Saddam's demon seed.

Uday Hussein’s many vices and wanton sadism appalled even his father. And one man was on hand to witness it all – Uday’s unwilling ‘body double’

By: Colin Freeman

Photo Of Uday Hussein In Military Uniform.

The siege of the Iraqi mansion lasted five hours, starting with a loudspeakered call to surrender and ending with the crash of missiles from a United States helicopter gunship. By the time it was over, half the house’s wedding cake-style facade was missing, affording the media a unique, through-the-rocket-hole tour when they were finally allowed near it.

Inside we found an elegant inner balcony splintered with bullets, and for anyone with a knowledge of gangster movies, one scene sprang to mind: the closing shots of Scarface, where Al Pacino’s drug baron makes his famous last stand.

“That film was mentioned a couple of times,” grinned Lieutenant Colonel Rick Carlson, commander of a unit involved in the raid, when I put this to him later.

So came the spectacular demise of Saddam Hussein’s notorious sons Uday and Qusay, whose lives resembled a real-life gangster flick, and whose deaths in July 2003 produced one of the few moments of universal good cheer in the ever-mounting gloom of post-war Iraq. For the US military, it was a much-needed morale boost in a steadily fraying mission, netting both the Ace of Hearts and the Ace of Clubs in the “Deck of 55” most wanted. For Iraqis, meanwhile, it meant the passing of two of the regime’s most feared men – in particular Uday, whose psychotic, unhinged brutality made his father look statesmanlike.

Yet as celebratory gunfire erupted over Baghdad, Latif Yahia, a 39-year-old former commando, was one of the few Iraqis who didn’t reach for his Kalashnikov. Not just because he was thousands of miles away in exile in England, where assault rifles are still frowned upon as party poppers, but because he didn’t want to cheer. He wanted to cry.

