Posted on 07/26/2003 3:44:06 PM PDT by Pokey78
Set in woodland southwest of Baghdad, the huge presidential compound of Radwaniyah has been variously described as a palace, a death camp and a secret centre for the development of weapons of mass destruction. A former Iraqi army colonel who calls himself Abu Ahmad knows what really went on there. He cannot forget the day four years ago when he took two young students to Radwaniyah on the orders of Uday Hussein. Ahmad was Uday’s chief executioner. Last week, as Iraqis celebrated the death of his former boss and his equally savage younger brother Qusay, he nervously revealed a hideous story. His instructions that day in 1999 were to arrest the two 19-year-olds on the campus of Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts and deliver them at Radwaniyah. On arrival at the sprawling compound, he was directed to a farm where he found a large cage. Inside, two lions waited. They belonged to Uday. Guards took the two young men from the car and opened the cage door. One of the victims collapsed in terror as they were dragged, screaming and shouting, to meet their fate. Ahmad watched as the students frantically looked for a way of escape. There was none. The lions pounced. “I saw the head of the first student literally come off his body with the first bite and then had to stand and watch the animals devour the two young men. By the time they were finished there was little left but for the bones and bits and pieces of unwanted flesh,” he recalled last week. He felt horror and disbelief but showed no emotion. “It was simply forbidden. Any slight show of disagreement, fear, anger, repulsion or disapproval could be noted against you. Even punished. You had to watch and pretend all was fine. You had to watch and pretend you were happy with what they did.” The worst part, he said, was not knowing who the students were or why they were being so gruesomely murdered. Much later he discovered that “they had competed with Uday where some young ladies where concerned. Uday was a very jealous man who rejected competition of any kind in particular when it involved ladies”. Uday did not watch the deaths of his two rivals, but his cameraman filmed the scene for him — and the recording went into his personal videotape library. The incident left Ahmad thoroughly demoralised. It was the day he discovered his selection to the elite Unit 18 of the Saddam Fedayeen, part of the president’s special security forces, also meant undertaking odious “special requests” by the fedayeen’s commander, Uday. He had become an executioner. Ahmad is still reluctant to talk about his work. After being tracked down through contacts last week, he spoke with difficulty. At times he sounded matter of fact about what he had done, in denial about what it meant. At others he was visibly tormented by his demons and memories, insisting he was not a murderer and using Koranic verses to seek forgiveness. He lives in fear of being caught by American forces. He said that every night he stays awake until 3am, the hour of the “knock on the door” — and then sleeps on his flat roof beside an arsenal of machineguns, grenades and other weapons.
AHMAD joined the Iraqi army in 1985 at the age of 18. He was a captain when he was picked for the fedayeen in 1997. He was soon promoted and made head of Unit 18, which carried out personal missions for Uday. Members of the unit excelled in swimming, parachuting, martial arts and use of firearms. They were granted special black identity cards signed in gold by Uday. Ahmad’s ID card stated his name, rank, blood type and a serial number and carried his photograph with Saddam’s picture and logo of “God, Country and Leader”. The unit’s first mission came in early 1999, when it was ordered to execute four men in the southern city of Nasiriya. They were to be beheaded. Ahmad describes the condemned men as “criminals who deserved to die”. One was a fedayeen agent accused of passing details of Unit 18’s movements to anti-government forces he was supposed to be spying on. “I thought he deserved what came to him as he and the others were criminals who had caused deaths to others,” said Ahmad, confident he was “upholding law, order and the country’s security”. But within months he was watching the students being fed to Uday’s lions. Doubts and nightmares set in. “When I discovered that I was working for an individual and executing the whims and grotesque orders of one person rather than working for the state, I felt betrayed and demoralised,” he said last week. After the incident in the lions’ cage, Ahmad sank deeper into Uday’s sadistic world. One of the worst moments was his personal baptism in barbarism. He was driven at night into Uday’s personal compound in a corner of Saddam’s Baghdad presidential palace. He had been told that Uday had a “special request”, and he was desperately uneasy. Ahmad was told to wait in a large hallway and was then invited into a room where he found a small pedestal with a sword laid out next to it. He noticed a pale, thin man dressed in a tracksuit and about five other people, including Uday’s cameraman. The pale man, aged in his thirties, looked as if he had been jailed underground. “His skin was very white as if he had not seen sunshine for a long time.” Then came the shock. Ahmad was asked to behead him. “I could not say no. If I had refused to obey or even shown hesitance, I would have been beheaded myself. I have no doubt of this. “It is easy for people on the outside to say they would rather die than kill, but if you have witnessed a beheading, if you have faced the sword yourself, you would feel the fear and know you could never undergo such a punishment yourself, not even for your morals or conscience.” Ahmad described the execution: “The man’s head was covered