridden to the resort town of Habanniya on their BMW 1000 motorcycles, abducted a newlywed off the street, and raped her. Afterward the disgraced girl threw herself from the seventh-floor balcony of Uday’s hotel room and died at her husband’s feet. When he cursed Uday, he was arrested for treason and executed.

Uday was spinning out of control. There was no mistaking him in the clubs and hotels of the city. The muscular six-foot psychopath with the Miami Vice stubble favored gold-rimmed, mirrored Ray-Bans, seven-inch Cuban Montecristos, and jewel-encrusted Rolex watches.

It was the look he was sporting on a crisp, dry winter day in 1987 when he drove around the campus of the University of Baghdad looking for action. He caught sight of Nahle Sabet, a pretty architecture student from a respected middle-class Christian family he’d noticed when he occasionally attended classes. He cruised past her slowly now, honking, trying to get her attention. She refused to even look in his direction.

Two days later Sabet was a few blocks from her family’s home in a Baghdad suburb when a Mercedes sedan screeched to a halt on the sidewalk in front of her. Two men in dark suits got out and identified themselves as secret police. They told her she was wanted at headquarters for questioning and led her into the car.

Headquarters turned out to be a farm Uday owned several miles from Baghdad. The frightened girl was hustled into a drawing room, where Uday sat at an antique desk. “You’re very lucky,” he said. “I’ve chosen you as my new girlfriend.”

“Strip her,” Uday ordered his guards. The burly men pounced on her and ripped at her clothes until she was cowering naked on the floor. Uday towered over her, unrolling his favorite wire cable. “First I will beat you. Then, if you’re good, I’ll allow you to please myself and my men.”

It took Uday and his men almost three months to break Sabet’s spirit. Then Uday tired of her. Her face was ruined; her body was a mass of bruises. He had the guards take her out to the kennels where he kept his attack dogs—Rottweilers, Dobermans, and great danes. He’d told the keepers several days before to stop feeding them.

Nahle Sabet was then smeared with honey and tossed into the kennels, where all evidence of the crime disappeared.

Qusay the Snake Fittingly, The Godfather is the Hussein family’s favorite movie. In real life Qusay seemed content to play Michael to Uday’s Sonny. The more outrageous Uday became, the more Qusay kept to the shadows. “In Iraq we call him the Snake,” says Entifadh Qanbar, who once partied with the same crowd as the brothers. “He never comes out of his hole.” But Saddam, impatient with his older son, began slowly giving Qusay various security assignments, expanding his role as he demonstrated his competence and ruthlessness.

Through it all Saddam took great care to keep his sons out of harm’s way during Iraq’s bloody war with Iran from 1980 to 1988. Uday and Qusay were considered far too valuable to be risked in the brutal conflict that cost Iraq 600,000 casualties. The closest either of them ever got to the fighting was a staged event in 1982 in which Uday and Saddam toured the front. Saddam asked for volunteers to lead an attack. Uday immediately volunteered, jumped into a waiting helicopter, and took off, rockets firing. Unfortunately, he mistakenly fired on and injured a number of his own troops.

Qusay, on the other hand, always seemed too careful to make mistakes. Uday watched jealously as his younger brother climbed the ranks of the Iraqi hierarchy. Uday kept himself busy running Iraq’s Olympic committee and its national soccer team, where he penalized poor play by publicly shaving the players’ heads. He also used the 10-story Olympic headquarters as a personal clubhouse to front his lucrative black-market business in cigarettes, whiskey, and currency.

In the fall of 1985, Adnan Khairallah, Saddam’s cousin and one of the army’s most popular generals, called up Qusay and asked if he’d like to go duck hunting at his private camp near the Tigris River. With Qusay’s star rising, the general was eager to cultivate the younger man’s favor.

The caravan of Mercedes and army trucks arrived at the general’s camp before dawn. Leaving their vehicles parked among the small town of silk tents with their priceless Persian carpets, Adnan, Qusay, and their retinue trekked out into the marshes to wait for the ducks.

When the hunting party was several hundred yards away from the camp, they heard a great roar. Flying toward them was not a flock of fowl but a helicopter, its runners customized to hold rocket launchers. At the helm was Uday.

Uday banked his helicopter and, with the rising sun at his back, dived on the island and fired his missiles at the general’s tents. Two fireballs mushroomed from the camp. “He was laughing and was happy,” Abbas Jenabi, a former Uday aide, recalls. “He even destroyed some of their cars.”

Despite such provocations, the brothers maintained an unwavering public image: confident Uday and his adoring younger brother. Privately, the relationship was developing into something else: a bitter rivalry. One that turned more dangerous with each new day.

