Saddam : His Rise and Fall Read online

  If Saddam was frustrated in his political ambitions, the bloody clashes that continued between the Baathists and communists after Qassem’s overthrow provided him with a more familiar outlet through which to channel his frustrations. The street fighting that took place in Baghdad during the coup itself had claimed anywhere between 1,500 and 5,000 lives. For several weeks after the coup, house-to-house searches were undertaken in pursuit of communists and leftists. The searches were carried out by the National Guard (Haras al-Qawmi), the paramilitary wing of the Baath, which had joined in the street battles that eventually led to Qassem’s defeat. The national guardsmen wore green armbands and carried submachine guns and, armed with lists of communist sympathizers, some of which had been provided by the CIA, they spent the first few weeks of the Baath Party’s new government indulging in what can only be described as an orgy of violence.

  Despite the assurances that the Baathists had given to the CIA that all those detained would be given a fair trial, many of those held by the National Guard were tortured and then summarily executed. Sports clubs, movie theaters, an entire section of Kifah Street, and a number of private houses were requisitioned by the National Guard to be used as prisons and interrogation centers. The liquidation of the communists in Baghdad was in many respects a forerunner of the anti-Leftist purges that were to occur in Chile and Argentina in the 1970s and 1980s. Saddam’s elite Republican Guard units were to behave in a similar fashion following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 when they commandeered government buildings and palaces and turned them into makeshift interrogation and torture chambers. The official Iraqi records claimed that 149 communists were executed, although it was generally accepted that hundreds, if not thousands, of communists suffered excruciating deaths at the hands of their Baathist tormentors. As often happens in such circumstances, many of those killed were either innocent, or the victims of local vendettas that had nothing to do with political ideology.

  Dr. Ali Karim Said, a former Iraqi diplomat who was a leading figure in the Baath during this period, said that many innocent Iraqis died in the government-orchestrated purges of the communists. “I still remember when my brother…, who was then a deputy commander of military intelligence and one of the main interrogators, came to my house and threw down his machine gun on the floor and said in a pained voice: ‘I cannot go on, because they arrest and send simple men to the execution courtyard. It is unacceptable and unbearable. They all shout: Please Mohammed, for your sake, Ali, and then they shout: God is Great three times before they die.’ My brother continued: ‘If you oppress these simple and helpless people they will definitely turn to the communists.’ After this episode I…opposed all execution orders.”26

  One of the most notorious torture chambers was located at the aptly named Palace of the End (Qasr al-Nihayah), so called because it was the site where the monarchy had been wiped out in 1958. One of the most notorious practitioners of the torturer’s art was Nadhim Kazzar, who would later become Saddam’s head of national security. Even by the brutalized standards of modern Iraq, Kazzar’s reputation for sadism stood out. Kazzar had joined the Baath Party as a student in the 1950s and quickly rose through the ranks. A hard and ascetic man, Kazzar was one of the party’s few Shiites to hold a position of power. He came into his own following Qassem’s overthrow when he revealed himself to be a fearsome persecutor of the communists. Kazzar’s reputation for indulging in gratuitous violence was such that he even succeeded in terrorizing members of his own party. He had a particular liking for conducting interrogations personally and for extinguishing his cigarette inside the eyeballs of his victims.27 Most of Kazzar’s atrocities were committed in the Palace of the End, which the Baathists managed to turn into a laboratory for developing the mechanics of interrogation and where they were able to refine a range of abominable practices that were later to become standard once Saddam was in power. Hanna Batutu, the distinguished historian on modern Iraq, has, for example, managed to piece together from official government files a horrifying account of what took place at the Palace of the End under Kazzar and the Baathists in 1963:

  “The Nationalist Guard’s Bureau of Investigation had alone killed 104 persons. In the cellars of the al-Nihayah palace, which the bureau used as its headquarters, were found all sorts of loathsome instruments of torture, including electric wires with pincers, pointed iron stakes on which prisoners were made to sit, and a machine which still bore traces of chopped-off fingers. Small heaps of blooded clothing were scattered about, and there were pools on the floor and stains on the wall.”28 This was the work of the party that was to act as the springboard for Saddam’s dramatic rise to power.

