One a murderous smuggler, the other the ruthless heir apparent, both Uday and Qusay were vital cogs in their father’s terror machine.
Uday Saddam Hussein
Uday, Saddam Hussein’s oldest son, who has died aged 39, was a flamboyant character at one time thought of as his father’s successor. But his erratic and violent behavior soon dispelled these thoughts, even if he did manage to carve out for himself a distinctive and feared place in Iraq’s clannish political world.
Uday was 15 when his father became president of Iraq in 1979. He later claimed that his father had taken him to watch some of the executions of disgraced party members which accompanied his rise to power. Indeed, he boasted that his indulgent parent had allowed him to execute some of the prisoners himself as “training’’ for a party activist. Whatever the truth of this, there was little doubt about the violent streak in his character.
His first public position was chairman of the Iraqi Olympic committee in 1987. He used the post to involve himself in a number of aspects of Iraqi public life, setting up a ministry of youth to promote himself and, ostensibly, the aspirations of a new generation of Iraqis. In the autumn of 1988, however, his temper got the better of him when he murdered one of his father’s closest aides, Kamil Jajo, in a fit of rage. Saddam Hussein’s anger and the fact that the murder was committed in public, at a party attended by many from outside the inner circle, meant that there was no attempt to cover it up. On the contrary, Uday was sent to prison, where he languished for a month or so until his father pardoned him, purportedly because of the overwhelming number of pleas for clemency.
Uday was sent into exile in Geneva, but was soon expelled by the Swiss authorities for possessing an illegal firearm. He returned to Iraq in time for the invasion of Kuwait in 1990, where he and his associates were prominent in the extensive and systematic looting that accompanied the Iraqi occupation. It was after Iraq’s expulsion from Kuwait in 1991 that he became more visible as a public figure in Iraq. In large part this was due to his ownership of Babil, a newspaper which was highly irreverent by Iraqi standards, criticizing government officials, poking fun at the workings of the bureaucracy and filled with gossip about members of the elite. At the same time he saw the opportunities offered by his privileged position and by the economic restrictions of the sanctions regime.
His smuggling and racketeering operations increased, extending throughout the Iraqi economy into the media, food processing, transport and — most lucratively of all — the covert export of oil. This led him into conflict with other members of the ruling family, most notably Wathban Al-Tikriti (one of Saddam’s half-brothers) and Hussein Kamil Al-Majid (a son-in-law of Saddam). Heading an organization called the Saddamists Union, which provided perks for senior officials and spawned a militia of young thugs, called Firqat Fida’iyyin Saddam (Legion of Saddam’s Fighters), Uday became an increasingly dangerous figure. When he shot and wounded Wathban Al-Tikriti at another public occasion in 1995, he seems to have precipitated his brother-in-law Hussein Kamil’s flight into exile. Upon the latter’s ill-advised return to Iraq in 1996, Uday was one of the family members who organized his murder.
But in December 1996 his violent past caught up with him. There was an attempt to assassinate him as he drove through Baghdad. He survived, but was severely wounded and it took more than a year for him to appear in public again. When he eventually did so, he was obviously disabled, but this did little to dampen his ambitions to extend his business and smuggling empire. In May 2000 he ensured that he was elected to the National Assembly, although his enthusiasm for the place fell dramatically when his father refused to allow him to be elected its speaker. Thereafter, he concentrated on self-enrichment, resentful of his younger brother Qusay’s elevation to the role of heir, but powerless to prevent it. Mistrusted and indeed hated by much of the political world in Iraq, and regarded as unreliable by his father, Uday discovered the limits of parental indulgence.
Uday had a $15-million reward on his head as No 3 on the coalition’s list of 55 most-wanted men from the ousted regime — only Saddam and the younger brother Qusay ranked higher. The brothers met their end during a firefight in Mosul Tuesday, after US forces, acting on a tip, stormed the villa where they were hiding. They are survived by their mother and sisters. The fate of their father is not known.
Qusay Saddam Hussein
The Younger son of Saddam Hussein, Qusay Saddam Hussein, who has died aged 37, was being groomed by his father as a fitting successor. As war loomed in 2003, it was Qusay whom Saddam Hussein placed in command of the central military region, charged with defending the heartland of the regime in Baghdad and Tikrit. Prior to that he had been entrusted with organizing the personal protection of his father, as well as with overseeing Iraq’s complex intelligence apparatus.
He thus embodied the dynastic principle behind Saddam’s rule of Iraq, as well as the practical principle of only trusting close family members with the key levers of power.
He was 13 years old when his father became president of Iraq in 1979. Less volatile than his older brother Uday, and much less visible in the playgrounds of the elite in Baghdad, Qusay’s qualities of systematic and ruthless intelligence had been recognized by his father who, it is said, saw in Qusay a reflection of his younger self. It was for this reason that in 1988 he was appointed deputy director of Al-Amn Al-Khass (the Special Security Organization), a very powerful security agency in Iraq, closest to the president and responsible for his personal security. By 1992 he had become director of the organization and his responsibilities had widened. Among these was the supervision of the concealment operations committee (COC), the body charged by Saddam Hussein with concealing as much as possible of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction program from the eyes of the UN weapons inspectors (Unscom). Set up soon after the weapons inspectorate was established in 1991, its mission was to hide documents and equipment relating to Iraq’s WMD capabilities, to lay false trails and to persuade the UN that Iraq had nothing more dangerous than its acknowledged conventional armaments.
During the 1990s, initial ostensible cooperation with Unscom gave way to a game of hide-and-seek, brought to an abrupt end when the activities of the COC itself looked as if they were about to be investigated in 1998. With the brief resumption of the weapons inspections under Unmovic in 2002 and 2003, the COC took up where it had left off, guided as ever by Qusay. By this stage, however, he had become even more powerful in the Iraqi state. He was commander of the Special Republican Guard. Its units had been formed in 1991 to defend the regime and to deter the regular army, including the Republican Guard itself, from trying to threaten the president. In 1996, following the abortive CIA Iraqi National Accord coup plot of that year, Saddam appointed Qusay head of the special committee which brought all the branches of Iraqi intelligence together to investigate the conspiracy.
In his thoroughness, his mistrust of all those he interrogated and his ruthlessness in dealing with suspects, he showed himself well able to handle the ferocious task with which his father had entrusted him. His use of exemplary cruelty and his contempt for those he had in his power were strongly reminiscent of the methods and attitude of his father, from whom he had learned his statecraft.
He was able to deploy these qualities further when Saddam allowed him, also from 1996, to chair the National Security Council, the supreme oversight body, bringing together all of Iraq’s five security and intelligence organizations, as well as the staff of the president himself. From this position, he was able to investigate all branches of the Iraqi state, to build up information on all the economic dealings of the Iraqi elite, including those of his brother and other members of the president’s family, as well as to establish close links with key units in the Iraqi armed forces.
His election in May 2001 to the regional command of the Baath Party signaled something that many in Iraq had long suspected: Qusay was being transformed into the crown prince of Iraq. However, as events demonstrated, this position was only as secure as the short-lived dynasty itself.
Qusay wed the daughter of a respected senior military commander. The couple, who later separated, had two daughters. A teenage boy killed with the brothers may have been Qusay’s son.
- Arab News Opinion 24 July 2003