with a cloth sack, a unit member of mine helped him to where the pedestal was placed and laid the man on the floor with his head on the raised pedestal. “There was no time to think or look around, no time even to observe on what type of pedestal his head was. It was all done quickly. The order was for me to behead him and I did. “The prisoner did not utter a word. I think he had by then somewhat resigned himself to his fate. I knew nothing of the man. “I had to make sure his head was cut off from the first blow I performed. I positioned the sword above his head to the back of his neck and brought it down with both hands. I heard a slight crack of bone when the sword first hits the back of the neck and then, like a fountain, blood spurts forward.” On finishing his task he was escorted out and taken back to his unit’s quarters. For days afterwards, he said, he could not eat or sleep. “It was just too much. Even if this man was a criminal, which I doubt, beheading someone is just too horrible.” There was worse to come when Uday ordered Unit 18 to carry out a “pyramid” execution: the victim was cut in half vertically. The condemned man was made to kneel upright on sandbags over a concrete block. His hands were pinned behind his back and his neck was held rigid between “two purposely made instruments to keep the head steady and straight and prevent any mobility”. The sayyaf (swordsman) first delivered a blow to split the victim’s head down the middle, then a member of the unit separated the body into its two sides with a 12-inch serrated knife. Ahmad said he had never personally killed anyone in this way, but he had witnessed his unit doing so on several occasions. Sometimes he was ordered to punish his own men. When a member of the unit was arrested for stealing while on duty, Uday immediately demanded that one of the thief’s hands be cut off. Later he “showed mercy”: the bones of both hands were broken instead. Another member of the unit inflicted the punishment, a reminder that anyone who disobeyed Uday would also suffer harshly, said Ahmad. “I know for a fact if I refused orders I too would be beheaded, my hands cut off or something similar — and knowing him, he would have ordered one of my men to perform the task. I was stuck and had no way out.” Orders for executions were usually brought by a representative of the Iraqi Olympic committee, which Uday headed. This aide would escort Ahmad’s unit to the homes of the “guilty” and ensure that it carried out the task to the last letter. In 2000 a committee aide was sent with orders for mass arrests. “The man came with a list of names and addresses and we rode with him as he showed us their addresses and locations.” At each address the unit surrounded the house and Uday’s representative escorted Ahmad to the front door. They knocked and when the accused appeared he or she was simply taken away without explanation. In all 36 people were seized, the majority women. They were accused of spying, prostitution, pimping and racketeering. Some came from good neighbourhoods. They were taken to the fedayeen headquarters in Baghdad’s Zayuna district where they were interrogated for three days. Their affidavits were then sent to Uday to decide their fates. He was in the habit of scribbling the sentence to be meted out on the file of each individual. On this occasion the entire list returned with the words “executions by beheadings”. Unaware that they were doomed, the prisoners were packed into a bus. They relaxed when they were told they were being handed to the Ministry of the Interior. Instead they were driven to Unit 18’s special compound and placed in a holding area where a mullah was brought in to recite Koranic verses for the dead and to ask them for their last wishes. Only then did they realise they would be killed. Ahmad revisited this compound near the gates of Baghdad last week. It had been bombed and looted, but in the rubble-strewn shell of his old quarters he relived a nightmare. He showed the hall where the 36 victims were held, and he walked the 200 yards they had been forced to walk to the execution ground. Standing in a small courtyard, 30ft square, he described how his unit had prepared a line of five sandbags. The condemned men and women had been dragged in, five by five. Some sobbed and cried for mercy, even calling Saddam’s name. One woman begged to be shot by a firing squad rather than face decapitation. Red plastic bags were tied over their heads and they were forced to lie on the ground with their heads on the sandbags. Swords swung down and blood spilt across the courtyard. It took an executioner two strokes to behead a particularly fat man, Ahmad grimly recalled. All along a cameraman filmed in silence. One of the condemned women was pregnant. This presented a problem, said Ahmad, because under religious law a pregnant woman should at least be allowed to finish her term and deliver the baby before being executed. “She was several months’ pregnant,” he said. “The doctor had verified it, she had said so and we could see her swollen stomach. She was taken in and out three times — everyone was unsure what to do with her.” Telephone calls were made to Uday by his representative. As they waited, the woman sobbed and begged for mercy for her unborn child. On the third telephone call the order was given to go ahead with her execution. “At that the woman was beheaded — and knowing she was pregnant, I felt sick in the stomach and wished for Allah to open up the ground and swallow everyone there including myself,” said Ahmad. It took three hours to complete all 36 beheadings that afternoon. The heads and bodies of the victims were delivered to their families in separate bags. Prayers and public mourning were forbidden — a mark of shame and more punishment inflicted by Uday.
