Raid on the Sun

Chapter 1

Terror of the Tigris

Prepare whatever resources and troops you must to terrorize the enemies of God. —the qur'an


Before the birth of its First Citizen, the flat, dusty village of Al Auja, just south of Tikrit and a hundred miles north of nowhere in the Mesopotamian desert, was best known to historians as the site where the vicious fourteenth-century Tartar chieftain Tamerlane chose to erect his infamous pyramid of skulls, a towering obelisk of death fashioned from the decapitated heads of thousands of slaughtered Persian soldiers. In an ironically unconscious homage, Saddam Hussein, who didn't know Tamerlane from Timbuktu, would one day commission his own public sculpture in Baghdad featuring two gigantic arms bursting through the sand brandishing a pair of crossed scimitars that crowned a similar pyramid of skulls fashioned from the helmets of thousands of slaughtered twentieth-century Persian soldiers, known now in modern times as Iranians.

It was into this savagely unforgiving desert that young Saddam, whose name in Arabic means to "strike" or "punch," was thrust on April 28, 1937, fatherless and penniless, to be reared in a mud-and-straw house on the kiln-hot banks of the Tigris, without electricity, running water, or paved roads. Hussein would never forget his Tikriti roots. As though drawing inspiration from the land itself, he was mesmerized as a village boy by the country's ancient glory when it sat at the head of the Fertile Crescent, long before Abraham marched south from Ur in northern Mesopotamia to lay claim to the tribal homeland of the Semites. Much more than Iraq's later Islamic heritage, divided between the Sunni sects of the north and Shia of the south, Saddam identified with the country's pre-Arab Babylonian roots. He revered the great Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar, whose golden age of prosperity had transformed ancient Baghdad into an intellectual center of trade and the arts, renowned throughout the Old World for such wonders as its legendary Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Even more impressive to young Saddam, Nebuchadnezzar was the last Middle Eastern ruler to conquer the Jews. Following a revolt in Palestine in 587 b.c., Nebuchadnezzar's army had destroyed Jerusalem, razing the First Temple and bringing an end to the kingdom of Judea. Thousands of Jews were marched in bondage back to Mesopotamia in what would become known in Talmudic history as the Babylonian captivity.

Hussein loved to recount the historic event to colleagues. And he would boast that someday he would follow in the footsteps of the legendary king to rule both the Middle East and Israel. Indeed, years later, after he had assumed regal-like powers, Hussein would embark on a Baghdad beautification program of public artworks, broad boulevards, and thousands of transplanted palm trees meant to evoke the great age of Nebuchadnezzar. Hussein named his sons Udai and Qusai, not names associated with Mohammed but with pre-Islamic Mesopotamia.

Maintaining fantastic dreams was especially important to young Saddam, who found his own reality nearly unbearable. Iraq was a tangled nation of tribes and clans and ethnic divisions. Where one was born and to what clan, or extended family, was extremely important, even in the poorer classes of Iraqi society. Surnames often derived from the village of one's clan. Most families could trace their forbears back for generations. Saddam's parents were not particularly distinguished members of either of their clans. Al Auja and Tikrit were considered backward, rural villages, and Tikritis of little account. Saddam's father's clan, the al-Majid, was considered lower caste.

Whether dead or just plain deadbeat—no one has ever seemed able to say for sure—Saddam's biological father left his son to be raised by his mother, Sabha, of the Tikriti Talfah clan, and a series of uncles, including one from his father's al-Majid clan named Ibrahim Hassan, who, regrettably, was better known to locals as "Hassan the Liar." (Tellingly, Saddam Hussein ultimately took his name from neither family—Talfah or Hassan.) Ibrahim eventually married Sabha and, with no trade and plenty of time, amused himself by beating young Saddam with a stick whenever he was bored, which, unfortunately for the boy, was often. He grew up mostly alone, forbidden to play with the other villagers, whom his uncle called "brigands," and who, in return, would taunt him for not having a "real" father. Saddam pined for the day he could escape Tikrit for a better world—a Mesopotamian world. In the meantime he bided his time, spending most days sitting by the side of the dirt road at the head of the village next to a fire pit with a red-hot poker, which he would stab into the stomachs of hapless village dogs that wandered by. This early cruel streak might have been occasion for worry, but on the sun-blasted streets of dirt-poor Tikrit it hardly went noticed.

Saddam finally caught a break when, in the fall of 1955, his mother's more prosperous brother, Khairallah Talfah, an ex-army officer turned hotheaded Arab nationalist and teacher, took Hussein along with his own son to Baghdad to attend secondary school. Saddam had just turned eighteen. Baghdad would change him forever.

In the early 1950s the city was a hotbed of ethnic and political radicalism. Iraq, which in Arabic means "the edge," was an amalgam of deeply divided tribes and ethnicities, the remnant of the defunct Ottoman Empire and Britain's Central Asian empire, which, following World War I, had been carved up into Iran and Iraq without taking into account traditionally and ethnically bound territories. Thus, most of southern Iraq, nearly 100 percent Shi'ite, had more in common with Iran than its Sunni "brothers" in the north. In fact, Iranian Shi'ites still revered two southern Iraqi cities as sacred religious shrines, including Najaf, the burial place of Mohammed's son-in-law, Al, (and the site of the horrendous terrorist bombing of its ancient mosque in August 2003). Meanwhile, distrustful of both the ruling Sunni and the southern Shi'ites were the northern Kurds, who were far closer in history and culture to the Kurdish tribes across the border in Turkey. By the 1950s Baghdad's tangle of ethnic divisions was further complicated by a slew of competing political parties, ranging from the Hashemite monarchists (the royal Arab family that ruled Jordan and whose scion, Prince Faisal, Britain had elected to rule Iraq in its stead), the right-wing Independence Party, and the centrist Liberal Party to the leftist People's Party, the Communist Party, and the secretive, socialist Arab nationalist Ba'th, or "Renaissance," Party.

Despite tutoring by his uncle, Saddam found it difficult to shed his peasant roots in the class-conscious big city, especially the crude accent that marked a rural Tikriti as unmistakably as a Cockney in St. James's Court. He failed to pass the entrance exam to join the prestigious Baghdad Military Academy. The stigma of outcast propelled Hussein, along with many of the city's disenchanted youth, toward the young, rebellious, socialist Ba'th Party. Founded in Damascus by two Syrian intellectuals in the early 1940s, the organization espoused vaguely pan-Arab nationalist and socialist principles similar to Egyptian president Gamal Nasser's Arab Legion. But the party's immediate attraction to Baghdad's frustrated young rebels was its intense hatred of Western colonialism, especially what it saw as its expansionist guerrilla state—Israel.

Hussein hagiographies would later attribute his party association to his newfound belief in Islamic nationalism. In truth, the impressionable peasant's son was greatly influenced by his uncle Khairallah, who having been jailed by the British for his part in Baghdad's short-lived pro-Mussolini revolt in 1941, was the closest thing Saddam had to a hero. Khairallah mentored him in the tradecraft of Iraqi politicians: manipulation, intrigue, and anti-Semitism. Not one for mincing words, Khairallah's collective wisdom would later be published for the benefit of future Ba'thi in his book Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies.