We know about the raid that found the Iraqi dictator in December 2003 Saddam Hussein only thanks to the Americans’ account of it. Rereading them today, the news from that day has an air of victorious naivety, because Iraq had not yet become the carnage that would keep American soldiers stuck fighting a guerrilla war of ferocious diehards for another seven years. But that day the details were like those of an adventure film. Him, hidden in a hole in the earth, not far from the magnificence of the palaces of the presidential estate in Tikrit which he had built in neo-Babylonian style, including Italian marble. The thirteen previous operations to capture him all failed. The code name “Red Dawn”, taken from the title of a film featuring Patrick Swayze in the role of the leader of a band of rebels. Delta Force troops. The photo of the dictator with the beard and long hair who reappears on the ground among the American boots after nine months in hiding, and ends up in all the news.
Iraq 20 years later: the war that changed the United Kingdom and marked the end of Blair
by Enrico Franceschini
Small miracles
We know little about that fact from the Iraqi side, but now a small miracle is happening. A Kurdish director found the man, a Sunni farmer and hunter, who kept Saddam Hussein hidden for eight months and constructed a beautifully shot documentary, Hiding Saddam. A Kurd at the helm means a member of the ethnic minority that Saddam tormented during his regime with endless persecution, which even went as far as the extermination of villages with chemical weapons. The fact that a Kurd interviews the Sunni Arab farmer who protected Saddam, in the al Door area, near Tirkit, that is to say in the deep province that supported the dictatorship, is a sign that Iraq, fractured by twenty years of violence perhaps begins, and little by little, to recompose. And this is the first half of the miracle. “I fled to Norway because of Saddam, it was strange to chase this story for ten years,” he says Halkawt Mustafa al Friday. «When I started reading the articles first about the manhunt, and then about Saddam’s death, I realized that I couldn’t not tell about it. I had read a newspaper that mentioned it Alaa Namiq, the farmer, but said nothing else. It took me a long time to find him, and then to convince him to tell me this story. He didn’t want to, he was devastated by his time in prison. He is only alive because the prison torture scandal emerged, otherwise I think he would have died. I’m the first person he opened up to, he never wanted to tell this story, not even to his wife. He was in a state of depression. Then it became important for him too to speak.”
From Mussolini to Saddam: when dictators kill friends
by Enrico Franceschini
The hunter
Alaa Namiq, who today has the confident face of someone who belongs perfectly to his environment, is the center of the story. «A man standing in a chair with a noose around his neck does not die because of the noose. He dies because he is alone. This is how I felt the entire time I hosted Saddam”, he explains to Friday by answering our questions via email. The fact that he agrees to speak in front of a camera and a magazine about what he did, in a Shiite-majority Iraq, where Shiite militias take violent revenge on anyone they suspect of having nostalgia for the dictator, is the other half of little miracle. «There is an Arab saying that says: “If a guest comes to your house you never know what he will bring to your future”. For us the guest must be honored and we never ask how long he will stay. Saddam told me that he had a dream in which he was clearly told to go to the Door and look for the Namiq family. So he left and arrived first at my older brother’s house, to which he asked who was “the hunter” in the family. And he told him that he was the younger brother, that is, me. He wanted the hunter because for him the connection with nature was very important, and because hunters are very skilled at hiding and hiding something in nature”, says Alaa. It is clear why Saddam chose him: Alaa is a son of central Iraq where the Sunnis, when he was in power, dominated despite being a de facto minority. He knows every inch of the landscape of marshes and fields around Tikrit and he also knows the human landscape, made up of clans and family alliances or enmities that must be navigated with skill: one denunciation is enough to ruin you.
Were you not afraid? «I had no choice. Saddam had arrived asking to stay just one night, but then the American soldiers arrived in the city, I couldn’t ask him to leave. He was sitting next to me and there were hundreds of soldiers looking for him: what should I have done? Did no one notice that you had an extra mouth to feed at home?«This thing worried me a lot. I didn’t sleep peacefully for eight months. I was under stress, terrified that the American soldiers would arrive. I wouldn’t have known what to do. And he ate a lot! Meat above all. And it was a problem, also because I was wondering how to feed a president, I didn’t feel up to it, everything had to be perfect. At the beginning it wasn’t easy.”If the Americans hadn’t captured him, what would have happened? «He wanted to return to power and was looking for a way to do it. He knew that the American soldiers would be killed and that they would leave sooner or later. He thought he could return in his place, only he didn’t know how long it would take him.”
The eternal exile of Iraqi Jews
at Shady Hamadi
The prophecy
Alaa had dug the hole in the ground where Saddam was later caught, but it was only used when American raids got too close. On normal days, he says, the dictator with a 25 million dollar bounty on his head worked with him in the fields, that was the best cover: a farmer with his back bent in a remote area, invisible to planes and satellites. He kept very little contact with his aides, so as not to be intercepted. Even now he happens to regret that period with Saddam. “I continue to feel close to him, it seems to me that I continue to live with him.” And as a leader, do you regret it? The question is delicate, he takes a turn to answer. «Everything he told me about the future of Iraq came true. Or rather: everything he said would happen if they deposed or killed him became reality. It’s one of the reasons why I tell this story: Saddam was right about the instability that would follow, about the arrival of the Islamic State, about the disaster we still experience today.”
On the Friday of 5 April 2024
#farmer #hid #Saddam #Hussein
– 2024-04-08 11:59:21