“The Americans should have taken Uday alive,” he tells me now. “I wanted him to face trial, so that I could tell the world what he had done, all the killing.”
Playboy, murderer, and sadist extraordinaire, Saddam’s elder son left no shortage of people with horror stories to tell in his wake. Yet for Latif, the trauma of his encounter with him was uniquely personal, one that still haunts him every time he looks in the mirror. For back in 1987, after noticing his striking likeness to Saddam’s son, Iraq’s secret service picked him to be Uday’s “fiday”, or body double, a job that involved becoming the living, breathing copy of the nation’s greatest hate figure.
Being the stand-in man on any occasion where Uday feared one of his many enemies might assassinate him was just one of Latif’s occupational hazards. Far worse was the window it gave him into the ruling family’s inner circle, attending Uday’s debauched parties, mixing with his entourage of pimps and thugs, and looking on as his doppelganger rampaged with impunity. And, to his ultimate horror and guilt, sometimes enjoying it.
“Until now, I haven’t slept properly because of thinking about him,” he said. “I am stuck with Uday for the rest of my life, and will probably take him with me to my grave.”
Now, though, 19 years after fleeing Iraq and claiming asylum in Europe, Latif has another chance to give Uday’s crimes an airing, and, hopefully, give his designer-stubbled, Ray Ban-wearing demon a final exorcism.
The Devil’s Double, released this week, is a film loosely-based on Uday’s early life – shot entirely from the point of view of his body double. Coming in the wake of Green Zone and the Hurt Locker, it is the first major Iraq movie to explore life in the ruling clan. And while Uday played no real role in the wider political drama of the war, he proves an illuminating focus point, being in many ways the personification of the regime’s dark side. Addicted to drink, sex and violence in equal measure, he was despised even more than his father – as I myself found when I was a correspondent based in Baghdad after the war.
On the hot July night that news emerged that he had been killed, the Iraqi capital erupted with so much gunfire that I thought a full-scale insurrection had broken out; by contrast, the celebrations when Saddam was caught five months later were more muted.
Iraqis used to tell me that their worst nightmare was Uday inheriting power, a fear that was not without justification, if the words that Latif claimed his employer once said to him are anything to go by: “Just wait till I’m president, I’ll be crueller than my father. You will often remember these words, and yearn for the days of Saddam Hussein.”
Starring Dominic Cooper as both Uday and Latif, the film is directed by Lee Tamahori, best known for his portrayal of violence within New Zealand’s Maori community in Once Were Warriors. The mayhem in that, however, is nothing compared to the savagery in The Devil’s Double. It applies the gangster movie blueprint to an entire country, replacing the Mafia with the Hussein clan, although Uday is far more crazed than anything Coppola or Scorsese have so far conjured up.
In one horrific scene, he uses a carving knife to stab to death Kamel Hannah, his father’s personal pimp, at a party attended by the wife of the recently-deposed Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak. The incident is entirely authentic, according to Latif, save for the minor detail that Uday actually used an electric rose pruner that he had at his side. Even so, Latif says the violence has been toned down.
“The movie shows 20 per cent of what really happened, at most,” he says. “On one occasion, in a jail back in ’91, I remember Uday dealing with a Shia prisoner who had been involved in the uprising against Saddam after the first Gulf War. He said: ‘I won’t kill you by the gun,’ and instead put a drill through his head. When he’d finished, he looked around and said: ‘This is what happens to those who stand up against us.’ They killed half the people in that jail, and put the bodies in among those still alive. Then they released the survivors, just so they could tell other Iraqis what they’d seen.”
Latif first met Uday in 1979, when the two were at the Baghdad College High School for Boys, the country’s answer to Eton. The Iraq of that time was a very different place: Saddam, newly in power, was still relatively popular, having used Iraq’s oil money to create one of the Middle East’s most developed countries, while Baghdad was the region’s party capital, full of bars, discos and nightclubs.
Even then, Iraq’s First Family were a law unto themselves. Latif’s teachers learnt this the hard way when Uday first turned up at school, surrounded by five bodyguards. Having turned a blind eye to his habit of throwing chalk at them during lessons, and parking his yellow Porsche in the school’s basketball court, one teacher finally protested when Uday brought a girlfriend into class. “The teacher told Uday this was forbidden in an all-boys school,” recalls Latif. “He was never seen again.”
A keen painter, Latif won Uday’s friendship after drawing a portrait of Saddam, but knew to keep his distance. When university beckoned, he even switched to reading law when learning that Uday had enrolled on the same engineering course.
Then, one day in September 1987, while serving at the front during the Iran-Iraq war, he was whisked by limousine to a palace in Baghdad, where Uday, sat in a white leather armchair and smoking one of his trademark Montecristo No 6 cigars, told him of the top-secret plan to make him his “fiday”. After all, his father had been using one for years. “I want you to be me. Everywhere, always,” he said. It was an order, not a request. When Latif at first refused, he was thrown for days into a blood-encrusted jail cell with no lavatory. When he still protested, Uday threatened to feed his sisters to his pet dogs.
Thus began his secret service-organised “training programme”. He and Uday already bore a sharp resemblance to each other, with the same round eyes, thick eyebrows and slightly curly hair. But nothing was left to chance. To start, there was cosmetic surgery – a cleft added to the chin, and dental treatment to mimic Uday’s bucktoothed grin, which even gave him Uday’s distinctive lisp as well. To be really convincing, though, he also had to study the unique Uday school of deportment, honing, as he puts it, a “supercilious, dictatorial arrogance”.
How to mimic Uday’s childlike giggle, cocky stride and slovenly manners, always sitting slumped rather than straight up. How to greet people with a studied stare, and make his point by gesturing with a revolver. How to cruise around Baghdad in a different Porsche, Ferrari or Lamborghini every day, which also had to match whichever loud designer suit he was wearing. How to cradle a Montecristo between middle and index fingers, and knock back vast quantities of Dimple, the unsophisticated Scotch that was Uday’s favourite. And how, when attending discos, to up the tempo by blasting a few gunshots into the ceiling. For Latif, though, the hardest part of the fakery was played on his own family. He signed a contract saying he would never, on pain of execution, tell anyone that he was Uday’s double; this included his parents, who were told he had gone missing at the front, and whom he was forbidden from seeing again.
At first, being Uday had benefits. Latif was billeted in a five-star apartment with four full-time servants, its own bar, and a wardrobe packed with Uday’s hand-tailored clothes. He was also introduced to Saddam himself, or a man he assumes was him: one scene in the film shows the Iraqi leader playing tennis with his own double, the two impossible to be tol apart. But the scales soon fell from Latif’s eyes as he saw at first hand Uday’s appalling behaviour, which was normally covered up by Iraq’s state-controlled press.
Saddam’s son ran his own dark empire in Iraq, controlling the lucrative underworld smuggling rackets that thrived during the years of UN sanctions. His vast wealth allowed him to buy hundreds of cars, stashed all over Baghdad in underground garages and torched once the US invaded so nobody else could own them. (Uday employed somebody just to scour the internet for photos of new or collectable cars, which were then placed in a ring binder. He employed his own fisherman and two lion-tamers, too.)
He also ran the Iraqi Olympic Committee – the only one in the world that had its own jail, where athletes who did badly in international contests would be tortured using increasingly elaborate methods Uday had found on the internet. Worst of all, though, was his penchant for kerb-crawling around Baghdad.
Like Uday’s request for Latif to become his “fiday”, proposals of a quick night of romance with the president’s son were not negotiable. Dozens of girls would be paraded before him at the Baghdad Boat Club every night, and most would end up in his bedroom. Those who refused were abducted by his bodyguards and raped, first by Uday, and then by his henchmen. (It’s said he never slept with the same girl more than three times.)
Latif chronicles several such incidents in his book I Was Saddam’s Son, including the events of one notorious night at Habbaniya, a resort in Iraq’s western desert. Spotting a woman on honeymoon, Uday dragged her up to his sixth-floor hotel room, where he beat and raped her.
“Afterwards, he comes grinning out of the bedroom, pours himself a brandy and goes on chatting as though nothing had happened,” Latif writes. “Suddenly, we hear a long shrill scream that goes on forever. I dash into the bedroom, and see the door open to the balcony… she jumped from the sixth floor because she couldn’t stand the shame. What could I have done? Uday’s bodyguards, who almost derived more pleasure from their boss’s acts of cruelty than he did himself, would have killed me.”
So what made Uday so crazy? The Devil’s Double doesn’t dwell on this too much, but Latif has theories of his own. For all that Uday’s childhood was spoilt and overindulged, he points out, it was also traumatic.
Saddam, he claims, inducted Uday into the ways of the “family firm” from a young age, taking him to his first public execution aged just five, and, aged ten, showing him videos of regime opponents being tortured. Living up to family expectations was also hard. After all, when your father has already grabbed the titles of President, High Excellency, and Conqueror of All Iraq, there is very little left to achieve.
“This evil man, this gangster, he would cry like a baby when he was drunk, and talk about how his father ignored him,” says Latif. “He was close to his dad, but after he murdered Kamel Hannah [the pimp killed with a rose pruner], Saddam started favouring his brother Qusay to take over from him. At that time Uday also got rid of all his professional bodyguards, and just had pimps and thugs around him. That made things even worse.”
Things got worse for Latif too, as anger over the gassing of the Kurds in 1988 and disastrous 1991 Gulf War defeat made the ruling family more unpopular. He suffered two assassination attempts during public engagements on his boss’s behalf, nearly losing a finger in a grenade blast. When he returned to Baghdad for treatment, however, Uday’s only concern was that he too may have to forfeit a finger if his double’s digit couldn’t be saved. The film eventually depicts Latif escaping Iraq with one of Uday’s former girlfriends, Sarrab, and as the closing credits point out, “the rest is history”.
Minus his double, Uday spent his final years paralysed from the waist down after being shot while out cruising for girls one day, although even that does not seem to have curbed his lust. When US troops searched his various hide-outs after the war, they reportedly found Viagra, porn movies and an HIV testing kit, as well as millions of dollars’ worth of fine wine and a heroin stash.
Latif, who now lives and blogs in Belgium, joined the exiled anti-Saddam opposition, although to this day, he insists the US-led invasion was a mistake, simply replacing one gangster clique with many. “I knew it would put Sunni and Shia and Kurd against each other,” he says. “Now you have lots of people all wanting to behave like Saddam and Uday.”
Nor does he wish ever to return to his home country, whatever rosy claims are made in the West about it now becoming a democracy. Because from his own bitter experience, the problem is not just the thugs who tend to hog power in Iraq, but the willingness of the people to follow them slavishly.
“The problem is not Iraq as a country, but the people. I am sorry to say this, but if you read the history of Iraq, you will see it has been like this for 7,000 years – that is to say,
a--holes, clapping their hands for anyone, and selling their mothers for money. It will take 50 years, maybe more, to change the place.”

The Devil’s Double opens in cinemas on Friday

Al-Qaeda the biggest Myth built by the CIA.

By: Latif Yahia

Bin Laden did not invent Al-Qaeda, this name for the Jihadist party only came about after 9/11. Al-Qaeda as we now know it was funded, trained and armed by the CIA and serves two purposes, the first is to strike terror into any and all persons and countries that is beneficial to America for sales of weapons, contractors or services. Secondly it draws out those who have ill will against America and befriends them under the illusion of fighting for the same aim, the irony is that they then become pawns for a master they set out to harm, ignorant that their comrades are indeed the enemy. America has an enemy indeed but one of it's own making and choosing.
This is the biggest scandal in the history of the CIA.
with this enemy America now has the means to perpetuate "Terrorism" around the world for the next 50 to 100 years, anything and everything will be blamed on Al-Qaeda or a similar faceless enemy, one that can never be found or fought in open battle, there is only really one other entity that the same can be said of, a Ghost.

{( Mama America )}

By. Latif Yahia

Daddy Bush watching the world

In a few short years we have seen our world change dramatically, irrevocably. We all have heard the reasons given for these changes, the new laws and the lessening of our human rights. I the age of Big Brother, when our bank accounts are scrutinised, telephone conversations monitored and our every movement tracked by CCTV in every street and shop or by following the little footsteps left behind by our mobile phones. How did we let this happen? Instantly, you will pinpoint September 11th 2001 as the day the world changed and indeed it did, but these changes to our lives were happening long before the fall of the twin towers. Technology is not at fault, it is, as it is used. It can have an extremely positive or negative effect dependant on the user. As much as technology can be used to contain and confuse us, to bring us "the official line", there are people out there, journalists, broadcasters and producers who want to show us reality, they show the live footage, the unedited very shocking truth. A truth that cannot be disparaged.

"We Love Iraq" Mr. Rumsfeld meets Saddam in 1983

With new mobile phone technology we are instantly transported, involved in the moment, anyone and everyone is the cameraman and the footage can be as shocking as the Asian Tsunami, or as disquieting as the shadowy underground figures of the London tube bomb survivors filing out of a smoke filled tunnel. It was once the case that everyone in the Mid-East would listen to Western Radio and Television if and when they could. For a long time in many countries it was illegal to do so and this in turn reinforced the belief that everything that was reported on these Western Stations was infallible, undoubtedly true and accurate. But now as I flip between western and mid-eastern channels, I find a disparity, they may be showing the same pictures but the words do not always fit. The mid-east now relies less on western media, it sees it for what it is, controlled and contrived just as our own channels were, giving the "official line" making sure we see it their way. Wars are not just fought on the battlefields; they are fought in your living room, at your breakfast table and on your way to work. There have always been "terrorists" in our midst, it just depended which side you were on and to whom you were speaking. One man's terrorist was another's freedom fighter. Let's look at the who? And moreover the why? Of this situation. Today the terrorists at the top of everyone's lists are Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. All terrorists need funding and although Bin Laden is independently wealthy, he was once trained, armed and supported by America.

The Family Made by the CIA

When the world had two Super-powers, America was only too happy to keep Bin Laden on their books, he was their boy as long as he kept fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. So he did and eventually he won, so why then should he turn against his partner in victory? Another American trainee was Saddam Hussein, again when it was deemed that the then Socialist President of Iraq was somehow a threat to Capitalism, Saddam was trained, armed and supported by America to remove this Socialist threat. Now there is no Socialist threat, the last bastion of Communism is on America's doorstep, Cuba; it is only a matter of time. There is no need to take Cuba by force, Mr. Castro is ageing and the clock is ticking until the gate is open and America will just walk in. This is the "New Empire", each civilisation has had their time in the spotlight and Mr. Bush is gonna make "darn sure" that this is his. Since the conception of America four hundred or so years ago it has needed an adversary. It began with the Native Americans whose presence on their own land was not to be tolerated and still to this day are quarantined on reservations. The next foe to America was Britain, (they have since made up and become rather good friends) and as the British Empire began America refused to be a part of it, after all, they had just fled Europe hadn't they? The Soviet Union was to be America's greatest Nemesis, it went against everything that America stood for and there was no room in this world for two "Super-powers". America fought against it any and everyway that it could, it created Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Mubarak to overthrow their communist leaders in the middle-east and the world was theirs. But now there is no adversary. Or is there? Islam is the new threat to the American way, after all it has communist principles doesn't it? Communal funds, interest free banking, the ideas of shared wealth and that high consumerism is bad for us, not just spiritually but environmentally. In the world of Islam the credo of Richard Greco "greed is good" does not stand. Islam is not perfect but it is the last belief system to have a strong and numerous following and is therefore dangerous. America needs business, capitalism is the life blood of the country. Americans are the highest consumers in the world, but they need us to consume too. We are needed to consume their products; we are invited to indulge in their way of life because there is none better. Buy more than you need, eat more than you hunger for, everything is an excess and it must stay that way because if we don't buy, their economy won't survive. But they also need war and conflict because even though we may buy their cars and their clothes and buy into the lifestyle, the big money is in weapons. Without conflict there is no market for weaponry, no testing ground for new ideas, tanks, and bombs. A famous example of this is during the Iran/Iraq war, America was selling Iran the weaponry and selling Iraq the satellite intelligence on where it was being transported to and stored by the Iranians. Today the Iraqi Army is reformed with American training, weaponry and uniforms; the same applies to the police force. Iraq is paid approximately six dollars a barrel for it's oil, which is shipped to the oil refineries in America, processed and sold back to Iraq at $60 a barrel. This is democracy? It is if the Iraqi government are in agreement. A government for the people, elected by the people. Well some of the people anyway. The "New Government" has managed to sequester more money in their short term than Saddam did during his thirty-five years reign. Saddam may have been a dictator, but each morning Iraq woke with a purpose, each had their job, their business and money in their pockets. Now there are no jobs, no prospects unless you want to work for America. Water is limited and electricity is available to your home for one hour each day. Saddam may have been a tyrant but to most of the Iraqi people now he is a prophet. As America and Britain celebrate a job well done in Iraq, bringing democracy to the Iraqi people wasn't easy. The New Government attend to the matters at hand, how to carve Iraq up; the two main proponents of this course of action are of course the Shia and the Kurds. The logic behind their move is that as both factions have oil in their perceived territories, that they should form federal republics one to the North in what they would hope to one day call "Kurdistan" and the other in the South, suggestions for the new name for this area are varied but all have a common theme, "Islamic Federal Republic of the South of Iraq". Another common theme in this lunacy is that both factions are only too willing to leave Central Iraq barren; there are no common economic policies, no shared governmental funds, and no Central government. It is a free for all, lands grab and all the oil and power that goes with it. The message from Messrs. Bush and Blair is coming loud and clear whether it has been delivered blatantly or subliminally, if you are not white, Christian or western return to your country of origin because it is not safe for you here in the west. Even as I am writing this new plans are being made to revoke the naturalisation/citizenship of British people who have been given a gift of citizenship by the Queen. The argument for the revocation is that when the Queen granted the citizenship she was unaware that they were or would be a threat to Britain and that the revokee's were in fact disrespectful to the Queen. Many of these people are facing death sentences in their country of Origin which was why they fled in the first instance. To return them is actually an act against Human Rights. When you read something about people being issued with death sentences, if you are not middle-eastern or have no experience of the regimes, whether they are kingdoms or republics, it is shocking.