Disrespecting the Pig Roast There is an idyllic garden island in the middle of the Tigris River called the Mother of Pigs. After taking power, Saddam reserved its use for members of his inner circle. Saddam’s food taster and head procurer, Kamel Hannah Jajo, had one of the most elegant villas. Unfortunately for him, his next door neighbor was Uday Hussein.

In November 1988, Jajo threw a party on the island and invited the cream of Baghdad society. The guest of honor was the wife of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

All night Uday brooded, listening to the party only yards away. He downed tumbler after tumbler of Cognac and whiskey while fiddling with a battery-powered knife called a Magic Wand. When Jajo shot his AK-47 into the air—a form of celebration commonly known as “Arab fireworks”—Uday had had enough.

They returned with Jajo’s reply. “He says he takes orders only from the president.”

Enraged, Uday charged into the party next door, waving the Magic Wand. Jajo stood on a table, gun in hand.

Uday went berserk, slashing the man’s throat with the electric blade. Jajo crumpled. Uday took out his pistol and shot his father’s aide in the chest, killing him instantly.

Uday immediately realized he had crossed the line. He ran back to his house and locked himself in the bathroom. His bodyguards ran after him and pounded on the door, begging him to come out. Terrified, Uday swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. When the guards broke through the doors, Uday threw up the pills all over their shoes.

Saddam hurried to the scene from the palace in slippers. The dictator confronted the woozy, cowering Uday in his upstairs bedroom. “If you’re found guilty of murder,” Saddam promised, “you will die like any other criminal.”

Investigators, sensing Saddam’s anger subsiding, found Uday innocent of the charges. Saddam ordered Uday to Switzerland until the scandal died down.

Saddam had had enough. He ordered Qusay to investigate Uday’s shady business dealings. It was exactly the break Qusay had been waiting for. “Qusay is a very cruel person,” says Amatzia Baram, an Iraq specialist at the University of Haifa. “For years he’s been gearing himself to become number one.”

Qusay peeled away the layers of Uday’s corruption. Its true depths came to light when Saddam toured Uday’s garages in a multistory fortress. As Saddam strolled the immaculate, polished concrete-floor rooms, he found a fleet of 30 Mercedes, plus Ferraris, Lamborghini Countachs, silver Maserati turbos, Jaguars, and dozens of Porsches. The centerpiece of the fleet was a Mercedes 500 fitted with a huge Rolls-Royce engine.

Saddam turned to his retinue. “Torch them,” he commanded. As Saddam strolled to his waiting motorcade, his son Uday’s priceless toys exploded inside the garage.

In exile, Uday held his own. One night at a disco, he grabbed at a woman,, causing her boyfriend to intervene. Uday pulled out his gun and threatened to kill him. Cash smoothed Uday’s indiscretions, but the Swiss wanted the Iraqi gone. A plane was dispatched by Dad to bring the errant son home.

Blood in the Sand In January 1991, the largest invasion force since World War II assembled in the Arabian desert to drive the Iraqi army from Kuwait. Saddam had been systematically looting the gulf emirate since invading it the previous August. Though the main prize was Kuwait’s multibillion-dollar oil industry, the Hussein family also divided up the country’s other material wealth. Uday sent his teams to steal every luxury car that could be found and brought to his farm. He later made $125 million from their resale.

The party didn’t last long. When the U.S. and allied forces began bombing Baghdad, the Husseins became scarce. Saddam and Qusay slept in a different palace every night. Uday moved to his farm, far from the danger of stray bombs.

By mid-March Saddam’s million-man army had been crushed. It was anticipated by the U.S. that defeat would topple Saddam and his rule. Though revolts broke out throughout the country, Saddam and Qusay’s secret police crushed all dissension. Instead of weakening the regime, Saddam was able to spin the defeat into a great anti-American crusade.

After the Gulf War ended, the U.N. dispatched inspectors to Iraq to assess the extent of Iraq’s advanced weapons development. Saddam appointed Qusay chief of concealment.

But Uday couldn’t help butting in. Early in 1996, he drove a metallic-gold 928 Porsche past a barracks of the Special Republican Guards. At that moment weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine, was standing curbside, preparing to lead his team inside. Uday roared past Ritter, screeched to a halt, and backed up until he was beside him.

“I’m alpha dog. I don’t put up with that stuff,” Ritter recalls. “So I’m standing there, staring this car down. Then the window rolls open, and there’s this idiot wearing these mirror sunglasses.”

The two men glared silently at each other. Uday revved the engine. Ritter refused to blink.

