Final showdown for Saddam, the great escaper

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S first political act was the attempted assassin- ation of the president of Iraq. It failed. Saddam was shot in the leg but still he managed to swim across the great Tigris river and escape.

It is typical of Saddam's career. There is blood everywhere, but Saddam is still alive. He had got away with it.

That was in 1959. Saddam Hussein has been getting away with it ever since. He got away with two more violent coups d'etat; he got away with a pointless war with Iran which cost a million lives; he got away with gassing his own people; he got away with invading Kuwait; he got away with frustrating the United Nations for more than a decade.

Now with Gulf War Two - the son of the mother of all battles - under way, and with the Bush regime committed to regime change in Iraq, if Saddam Hussein is going to get away with it this time, it will be his most extraordinary escape of all.

His earliest memories are, probably, of getting away with it. He was born in humble surroundings in 1937 in the village of al-Awja, near the town of Tikrit, 100 miles to the north of Baghdad.

His father deserted his family at an early age, and his mother, Subha, remarried a cousin, Ibrahim Hassan. Ibrahim beat Saddam, called him "son of a whore" and sent him, aged six, to steal sheep and chickens from the neighbours.

Saddam became a "son of the alleys", and got away with selling his stolen goods at Tikrit market.

Aged ten, an uneducated Saddam fled his violent childhood to live with his uncle, Khay-rallah Tulfah, in Baghdad. Khayrallah was a former army lieutenant who had spent time in jail for his part in an attempted coup against the king.

In Baghdad, Saddam, a boy from the sticks, was mocked by his city-wise contemporaries as he sold cigarettes from a tray in the street to survive. The boy from the rural mud-huts dreamed of power, but his lack of education meant he was rejected by the Baghdad military academy.

But, unbeknown to young Saddam, the tide was beginning to turn his way. Modern Iraq had been created when the British withdrew in 1932, leaving a king ruling the country. But the Iraqi peoples were growing restless, none more so than the Sunni Muslims.

There are three main ethnic groupings in Iraq. The Shia Muslims are the majority (60 per cent); the Kurds in the north account for 20 per cent, and Saddam's Sunni Muslims comprise the rest.

In 1957, the Sunni Muslims were organising themselves into the Ba'ath political party and Saddam and his uncle, Khayrallah, signed up. In 1958, the last king of Iraq was forced to flee his burning palace; in 1959, Saddam and other Ba'ath Party members took a pop at President Abdel Karim Qasim.

The President survived. Saddam escaped by swimming the Tigris (he later hired a Hollywood film producer to make a movie of his drama), and he remained in exile until 1963.

Then the Ba'ath Party successfully removed Qasim from power, and Saddam was able to return. He married his cousin, Sajida, a schoolteacher who was Khayrallah's daughter, but Qasim quickly regained power and the bridegroom was imprisoned.

Saddam escaped in 1966, became assistant general secretary of the party, and in 1968 was part of the Ba'athist coup that swept Qasim from power for good. Saddam's cousin, Ahmed Hasan al-Bakr, became the new president. Saddam was his deputy.

In the Cold War, Saddam started playing the West against the Soviet Union as both sides were eager to get their hands on Iraq's oil. Using methods peculiar to himself, he also started developing Iraq, building hospitals, roads and schools.

Because of his illiterate childhood, he instituted a reading programme for every Iraqi - the penalty for non-attendance was three years in jail. (Saddam has many hang-ups from his childhood. Another is that because he went shoeless in his youth, he now owns dozens of pairs of shoes handmade in Italy and France - indeed, he shares a favourite Parisian shoemaker with George Bush).

In 1979, Saddam eased al-Bakr to one side and assumed the title of president (he also appointed himself lieutenant-general and field marshal to satisfy another youthful hang-up about his rejection from the military academy).

During his 11 years in power, al-Bakr had withstood at least seven attempted coups. Saddam learned to stay alive. Whenever he leaves his palaces, six lookalikes drive off in different directions in black Mercedes. On the rare occasions he goes abroad, he takes a chair with him - just in case the one supplied has a bomb beneath it.

But he already knew that the best way to stay in power was through fear. He immediately summoned the 350 leading faces in the Ba'ath Party to a conference in Baghdad. With a video camera running, Saddam sat at the high table in his military uniform, smoking a fat cigar and weeping.

He had heard about a Syrian coup, he said. He wheeled out an informer who, under torture, started reeling off the names of those involved.

As the names were called, armed police escorted the suspects out of the hall. Saddam wept crocodile tears as his victims - including his family and friends - disappeared to their deaths, their mouths taped up so they could not protest their innocence.