To the Western person to receive a death sentence you must have committed a heinous crime and have been judged by a jury of your peers. This is not necessarily the case in the middle-east, yes there are the murderers, the rapist's etc but also to speak out against the King or the President or a member of government, even local government, can land you with a death sentence. What makes one Dictator different from another? Well, business. Business is the difference between being dragged kicking and screaming into the UN for offences against Human Rights and not. I am not inferring that all countries violate human rights, some have excellent records but there are countries that openly flout their contempt for their citizens or ethnic minorities that nothing is said about and why? Business. I am not talking about corner shops here; I am talking about big mutli-million if not billion dollar business. When countries are involved in big business it doesn't really matter what they are doing behind closed doors, torture, extreme poverty etc. While the business is going on nothing will be said and things can continue as they are, everyone concerned is aware of what is happening, they just choose to ignore it and if questioned on the subject will deny any knowledge. This happens time and time again. Anyone who can speak openly from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait can tell you that this is the situation in their countries, but not many are able to speak freely. Although America and Britain would have you believe that nothing of the sort goes on in these countries, that Saddam in Iraq was the only one, it is not true. As I described earlier when you do business you are a friend and are not held accountable. Further proof of this is the situation of the Kurdish peoples, for many years America, Israel and Britain supported the Iraqi Kurdish in their fight against Saddam Hussein but on the other side of the Iraqi Border with Turkey are 17.5 million Kurdish. These Turkish Kurdish are denied any and all rights to their heritage, language and culture. To acknowledge ones Kurdish origins in Turkey is illegal, many have been imprisoned without trial or hearing, tortured and murdered. {( New Iraq )}

The "Liberation" Dinar an hommage to Mr. Bush

First Iraqi meets Shimon Peres in Israel (never seen before footage) For Peace.
I was the first Iraqi to legally enter Israel in the history of the state for Peace, meets with Shimon Peres President of Israel in the Peres Centre for Peace. Joined by his colleagues from Breaking the Ice, the Sahara peace mission. I and my comrades set out to walk across the Sahara desert from Jerusalem to Tripoli, this is just one of the highlights from that Peace mission and his forthcoming documentary.

The other side of the coin (never seen before footage)
I was with Breaking the ice visiting the Palestinian territories. After we meeting with Shimon Peres, the BTI team went to meet with the Palestinian authority and we visit Yasser Arafat's grave. It is very important to listen to what the representatives of Israel and Palestine have to say, they both say that they want Peace and harmony between the Isrealis and the Palestinians, so who, or what is the cause of the conflict between the two sides and can it be resolved? Once again we see that as individuals we are happy to interact with one another it is only when we focus our attentions on ethnicity, religion or politics we point fingers.

Latif Yahia