The inspection team monitored all communications and later unscrambled Uday shouting on the phone about a “crow,” the name the Iraqis had for the weapons inspectors. “This goddamn crow is humiliating Iraq!” he screamed. “He embarrassed me in front of my soldiers! I want his ass. I want him gone!”

That night Uday’s security goons made their move to kidnap Ritter. Luckily, they were not only inept but also drunk. As they stepped from their SUV, one of them shot himself in the leg with his automatic weapon. His partner attacked the wrong vehicle, drawing his gun on a group of terrified Iraqi citizens.

Uday’s attempt at foreign relations became a popular joke in the bazaars and cafés of Baghdad. Worse than with all his previous transgressions, he was now an embarrassment to his clan. This line no self-respecting Iraqi could cross and survive.

You Die, Uday The Tigris River makes a lazy S through downtown Baghdad. At the western end of the S lies the Mansour district. On Thursday evening, December 12, 1996, three groups of idlers carrying sports bags waited at an intersection. Just before 7:30, they saw the two white Mercedes led by Uday’s Porsche.

Uday had been on a roll. Months earlier Uday’s brothers-in-law, Saddam and Hussein Kamel, had defected with their families to Jordan. Pardoned by Saddam and nagged relentlessly by their wives, the brothers finally consented to return to Iraq if their safety would be guaranteed. However, no sooner had they crossed the border than Uday separated his sisters from the two traitors and had the two men confined at their family home in Baghdad. Hours later Uday and a unit of Iraqi Special Forces attacked the Kamel house, killing the two brothers, their father, their sister, and her three children.

The convoy slowed at the T intersection with Baghdad International Street. The “idlers” yanked AK-47s from inside their sports bags. The intersection exploded with gunfire. The gunmen, from a shadowy Muslim group named al-Nahdah—“the Awakening”—had tracked Uday’s movements for weeks. The gunmen sprayed bullets at all three cars.

One of the assailants saw Uday crouching underneath the dashboard and let loose a barrage at the Porsche. Although the bulletproof sides of the car deflected some of the fire, Uday was hit eight times. Another gunman ran up to administer the coup de grâce, but his rifle jammed.

As the members of al-Nahdah melted from the streets, the most hated man in Iraq lay bleeding. Rushed to the hospital and operated upon by Cuban-trained doctors, Uday barely survived, temporarily paralyzed from the waist down and impotent. While he was still unconscious, dark rumors began to sweep the upper ranks of the military that Qusay, or even Saddam, might have ordered the hit.

When Uday woke from surgery, he found his entire family waiting by his bed. Saddam was furious. One by one, he pointed out the greed and incompetence of family members threatening his regime. Finally, he turned to Uday. “And what kind of man are you? Are you a politician, a traitor, a people’s leader, or a playboy?”

The only person that Saddam did not criticize was Qusay. The once adoring brothers now stared at each other with undisguised hatred. One of them would have to go.

Murder on a Grand Scale Early on the morning of April 26, 1998, Iraq’s largest prison went on alert. Saddam’s troops took up positions outside the towering walls of Abu Ghraib, a lockup for 15,000 men. Qusay Hussein was en route for an unscheduled inspection.

As the armored convoy wheeled through the prison gates, Captain Khaled Aziz al-Jenabi, a 20-year veteran in the secret police agency, the Mukhabarat, sat in his cramped office. “I was supposed to be on vacation this week,” he muttered to a colleague. He reluctantly went outside to meet the VIPs.

The 33-year-old Qusay stepped from the armored limousine into the bright sunlight dressed in starched military fatigues and dark aviator sunglasses. He wasted no time. “We must do something about the political ward. It is far beyond capacity,” Qusay said to Colonel Hassan al-Amiri as Captain al-Jenabi and others stood by. “I want the prisoners executed by the end of the day tomorrow.”

Knowing that questioning Qusay was grounds for arrest, torture, even death, the warden tried to stall the prince. “We don’t have the facilities for such a job, or the manpower,” he said, unable to believe they were being forced to massacre more than 2,000 political prisoners.

Qusay was unmoved: “Start at 6 a.m. Work all day; you can get it done. I’ll leave a squad of my own men to assist you.”

At daybreak the horror began. Faced with death, the prisoners screamed and cried and shit themselves with dread. The guards selected 10 men at a time and beat them down the stone steps into the execution room, a long hall lined with sandbags. The condemned were tied to poles, and cloth bags were pulled over their heads. Some said a final prayer to Allah for their souls.