JAMAL KAMEL has also felt Uday’s capacity for sadism. To him the deaths of Uday, 39, and Qusay, 37, in a villa in the northern city of Mosul after a four-hour battle with the 101st Airborne Division, smack of poetic justice. “They did exactly the same thing to my family,” he said. “When I saw that house on television after the attack by the Americans I remembered the house my brothers died in, how it was burning and destroyed. This is the same film. The same scenario.” Kamel’s two brothers were Saddam’s sons-in-law. Highly placed in the regime, they fled to Jordan in 1995 and revealed secrets of the Iraqi weapons programme to the CIA. Lulled by Saddam’s promises that all would be forgiven, they returned to Baghdad where Uday personally led a commando assault on their villa.
After a long battle, all of the occupants were killed, including Kamel’s elderly father and several young nieces and nephews. The house was burnt to the ground. Uday’s sisters never forgave him for massacring their husbands. “Neither did I,” said Jamal Kamel. Last Tuesday, Uday found himself on the other side of the barricade, with no way out. In the wake of his death, evidence has surfaced of how he managed to escape this fate for the past three months. On April 9, the day American tanks rolled into Baghdad, Saddam and his sons were in separate houses in Adhamiya, a Sunni Muslim neighbourhood full of loyalists. One of their former entourage has revealed that they stayed in the capital for at least a week after its capture, driving from one safe house to another in daylight under the noses of American soldiers. Then they headed out. Offers of huge rewards for information leading to their capture provoked a torrent of false tip-offs, but the special American “Task Force 20” charged with tracking them down made no breakthrough. As a result, nobody got over-excited when word spread among the American military on Monday night of an informant in Mosul offering to betray Uday and Qusay for a reward of $15m each. Mosul, bordering the autonomous Kurdistan region, is well beyond the “Sunni triangle” north and west of Baghdad where resistance to the Americans has been strongest. It seemed extremely unlikely any of Saddam’s family would hide there. So much so that when Sergeant Joshua Gilbreth, of the 101st Airborne Division, told his friends that he believed he had recognised Uday in a dark BMW right next to his Humvee in Mosul on Monday, they laughed in disbelief. Gilbreth said he noticed the man looking at him, and when Gilbreth stared back the man smiled and waved. Then the car sped away. The next morning, at about 10am, Ali Abbas, a lawyer who lives in the affluent Falah district of Mosul, saw four Humvees pulling up on the wide boulevard outside. A party of soldiers got out and began calling on his next-door neighbour, Nawaf Zaidan, to come out with his hands up. Zaidan emerged with his nine-year-old son and was put into the back of a car. For the next half an hour an Arabic translator addressed the remaining invisible occupants of the house through a loudhailer, telling them they were surrounded and that they should surrender. Nothing happened. “Then all the shooting started,” said Abbas. “It went on for hours. It was much worse than anything that happened during the war.” A group of soldiers had tried to enter the three-storey building but were shot at from a fortified second floor. Four were wounded and they fell back to regroup. By 10.45am, reinforcements arrived and the Americans began firing machineguns, grenades and rockets. As bullets pecked at the building, beige and maroon tiles were chipped from the facade and dust flew from the concrete columns. Still the chatter of answering gunfire echoed over the road. Just before noon, two Kiowa helicopters skimmed over the rooftops and rockets flashed into the villa. More and more troops poured into the neighbourhood until about 200 were surrounding the house. At 1.21pm soldiers stormed the wrecked mansion. They rushed up the stairs to be confronted by more gunshots, apparently from Qusay’s 14-year-old son Mustafa, who was quickly felled by an American bullet. On the floor lay clothes, bloodstained bedding, a Pepsi can and a box of Mars bars. The bodies were flown to Baghdad where their DNA was compared with samples already in American hands. Visual identification by one of Saddam’s former bodyguards was confirmed by dental records, allowing President Bush to announce that “the careers of two of the regime’s chief henchmen” had come to an end. In Baghdad they celebrated the news with a deafening barrage of gunfire. In Mosul the mood was less jubilant. “There can be no doubt that these men died bravely, with honour,” said Mohammed Jasem al-Gaoud, a local sheikh. “This was a very uneven contest — helicopters and missiles against rifles — and these two acquitted themselves well.” He said Mustafa was well known as “an excellent shot” with a Kalashnikov. “The lad did as best he could, no doubt,” said al-Gaoud, “but they were horribly outnumbered.”
