Raid on the Sun Read Online Free PDF Page B

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, Ali (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