Saddam : His Rise and Fall Read online

  Although the establishment of a monarchy in Baghdad suited the British, it was not popular with the newly liberated citizens of Iraq, most of whom were opposed even to the creation of the new state. When it had first been proposed, in 1919, that the provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra be joined together to form one nation, even the local British administrators argued that it was a ludicrous suggestion. Arnold Wilson, the civil administrator in Baghdad, said it was a recipe for disaster because it meant trying to force three distinct groups—the Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds—to work together, even though it was well known that they detested each other.14 Tensions among the various tribes at that time were so great that in July 1920 the country suffered the greatest revolt in its history. The revolt was caused by a combination of factors, but Britain’s failure to fulfill its wartime promise of allowing the Arab leaders self-determination was a significant factor. As one Arab leader told Gertrude Bell, the British writer, on the eve of the revolt: “Since you took Baghdad, you have been talking about an Arab government, but three years or more have elapsed and nothing has materialised.”15

  The rising, which lasted until 1921, was suppressed, but not before almost an entire battalion of the Manchester regiment was wiped out by Shiite guerrillas. At least ten thousand people died in the revolt and, if nothing else, it persuaded the British that it would be far better to establish a puppet regime to run the country for them rather than burden themselves with the huge cost in men and resources that would be required to subdue the warring tribes. While efforts were made by the rival warlords in Basra and Baghdad to patch up their differences and present the British with a viable, local leadership, the British, mainly through their sentimental attachment to Sharif Hussein, resolved that one of his sons should be made king. Sayyid Talib, the preeminent local leader of Basra, was the only politician who had any realistic claim to leadership of the country. He received widespread support from tribal leaders when he toured the country campaigning under the slogan: “Iraq for the Iraqis.” As it was Britain’s intention to legitimize Faisal’s accession by means of a plebiscite, the emergence of a genuine, secular contender caused alarm in the British government. The crisis was resolved, however, by the resourceful Sir Percy Cox, the British Resident in Baghdad, who invited Talib to afternoon tea at the British Residence to discuss his plans. When Talib arrived at the residence, Sir Percy was nowhere to be seen, and so he was entertained by Lady Cox. As he left the residence after the tea party, Talib was arrested by one of the other guests, who was acting on the orders of Sir Percy. Talib was then deported to the island of Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in the Indian Ocean, leaving Faisal free to ascend the throne, his coronation taking place in Baghdad on August 23, 1922.16

  The establishment of the monarchy in Iraq, consequently, did not enjoy the most promising of starts, and the British acquired a well-deserved reputation among the country’s new citizens for double-dealing. Faisal was a weak king who was served by a number of weak governments that never properly established their nationalist credentials. The British, who showed more interest in the newly discovered oil fields around Mosul than the internal politics of their newly created state, established two Royal Air Force squadrons on the outskirts of Baghdad and Basra as a deterrent against any future tribal revolts. Faisal’s cabinets were filled with a group of former Ottoman officers who had fought with the British in the war. Although membership of the cabinet was changed frequently in an attempt to placate the complaints of genuine Iraqi nationalists, the outlook of the government remained the same.

  The opportunity for the nationalists to enforce the changes that had been denied to them in the settlement of 1922 did not arise until the outbreak of the Second World War. Faisal died in 1933, to be replaced by son Ghazi, a Sandhurst-educated homosexual who, despite making populist noises, was incapable of ousting the British from their positions of influence, to the immense irritation and frustration of Iraq’s emerging governing classes. By 1941, after Hitler had conquered most of western Europe, a group of Iraqis led by the pro-Nazi prime minister Rashid Ali, who was backed by four colonels known as the Golden Square, decided to challenge British influence in the country by attacking one of the RAF bases on the outskirts of Baghdad. Having committed himself to driving the British out of Iraq, Ali appealed for German support. The Germans were, however, slow in responding, and the British were able to crush the revolt easily. Rashid Ali and some of his supporters managed to flee the country, but other participants, including Saddam’s uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, were rounded up and punished. The four colonels who had supported Ali were hanged and their bodies publicly displayed outside the Ministry of Defense building in Baghdad, as were some of the other ringleaders. Others were jailed and thrown out of the armed forces. Khairallah, who had been a willing participant in the revolt, was stripped of his army rank and jailed for five years.

  Both nephew and uncle had changed a great deal by the time that Saddam and Khairallah were once again reunited in Tikrit. Khairallah was bitter and vengeful after his treatment by the British. Apart from having to serve his jail sentence, Khairallah had also lost the social status that went with his rank as an officer in the Iraqi armed forces. After his release from jail, the cashiered Khairallah found himself a post teaching at a local private school where, no doubt, he was able to disseminate his uncompromising nationalistic, and anti-British, views among the impressionable young minds of his students. A former Iraqi pupil who attended the school at the time it was being run by Khairallah recalls that he was “a very tough man, a Nazi and a Fascist. All the pupils were in awe of him, both because of his record in fighting the British and because of his political views.”17

  The young Saddam was in awe of his uncle’s heroic exploits in the 1941 revolt, and Khairallah’s new position as a schoolmaster added to the attractiveness of him moving to Tikrit. During his uncle’s enforced absence, Saddam had graduated with full honors in the art of being a street tough but, thanks to the capriciousness of his stepfather, the boy was completely illiterate. For most boys of Saddam’s low social standing, learning how to read and write was not high on their list of priorities when they could better amuse themselves by stealing from their neighbors or beating up and intimidating those who caused them offense. And Saddam would have happily continued to live a life of random thuggery had it not been for his desire to emulate his heroic uncle and fight for the liberation of his homeland from its foreign oppressors.

  A career in the armed forces was about the only avenue open to someone of Saddam’s class to improve their social standing; not only were they poor peasants from the provinces, but they were also Sunni Muslims, who in the new Iraq were regarded as a minority sect by the more populous, and politically influential, Kurds and Shiites. The ambition of any young Iraqi with military pretensions was to enroll at the prestigious Baghdad Military Academy, established by the British to produce a well-trained, and loyal, cadre of officers. The tradition of young Tikriti men joining the armed forces can be traced back to Mawlud Mukhlis, who was born in Tikrit and made a name for himself during the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks in the First World War. After the creation of Iraq, Mukhlis became a close confidant of King Faisal I and vice president of the Senate under the monarchy, and he used his considerable influence to appoint young Tikritis to senior positions in the armed forces and the police, a practice that was continued by his protégés, thereby creating, by the late 1950s, a powerful Tikriti clique at the heart of Iraq’s military and security establishment. Saddam, who had already acquired some of the more aggressive attributes necessary for a career devoted to the art of making war, aspired to join the elite at the Baghdad Military Academy. Unfortunately for him, he had no formal qualifications and no realistic prospect of acquiring them so long as he languished at Al-Ouja.

  Exactly how the ambitious young nephew came to be reunited with his embittered and disgraced uncle in Tikrit is another episode in the life of the young Saddam that has become cluttered with an array of fa
nciful and highly imaginative folktales. A commonsense explanation would be that Khairallah who was, after all, the boy’s foster father, had offered to help the boy obtain a proper education. His sister Subha, who had her work cut out simply keeping her growing family above the subsistence level, would have jumped at the prospect of having one less mouth to feed. And Hassan al-Ibrahim, while perhaps ruing the loss of the boy’s cheap labor to run his unedifying errands, would be relieved at the prospect of this particular cuckoo being removed from the family nest.

  Throughout his career Saddam has been well aware of the enormous importance of propaganda and the cult of personality. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the official accounts of Saddam’s life provide an altogether more lurid description of how he came to leave the family home to be reunited with Khairallah. The account provided by Fuad Matar (for example) in his officially sanctioned biography is filled with drama.

  According to Matar (who was, after all, only repeating what he had been told by Saddam himself) Saddam’s family wanted him to become a farmer and believed there was no point in him receiving a formal education. But Saddam became interested in the idea of going to school when he met up with his younger cousin Adnan, Khairallah’s son, who told him how he was learning to read, write, and draw. Adnan was Khairallah’s son by his first marriage, which also produced a daughter, Sajida, who was to become Saddam’s first wife. During his imprisonment Khairallah had become estranged from his wife, who moved, with her two children, to her parents’ home in Baghdad. After his release from prison Khairallah remarried, and Adnan and Sajida moved back to Tikrit. Adnan was to become Saddam’s closest childhood friend, and in later life became Iraq’s defense minister, a position he held until he died under mysterious circumstances in a helicopter crash. In 1947 Saddam was so impressed by what his young cousin had told him that he resolved to travel with him to Tikrit to attend the village school. This, according to the official biography, was Saddam’s “first act of rebellion,” as his family remained convinced that education would be a waste of time for their brutish boy.

  “When everyone was asleep, he [Saddam] left the house and walked through the dark until he reached a place where some other relatives worked. They were very surprised by his sudden appearance, but understood once he had explained that he wanted to attend school in Tikrit against his family’s wishes. The young Saddam was greatly encouraged by these relatives. They gave him a pistol and sent him off in a car to Tikrit. There he was welcomed by other members of his family, who applauded his decision. After completing his first year at the school, he moved to Baghdad with his maternal uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, who had looked after him because his father had died before he was born. He completed his primary education at schools in Baghdad and entered the secondary stage.”18

  Even in a lawless community like rural Iraq in the 1940s, the idea of giving a boy of ten or so a gun to ensure that he gets his own way seems more than a little farfetched. Modifications to this stirring account have, on occasion, graced the pages of the government-controlled Iraqi press, the main alteration to the narrative being that Saddam walked on his bare feet to Tikrit, rather than taking a taxi, an embellishment designed to portray his heroism in an even more romantic light. Certainly the move to Tikrit should not be underestimated in terms of Saddam’s self-esteem. In rural Iraq men generally take their surname from their birthplace, so that technically his name should be Saddam Hussein Al-Ouja, whereas he persists to this day in being known as Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti, an altogether more cosmopolitan nomenclature.

  Saddam’s education was not an experience, at least to start with, that he relished. It could not have been very enjoyable for the rough, almost feral, street child from a poverty-stricken village, who did not even know how to spell his name, to be thrown in with a group of five-year-olds who were better educated. Saddam most likely acquired more psychological scars from the bullying and mockery he suffered at school, even though he was probably better equipped than most to deal with the bullying. Inevitably he got into fights with some of the other boys. Some of these childhood scars ran deep, for in adult life he was said to have returned to Tikrit to exact revenge on his tormentors. Some accounts portrayed him as a high-spirited boy who attempted to charm his better-educated classmates by playing practical jokes on the teachers, such as embracing his old Koran teacher in a deceptively friendly hug and then inserting a snake beneath his robe. A more easily recognizable anecdote about Saddam’s conduct at school was provided by one of his direct contemporaries. “My headmaster told me that he wanted to expel Saddam from school. When Saddam heard about this decision, he came to his headmaster’s room and threatened him with death. He said: ‘I will kill you if you do not withdraw your threat against me to expel me from the school.’”19 The expulsion threat was quietly dropped.

  Saddam received much encouragement from Khairallah and from his younger cousin Adnan, who was three years his junior, to get him through his schooling. After a difficult start, Saddam seems to have settled into the rhythm of the education process. Photographs taken of Saddam at the time show a square-jawed, unsmiling boy with sharp, piercing eyes, a boy who looks well capable of looking after himself. Saddam had to overcome many handicaps simply to attend school, and he was not regarded as a star pupil, although he did have an excellent memory and an almost photographic ability to remember details. The Palestinian writer Said Aburish, another of his apologists, has claimed that “Saddam was an exeptionally intelligent child, a fast learner who was calculating and methodical from the start.”20 This assessment of the schoolboy Saddam, however, was rather undermined by the fact that Saddam was unable to pass the basic requirements of the entrance examination for the Baghdad Military Academy. Nor was there much doubt that Saddam was extremely keen to join the academy. But he was deeply offended by his rejection, and in 1976, after he had firmly established himself in the government, he had himself appointed an honorary general; after he became president, he appointed himself the country’s first field marshal. For good measure he executed by firing squad the son of Mawlud Mukhlis, the legendary Tikriti officer responsible for establishing his kinsmen in influential positions in the Iraqi armed forces.