  So what was Saddam’s role in these atrocities? There are few precise details of Saddam’s whereabouts at this time. The only comment Saddam personally made concerning this period related to the internal battles that were taking place within the Iraqi Baath Party. “There was an atmosphere of terror, and blocs and groupings were formed in the party; obstacles were placed in the way of comrades who wanted to work along proper party lines.”29 As Saddam was later to make Kazzar his security chief, giving him a free hand to institutionalize the diabolical interrogation methods he had developed at the Palace of the End, it is more than likely that the two men became acquainted during their eradication of the communist opposition. Saddam, fresh from his meetings at the American embassy in Cairo, may even have been able to provide some names and addresses of communist sympathizers in Baghdad. Some of Saddam’s surviving contemporaries from this period have suggested that, apart from his mundane duties at the Central Farmer’s Office, he became closely involved in organizing the National Guard, the Brownshirts of the Baath Party. He visited detention camps in Baghdad and helped to supervise the “punishment” of communist detainees.30 Some of the detainees were held at the Fellaheen, or peasant, camp, which provides an intriguing insight into the likely nature of Saddam’s duties at the Central Farmer’s Office. Saddam’s task, it appeared, was to improve the lot of the peasants, so long as they were peasants who did not have communist sympathies.

  As a reward for his diligence in tracking down communists, Saddam was appointed to the Baath Party’s intelligence committee, which assumed overall responsibility for the interrogations. In the 1990s an Iraqi communist who was tortured at the Palace of the End claimed that Saddam had personally supervised his interrogation. “My arms and legs were bound by rope. I was hung on the rope to a hook on the ceiling and I was repeatedly beaten with rubber hoses filled with stones.”31 Saddam has been accused of disposing of the bodies of his torture victims by dissolving them in bathtubs of acid. He was said to have experimented with the various torture techniques developed by Kazzar, sometimes offering the victims a menu from which they could choose their preferred method of interrogation. In the Iraqi-made autobiographical film, The Long Days, Saddam comments on his participation in the events of 1963, saying, “We must kill those who conspire against us.”

  A more mundane sketch of Saddam at this time was provided by Baha Shibib, who was a member of the Baath Party leadership in Baghdad in 1963 and briefly served as foreign minister. “In the greater scheme of things Saddam was pretty insignificant,” said Shibib. “He was involved with the interrogations, but he was not involved in policymaking. When he came back from Cairo, his main concern was to get a job that paid a monthly salary. He came to us begging for a job, so we gave him something with the farmer’s bureau. But the main thing I remember about Saddam then was the way he was always hanging around Bakr. He was the prime minister and clearly had lots of influence and Saddam, as a fellow Tikriti, was always hanging around his office, trying to ingratiate himself. He hung out with Bakr’s bodyguards, trying to play the tough guy. But no one took him too seriously. We were far too busy with other matters.”32

  Fortunately for the Iraqi people, this particular Baathist reign of terror was short-lived. Factional infighting between rival Baathist groups resulted in the party being ejected from power in No
vember 1963, thereby drawing to a close, for the time being at least, the gratuitous bloodletting taking place at the Palace of the End. The Baath, which had been the dominant party in the government established by President Arif the previous February, soon fell prey to factional infighting. The main cause of the ideological split was the vexed question of whether Iraq should pursue the stated Baathist objective of pan-Arab unity, and form a federation with either Syria or Egypt, or both. The civilian wing of the Baath, led by Ali Salih al-Sadi, favored political union, especially after the Syrian Baath had staged a successful coup d’état in Damascus in March. Sadi was opposed within the Iraqi Baath, however, by the party’s more conservative, military wing, which favored the traditional “Iraq first” policy. By the autumn of 1963 Iraq’s military establishment had become increasingly irritated by the ill-disciplined behavior of the National Guard, the Baath Party militia, which was being used by Sadi and his gangs of Baathist thugs to intimidate his opponents and persecute the communists.