When the charade was over, the 300 who remained in the hall rose to applaud their glorious leader. There had been no Syrian plot; many among the 60 dead were totally loyal to Saddam, but those who remained (and those who saw the videotape) were under no illusions about where the power in Iraq now lay.

Despite this brutality, the West actively courted Saddam and his oil. His peculiar social reforms had moved the country forward and he was regarded as modern and secular compared to the prehistoric Islamic extremism of his next-door neighbour, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had come to power in Iran in 1978.

To keep the Ayatollah at bay, the West armed Saddam. Britain sold him Bailey bridges. France sold him Mirage jets. Germany sold him poison gas. Russia sold him tanks. The US provided him with satellite intelligence.

In 1980, Iraq invaded Iran. Saddam told his troops it would be "the lightning war", but it dragged on for eight years. One million people died.

In 1984, for the first time, Saddam used chemical weapons against the Iranians. The West began to realise what a thoroughly unpleasant horse it had backed, and slowly withdrew, leaving Iraq economically crippled.

Seeing the weakness, the Kurds in northern Iraq, who had long dreamed of independence, rebelled. Saddam crushed them, killing tens of thousands in a "scorched earth" policy which culminated, notoriously, in mustard gas, sarin and tabun being released on the Kurdish town of Halabja in 1988. About 5,000 died instantly. Thousands more suffer long-term health problems.

The United Nations began to express its reservations, but right up to 1989 the US continued to supply Saddam, even with the nerve gas sarin. In return, the US got to learn about Saddam's next adventure, but it mistakenly believed that he would only dare snatch a little piece of land from Kuwait.

But Iraq was broke, and Kuwait was demanding repayments of the money it had loaned Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. Saddam also blamed Kuwait for over-producing oil and so keeping the price low on the world market.

He also accused Kuwait of sucking out oil from beneath Iraqi soil. So, in August 1990, he marched in and snatched the whole state.

And, effectively, he got away with it. He was forced to retreat, but the US-led coalition failed to enter Iraqi territory.

The US hoped that the various rebellious factions within Iraq would finish the job for them, but when the Shia Muslims in the south rose up, Saddam put them down with fearsome brutality, killing tens of thousands.

He has been bombed by the USAF and the RAF enforcing the no-fly zones practically every week since; the UN sanctions have killed about 500,000 of his people, but he has been able to build luxurious palaces and keep himself well-shod in expensive shoes; the weapons inspectors have spent eight years turning over his secrets, but still he has chemical and biological capability and nuclear know-how.

Even his own family has revolted. His sons-in-law fled with his daughters to Jordan in 1995 but he enticed them back, promising safety. As soon as they returned, the sons-in-law were killed, their bodies being dragged off with meat-hooks through their eyes (such is the inventiveness of Iraqi torture techniques that it appears that Saddam revels in causing pain: he uses methods such as pulling out fingernails and putting electrodes on penises, and he also uses electric drills to mutilate hands and scissors to cut through the necks of ministers who have offended him).

And yet, time after time, he has got away with it all. This time, such is the might and determination ranged against him, it seems impossible that he can escape once more - but for a man who has been implicated in the deaths of more than a million people, it is probably just a question of how many he can take with him.

Violence from the beginning

Born: April 28, 1937, near Tikrit.

Family: never knew his father; brought up by his violent stepfather and his politically-active uncle. His mother Subha, whom he idolised, is buried in a shrine dedicated to "the mother of militants".

Married: first to Sayda, his cousin, and then Samira Shahbander.

Children: Uday, 40, killed Saddam's valet in a drunken fight in 1988, and he was crippled in 1996 in a botched assassination attempt. Uday chairs the Iraqi Olympic Committee, which has its headquarters in a fortified building in Baghdad which has cells in it. He is currently under investigation by the International Olympic Committee for violence against athletes who fail to win medals. Uday also owns most newspapers and TV stations in Iraq and runs the journalists' union, which recently voted him "journalist of the century" for his "innovative role, his efficient contribution in the service of Iraq's media family, and his defence of honest and committed free speech".

Qusay, 37, and without Uday's drunken tendencies is regarded as Saddam's successor.

Saddam's two daughters lost their husbands in 1995 for crimes of disloyalty.

Education: Baghdad Secondary School, Cairo College of Law (in exile), Al-Mustansariyah University, Baghdad.

Career: 1957: joined Ba'ath Socialist Party; 1959: failed coup attempt and forced to flee; 1968: helped lead July 17 revolution and became vice-president; 1979: became president; 1980: invaded Iran; 1990: invaded Kuwait.

20/03/2003