IF THERE is admiration for the “heroic” deaths of Uday and Qusay, there is little sympathy for the men themselves. Their savagery was not confined to execution grounds; awareness of it was a commonplace of Iraqi life. Uday abducted women from nightclubs for his pleasure in bed and, as head of the Iraqi Olympic committee and the football federation, tortured sportsmen for losing. Aladaniya jail near Baghdad airport was Uday’s favourite place for the torture of his players. Ziad Tariq, a footballer who styles himself “the Rio Ferdinand of Iraq”, was jailed there 11 times and learnt to dread it. The torture was not just sadistic but bizarre. He said last week: “When you entered the jail they would have long cables on the wall each labelled with a name such as “the terrorist”, “the Saddam”, “the Uday” or “the silence”. These were the punishments you had to choose. The first time I chose the Silence because it sounded the least bad. “They put me in a cell just 1m by 1.5m, painted completely red with no windows and lots of tiny stones on the floor and told me to count them. It did not matter what number you said it would be wrong. If I said 2000, they would say no, it’s 2001 and beat me 10 times. Then they put me inside a circle and told me to run round and round for nine hours. After that they threw me on the hot pavement and a fat guard sat on my chest. Then they pulled me along by my ankles so that my back was streaming with blood. “Another time they drew a bicycle on the wall and told me to ride it. They threw me in foul dirty water and said you must swim, then they kept pushing me under with a stick forcing me to drink. “Once they told us we had to catch 10 flies during the night and 10 mosquitoes during the day or you would be tortured more. This was impossible so you had to catch the mosquitoes at night and hold them till daytime and vice versa with the flies. Then they would ask which is male and which is female. Whatever you said it would be vice versa.” All of his torture sessions were filmed and sent to Uday. Ziad’s back is marked with scars and ridges from the beatings. Uday’s psychotic temperament and Caligula-like appetite for gore had made him the most hated figure in Iraq. Inevitably he did not have many true friends: one who went on a boating picnic with him had his thumb shot off when he held up a Coca-Cola can so that Uday could test his aim with a pistol. His hand was badly injured; he fearfully told his family that he had caught it in an outboard propeller. Qusay was quieter and more responsible than Uday. He liked to raise peacocks and gazelles on his farms. But he was no less ruthless. Through his control of the state intelligence and security services he orchestrated the bloody suppression of rebellious political movements as he emerged as heir apparent to Saddam. He reportedly was obsessed with the need to reduce prison populations and ordered the most simple solution: mass executions. Those who knew him well say his studious manner masked an extremely cruel nature, evident even when he was as young as 18. “Qusay seemed a quiet, smiling man and when you looked at him he appeared innocent,” said Faig al-Sheikh Ali, who studied law with him at Baghdad University from 1984-88. “But actually he hid the evil inside his heart and he was a savage and a torturer. “It was kind of spooky. He’d come into the class and you would know that at the weekend while you had been studying he had had someone killed or tortured.” He was also pampered. Before he started his four-year law degree, the students’ union was turfed out of its room, which was transformed — with ensuite bathroom, television, video and sound system, sofas, desk and chair — into luxurious quarters for Qusay. The classroom was also redecorated, new tables, chairs and blackboard brought in. The corridor outside was installed with bugging devices so that everything students said would be monitored. Qusay arrived with 20 bodyguards, one of whom sat behind him in all his classes. Another 20 to 25 special guards kept 24-hour watch on the university. For his first year Qusay appeared for classes twice a week. In his second year this dropped to once, then in his third to just once a fortnight and in his last year perhaps once a month. “He always appeared for exams,” said Faig. “He always got 99%, even though he did not come to classes. “One day I asked our trade law professor who was a personal friend how could it be that Qusay scored 99% when the cleverest in the class only got 89%. He told me, ‘Faig, you know Qusay was never tested’.” Faig said that in his finals, Qusay’s paper was written by a teacher. Yet again, he came out top. To celebrate his graduation Qusay had a party on the Island of Pigs on the Tigris river. “Uday was there and his bodyguards and they were all drinking and shooting off their pistols and Kalashnikovs, then raping some of the women. Qusay joined in too.” Faig revealed that there was a failed assassination attempt on Qusay at the university. “One day in 1986 we arrived at the university to see it was surrounded by Republican Guards and Special Guards. They were crawling all over the buildings and not allowing anyone in or out. Eventually they left and we were told they had found two pistols and two hand-grenades in the toilets,” he said. Faig did not know what had really happened until years later when he discovered that his own cousin, a member of the exiled Workers’ Islamic Organisation, and another plotter had been waiting on the campus to shoot Qusay with guns smuggled in by two female students. Warned that they had been rumbled, they had fled. “I have never spoken of this before because I was afraid for my family,” said Faig. “But now they are gone, and we are finally free to speak of such things.”
There was a dark BMW parked in front of the villa...
Where were they going ......were they visiting Saddam???
As were the contests where Satan's spawn tortured and killed all those innocent people. Bad Democrats. Very bad Democrats who are whining over this.
I predict that Ahmad will end up committing suicide. Just horrible...
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