  In early November the military wing of the Baath conducted a coup of the party’s leadership against Sadi and his associates. Sadi was put on a plane and sent into exile in Spain. The National Guard came out onto the streets in protest and attacked the government’s main Rashid military base on the outskirts of Baghdad. At this point Bakr, who had been attempting to reconcile the ideological differences between the rival wings of the party, called a meeting of the Baath National Command, the party’s governing body, an umbrella organization, which controlled the different national groups, such as the Syrian Baath and the Iraqi Baath. (The individual Baath Party Regional Commands represented the interests of Baathists in their respective countries; thus the Iraqi Regional Command and the Syrian Regional Command were both subordinate to the National Command, which was based in Damascus.) Throughout this period Saddam, more through family loyalty than ideological conviction, supported Bakr, his fellow Tikriti, and soon found himself acting as the prime minister’s de facto personal bodyguard. Saddam was to be found constantly in public at Bakr’s side, armed with a loaded revolver.

  The arrival of Michel Afleq and several other prominent Syrian Baathists to attend the special conference convened in Baghdad by Bakr to resolve the ideological conflict within the Baath did not, however, improve the mood of the “Iraq first” contingent, especially when Afleq, who regarded himself as the figurehead of pan-Arab Baathism, suggested that he should take control of Iraq’s political affairs. With the National Guard continuing to pose a threat to public order, President Arif finally lost patience with the Baath and decided to act. On November 18 he mobilized those army units on whose loyalty he could rely. Several disillusioned military members of the Baath, including General Tahir Yahya, the chief of staff, and Brigadier Hardan al-Tikriti, the commander of the air force, lent their support when Arif gave the order to attack the National Guard in Baghdad. Within hours Arif’s forces were successful and the president was in full control of the city.

  President Arif’s decisive intervention ended the Iraqi Baath Party’s first, brief, flirtation with power. The twelve Baath members of the government were expelled, and replaced by military officers upon whom Arif felt he could rely. Bakr, Saddam’s mentor, was sacked as prime minister and Iraq submitted itself to government by military dictatorship. The National Guard was dissolved and replaced by the Republican Guard, an elite unit in the armed forces that was commanded by a member of Arif’s own tribe. Well armed and stationed strategically near Baghdad, the main function of the Republican Guard was to protect the regime against future coup attempts.

  The disastrous reversal in the fortunes of the Baath Party in late 1963 was not, however, a complete disaster for Saddam Hussein. The peremptory dismissal of not one, but two, sets of party leaders meant that the Bakr faction, which Saddam supported, became the dominant force. During the next couple of years Bakr made his way through the ranks of the Baath Party to become secretary-general of the Regional Command—i.e., the section of the party responsible for Iraq. As Bakr’s position strengthened in the Baath, so did Saddam’s. The full membership of the party that he had acquired in Cairo was finally recognized in Baghdad and he was promoted to the Iraqi Baath Party’s Regional Command in the summer of 1964—according to some commentators, with the backing of Michel Afleq—and used this position to consolidate his control of the party’s internal security. The crisis of late 1963, in which the military wing of the party had colluded with the government to form a military dictatorship, taught the civilian wing of the Baath Party an important lesson, namely that in future they would need to be better organized if they were not to succumb to the superior firepower of the armed forces.