A guard stepped to the first man and shot him once in the skull. He stepped down the line to the next and did the same. The bags over the men’s heads kept blood and brain matter from spraying everyone. In an adjoining building, five gallows stood. As soon as the nooses were looped around a man’s neck, he’d be kicked off the platform. As the next group was led in, some of the previous victims were still jerking and kicking.

Qusay instructed his guards to make sure every guard and officer in the prison got blood on his hands.

It was more than a mass murder—it was a mass initiation. “This is like a criminal family,” says Frank Anderson, a former CIA chief of the Near East?South Asia desk. “The way one establishes bona fides is by participating in a crime. Everybody in that country who has any political power has been implicated in the crime.”

The Dictator and the Beachball Qusay is now the second most powerful man in Iraq. No longer in Uday’s shadow, he has gained authority and confidence. The battle between brothers continues to escalate.

Uday struck back where he knew it would hurt Qusay the most. Just as he had lusted for Porsche 928s, Uday knew Qusay had a passion for thoroughbreds. “Uday went to Qusay’s farm, had poison put in the food, and threw it to the horses,” says former Uday aide Abbas Jenabi. “He killed two of the best racehorses in the world.”

But the game has moved beyond sibling rivalry: Qusay has bigger battles on his mind. Since the end of the Gulf War, Iraq has been hamstrung by a U.S.-led embargo and occasional sorties by allied air forces enforcing no-fly zones or bombing factories where it is suspected that teams of Iraqi scientists are building weapons of mass destruction.

Despite a massive air raid in the opening days of the new Bush administration, it is believed that Qusay has successfully concealed Iraq’s weapons development. Hidden in secret locations are anthrax, chemicals for nerve gases, and the ballistic missiles to deliver them.

Then there is the “beachball,” an Iraqi euphemism for the biggest prize: a nuclear weapon. Naturally, Saddam and Qusay occupy two chairs on the country’s nuclear commission. In this role the probable future president of Iraq occasionally summons Iraq’s top nuclear scientists to his office, where he has them stand at attention before his desk. “So, gentlemen,” Qusay asks politely but with deadly seriousness at the start of every meeting. “When can you give us the beachball?”

Damn straight. It is sickening that Uday is so damn full of himself that he thought he could pull his usual shit in Switzerland.

He makes Alex Kelly (rapist expatriate extraordinaire) look like a choirboy.

...talk about your charmed upbringing.

Thanks for the ping, sweetliberty.

I have never heard or read anything about Saddam's immediate family. Maxim isn't part of my usual reading fare, so I guess I missed this article.

For all the barbarianism of Saddam, you'd think he would have been quite the disciplinarian with the kids (Saddam to Uday: "Uday, I told you to take out the trash three times today and it still sits here stinking up the room like some American Great Satan festering garbage. For that, I will have all the hairs on your right forearm pulled out one by one by tweezers.") But, I see the kids are just a chip off the old block.

I agree - this should be required reading for all Americans, at least for all of Congress.

Congress can't be bothered. They're too busy being obstructionists, at least the Rats are. Did you hear about them blocking yet another Bush judicial appointee? And it was strictly because of her record of supporting parental notification for abortion.

Here's a half-assed theory for you...do you suppose President Bush signed CFR knowing he'd need the political goodwill down the road (I'm thinking specifically of Senator McCain's recent statement supporting Bush's justification for wanting to oust Saddam)? I would hope not, but it isn't completely out of the realm of possibility.

I don't know what to believe any more. I am so discouraged by the shameless displays of childishness and dishonesty and just plain hatefulness in some cases that I see in Washington that it is hard to believe that many of them are thinking about the American people or the future well-being of our country at all.

I am so discouraged by the shameless displays of childishness and dishonesty and just plain hatefulness in some cases that I see in Washington that it is hard to believe that many of them are thinking about the American people or the future well-being of our country at all.

If my theory did happen to be true, would that reflect poorly on Congress for forcing Bush into the predicament, or on Bush for opting to subtly erode one of our liberties for the greater purpose of security? I'd tend to place the blame on Congress, but knowing President Bush he would take full responsibility for signing CFR. I would certainly hope so, anyway.

They are all accountable for their part. In some issues there may be no real right or wrong answers, just differing points of view, but these aren't the issues that are generally the ones that are critical to our survival or prosperity. There are other issues where there are clearly right and wrong answers and I think that those who know that what they're doing is wrong and do it anyway are more accountable than those who do wrong believing that they are doing the right thing. I don't really know where this issue would fit within that framework.

U.S. Beachballs - such a beautiful thing.

How appropriate - you play with beachballs in the sand, there's lots of sand in the desert. I say, let's give 'em a few beachballs like this to play with.

Surf's up, boys!

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