vomited, and Saddam raised a hand to his own throat, feeling a sudden chill. “God is great,” he whispered. He said it again, louder: “God is great!”
Uday meanwhile strolled over to where the cops were sitting on the second gunman. As he approached, more police moved in around him, forming a ring that screened him from the view of the cameras. He held out his hand, and an officer passed him a wooden baton.
“Please,” the gunman begged. “Mercy! In the name of God, mercy!”
“Hold him tightly,” Uday said.
T HE L IBRARY OF A LEXANDRIA
A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE
Saddam Hussein
This page is currently protected from editing to deal with repeated acts of vandalism . To suggest changes, please contact an administrator.
The factual accuracy of this article is disputed . Please see the discussion on the talk page.
Saddam Hussein Abd al Majid al Tikriti (born April 28, 1937), a Sunni Muslim , is an Iraqi labor organizer, philanthropist, bestselling novelist, and reputed gangster and bootlegger. Though he emphatically denies having anything to do with the manufacture or sale of alcohol , he is more coy on the question of whether he has other ties to organized crime . To date, he has been indicted nine times on various felony and racketeering charges. He has never once been convicted.
EARLY LIFE
Saddam was born in the village of Al Awja , near Tikrit . His father, Hussein Abd al Majid , died while Saddam was still in the womb, so Saddam was raised by his maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah , in Baghdad .
In 1957 Saddam became an organizer for the Baath Labor Union , which represented construction, garbage collection, and river transport workers in Iraq and Syria . The Arab Bureau of Investigation suspected that the Baathists were also engaged in smuggling and other illegal activities, but did little about it. At the time, the ABI was far more concerned with investigating corruption among two other, much more powerful Iraqi labor unions: the Royal Order of Hashemites , which was controlled by the Hashem family , and the Free Officers Union , led by retired Iraqi state police colonel Abd al Karim Qasim .
THE LABOR DAY MASSACRE AND THE RISE OF THE BAATHISTS
On the morning of July 14, 1958, the Hashem clan leader Faisal II was on his way to a Labor Day celebration when he was approached outside his Baghdad home by a group of men in police uniform. Faisal, his bodyguards, and several other Hashem family members were ordered to stand against a wall with their hands raised; when they did so, they were machine-gunned. By the time the real police arrived on the scene, reports were flooding in from all over Iraq of other Hashemites being murdered or simply disappearing.
It was widely believed that Abd al Karim Qasim had organized the massacre, but local law enforcement would do nothing against him, and federal agents found their own investigation stymied at every turn. Meanwhile, the surviving Hashemites decided to take matters into their own hands. An orgy of violence ensued, with the Hashemites taking the worst of it; by the end of the year, most members of the clan had either died or left Iraq.
In October 1959 masked gunmen ambushed Qasim as he left the Free Officers Union Hall. This was only the most recent of a series of attempts on Qasim’s life, and like the previous attempts, it failed. What was different was that this time the attackers were not Hashemites, but Baathists. Five of the six gunmen were killed by Qasim’s bodyguards; the sixth escaped. An hour later, Saddam Hussein showed up at a nearby hospital with a bullet wound in his leg. He claimed to have been mugged.
Qasim went into seclusion and Baathists began to die in large numbers. Saddam boarded a plane to Egypt , where he remained for the next four years. In interviews he has said he went to Cairo University to study law, “something I had long planned to do,” and that his departure from Iraq on the eve of a major gang war was a coincidence
Uday meanwhile strolled over to where the cops were sitting on the second gunman. As he approached, more police moved in around him, forming a ring that screened him from the view of the cameras. He held out his hand, and an officer passed him a wooden baton.
“Please,” the gunman begged. “Mercy! In the name of God, mercy!”
“Hold him tightly,” Uday said.
T HE L IBRARY OF A LEXANDRIA
A USER-EDITED REFERENCE SOURCE
Saddam Hussein
This page is currently protected from editing to deal with repeated acts of vandalism . To suggest changes, please contact an administrator.
The factual accuracy of this article is disputed . Please see the discussion on the talk page.
Saddam Hussein Abd al Majid al Tikriti (born April 28, 1937), a Sunni Muslim , is an Iraqi labor organizer, philanthropist, bestselling novelist, and reputed gangster and bootlegger. Though he emphatically denies having anything to do with the manufacture or sale of alcohol , he is more coy on the question of whether he has other ties to organized crime . To date, he has been indicted nine times on various felony and racketeering charges. He has never once been convicted.
EARLY LIFE
Saddam was born in the village of Al Awja , near Tikrit . His father, Hussein Abd al Majid , died while Saddam was still in the womb, so Saddam was raised by his maternal uncle, Khairallah Talfah , in Baghdad .
In 1957 Saddam became an organizer for the Baath Labor Union , which represented construction, garbage collection, and river transport workers in Iraq and Syria . The Arab Bureau of Investigation suspected that the Baathists were also engaged in smuggling and other illegal activities, but did little about it. At the time, the ABI was far more concerned with investigating corruption among two other, much more powerful Iraqi labor unions: the Royal Order of Hashemites , which was controlled by the Hashem family , and the Free Officers Union , led by retired Iraqi state police colonel Abd al Karim Qasim .
THE LABOR DAY MASSACRE AND THE RISE OF THE BAATHISTS
On the morning of July 14, 1958, the Hashem clan leader Faisal II was on his way to a Labor Day celebration when he was approached outside his Baghdad home by a group of men in police uniform. Faisal, his bodyguards, and several other Hashem family members were ordered to stand against a wall with their hands raised; when they did so, they were machine-gunned. By the time the real police arrived on the scene, reports were flooding in from all over Iraq of other Hashemites being murdered or simply disappearing.
It was widely believed that Abd al Karim Qasim had organized the massacre, but local law enforcement would do nothing against him, and federal agents found their own investigation stymied at every turn. Meanwhile, the surviving Hashemites decided to take matters into their own hands. An orgy of violence ensued, with the Hashemites taking the worst of it; by the end of the year, most members of the clan had either died or left Iraq.
In October 1959 masked gunmen ambushed Qasim as he left the Free Officers Union Hall. This was only the most recent of a series of attempts on Qasim’s life, and like the previous attempts, it failed. What was different was that this time the attackers were not Hashemites, but Baathists. Five of the six gunmen were killed by Qasim’s bodyguards; the sixth escaped. An hour later, Saddam Hussein showed up at a nearby hospital with a bullet wound in his leg. He claimed to have been mugged.
Qasim went into seclusion and Baathists began to die in large numbers. Saddam boarded a plane to Egypt , where he remained for the next four years. In interviews he has said he went to Cairo University to study law, “something I had long planned to do,” and that his departure from Iraq on the eve of a major gang war was a coincidence
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