  Salim Shakir, a former general in the Iraqi army who was active in the Baath Party during this period, recalled that Saddam carefully exploited Bakr’s diffident nature to increase his own power base. “Until 1963 Saddam Hussein was nothing more than a gangster. If you wanted someone killed, you called for Saddam. But after Bakr started to move up the party ranks, Saddam was very smart and attached himself to him. Bakr was a good politician, but he was useless in public. He was a backroom operator. He needed someone to carry out his orders, and so he asked Saddam. As a fellow Tikriti he believed Saddam was loyal to him, and so he gave Saddam a lot of responsibility. Saddam was therefore able to use Bakr to strengthen his position in the party.”33

  Saddam now concentrated his energies on improving his social position. He married Sajida, to whom he had been betrothed during his exile in Cairo. Although it was an arranged marriage, the bride and bridegroom appear to have enjoyed a genuine affection for each other. A photograph taken shortly after their nuptials in 1963 depicts an attractive young couple, with Saddam clean-shaven (the trademark mustache had still to make its appearance) and smartly dressed in a dark suit and tie, and a rather serious-looking, dark-haired Sajida wearing a modest dress with a plain floral print. Later Sajida dyed her hair blond after her husband developed a penchant for blond women, but in these early days of innocence they appeared much like any other young couple preparing to tackle the challenges of married life. Even after a couple of murders, a failed assassination attempt and four years’ exile in Cairo, Saddam himself looked far from menacing; he comes across as self-conscious and shy, a fresh-faced young man who seems ill-at-ease in front of the camera lens. Saddam’s social ineptitude was confirmed by one of his Baathist contemporaries who remembered him as being “very shy and introverted.” At social gatherings “he did not say much. When he did speak, though, all he did was express ferociously anticommunist views.” Nor did Sajida herself make much of an impression on Baghdad society. “She looked like her father wearing a wig and, as no one liked her father, people gave her a wide berth.”34

  From the point of view of Saddam’s future career, however, his choice of Sajida for his bride was a good one. Khairallah Tulfah, her father and his uncle, was a close associate of Bakr, even if Khairallah detested the Baath Party’s socialist sympathies. During the party’s first flirtation with power in 1963, Bakr rewarded Saddam’s uncle for his support in helping the Baathists to seize power by making him director general at the Ministry of Education. Saddam’s alliance with Bakr was further strengthened when one of Bakr’s sons married a sister of Sajida, and one of Bakr’s daughters married a brother of Sajida.35 Even at this early stage in the Baath Party’s development, the clannish Tikritis were using the traditional bonds of marriage and kinship to secure their power base in Baghdad.

  Saddam devoted all his energies to building up the Baath Party’s internal security structure, a body that would become one of the main platforms for his own ascent to power. Like many Baathists, particularly those in the civilian wing of the party, Saddam had been appalled at how lack of party discipline had resulted in its expulsion from office in late 1963. With Bakr’s encouragement, Saddam resolved to establish an organizational structure that could deal both with external enemies and internal dissidents. During his Cairo years, Saddam was greatly influenced by Jo
sef Stalin, and studied his life and work. While it is difficult to believe that a mediocre student like Saddam, who spent most of his time running gangs and intimidating opponents, was capable of undertaking a serious study of the Soviet despot, it does seem that some of the more ruthless aspects of Stalin’s philosophy found favor with the Baathist’s apprentice. After the humiliation of November 1963, Saddam was often to be heard uttering Stalinist maxims such as “If there is a person then there is a problem; if there is no person then there is no problem.”

  Saddam was one of a group of committed Baathists responsible for establishing, sometime during 1964, the party’s secretive security apparatus, which was called Jihaz Haneen, or the “instrument of yearning.” Following the coup of November 1963, which had resulted in most of the remaining Baathist leaders—including Bakr—eventually being jailed, Saddam took a calculated risk by remaining in Baghdad, a decision that was contrary to the wishes of the party’s high command in Damascus, which wanted him to flee once more to Syria. Saddam correctly reasoned that he would be regarded as a coward if he left Baghdad, and as a traitor if he sought refuge with a group of foreign Baathists in Syria. Together with some of the few Baathists who had not been jailed by Arif, Saddam set up an underground security force that owed more to the Nazi Brownshirts than the Red Guards in its outlook. The principal aim of Jihaz Haneen was to act as a counterweight to the large number of military officers in the Baath who in 1963 had sided with Arif to expel the civilian wing of the party. With people like Nadhim Kazzar holding senior positions, however, the organization was soon to become one of the most feared security apparatuses in the entire Middle East.