  Saddam did, however, manage to complete his primary education so that, in 1955, he graduated in Tikrit and, together with his cousin Adnan, moved to Baghdad with Khairallah where the two boys enrolled at the Karkh High School. The move from Tikrit to Baghdad was to have just as important an effect upon Saddam’s development as had the move from Al-Ouja in 1947. Baghdad in the 1950s was a hive of intense political activity and rivalry. This was a period when Arab nationalist sentiment, encouraged in particular by Britain’s withdrawal from empire after the Second World War, believed the moment had finally come to throw off the quasi-colonial shackles that had been imposed after the First World War. The independence movement was best articulated in Egypt by the charismatic leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. His determination to liberate Cairo from Britain’s intrusive sphere of influence helped to create the Suez crisis of 1956, which proved to be the final nail in the coffin of Britain’s imperial pretensions. Nasser’s diplomatic success at Suez reverberated around the Middle East and greatly encouraged other nationalist groups, particularly in Iraq where the monarchy created by Britain in 1922 was still in place and still deeply unpopular. King Ghazi, the only Iraqi king who had had any genuine popular support and who had upset his British overlords as a consequence, had been killed in a mysterious car crash in 1939. The British, and their allies in the Iraqi government, were blamed, rightly or wrongly, for his death. His successor, Faisal II, was only four years old at his accession and the country was effectively run by his uncle, Abdul Ilah, and the veteran Iraqi politician Nuri Said, both of whom were staunchly pro-British. After Nasser’s exploits at Suez, the pro-British sympathies of Said and Ilah were increasingly at odds with Iraqi nationalist sentiment, and in Baghdad numerous political parties sprung up, the mainstay of whose campaign platforms was the overthrow of th
e monarchy.

  The other crucial geopolitical dynamic that had a bearing on the politics of Baghdad in the 1950s was the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower. Not only were the Soviets keen to export their ideology to the Middle East; they were eager to break what they regarded as the West’s monopoly of control over the region’s vast oil wealth. The communist menace was regarded as a very real threat both in Washington, which after American president Dwight Eisenhower’s intervention over Suez, had increased its involvement in the Middle East, and in London, which was still trying to maintain some vestige of control. In 1955 the Iraqi government was instrumental in setting up the Baghdad Pact, a regional defense organization comprising the unlikely alliance of Britain, Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan. The pact’s raison d’être was to confront the Soviet threat, although Nuri Said secretly hoped it would provide Arab opinion with an alternative rallying point to Nasserism. Nasser’s response to the pact was to sign a massive arms deal with the Soviets and the following year to nationalize the Suez Canal. Apart from making Nasser the undisputed champion of Arab nationalism, the pact made the Iraqi government appear the stooge of Western interests.

  As one of the veterans—and in Saddam’s eyes, one of the heroes—of the 1941 uprising, Khairallah was heavily involved in the political currents of the day. Khairallah’s family moved to the Karkh neighborhood of Baghdad, a rough, run-down residential area on the western outskirts of the city. Karkh was a mixed neighborhood of Sunnis and Shiites, and there were frequent outbreaks of violence between the two communities. While working as a schoolteacher, Khairallah was very much involved in political agitation and, not surprisingly, his main political contacts tended to be among those of his own class and background. One of Khairallah’s associates at this time was Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, a Tikriti army officer and the future Iraqi president who would play a central role in Saddam’s rise to power. Bakr was a leading light in the newly formed Baath (meaning renaissance) Party, an Arab nationalist movement that had been formed in Syria in the late 1940s. A radical and secular party, its main goals were the creation of a united Arab state that dispensed with the arbitrary imperialist boundaries that were imposed on the Middle East after the First World War, and a more equal distribution of the vast oil wealth that was starting to transform the economics of the region. Nationalist and patriotic in outlook, the Baathists were the declared enemies of the Soviet-backed communists, whom they suspected of wanting to replace one form of colonialism with another, the only difference being that one emanated from London while the other had its roots in Moscow.