Iraq on its own
Hopes and frustration in Iraq seven months after U.S. departure.
Hussein released several fiery speeches during the time he was in hiding, exhorting his supporters to fight the Americans. Namiq says he and Hussein recorded them together on a small tape recorder.
Knowing the Americans would be analyzing the recordings for clues to Hussein’s whereabouts, Namiq says he once drove 10 miles to the city of Samarra, parked on the side of the road and recorded the sounds of urban traffic.
(The Washington Post) - A map showing Saddam Hussein’s hometown and where he was captured.
“I wanted to make the Americans feel dizzy and confused,” he says.
Namiq clearly still reveres Hussein, who was hanged in 2006.
“Saddam knew there would be a day that he would be captured and executed,” Namiq says. “In his heart, he knew that everything was gone and that he was no longer president. So he started something new — jihad against the occupiers. He sacrificed everything he had, including his two sons, for the sake of the country.”
Namiq says that when he was held at Abu Ghraib, U.S. soldiers — including a female interrogator who told him he looked like actor Tom Selleck — questioned him daily about weapons of mass destruction and the hiding places of top aides to Hussein.
He says that his cell was kept dark 24 hours a day and that guards threw in buckets of water to keep it constantly wet. He says he was hooded and beaten, and bitten by guard dogs. He was submitted to mock executions, he says, and constant, deafening rock music.
“I endured the dogs and the torture, but I couldn’t stand that music,” Namiq says, without a trace of humor in his deep voice.
A spokesman for the U.S. Central Command said that because records of individual prisoners at Abu Ghraib in 2003 would be difficult to retrieve, military officials could not immediately confirm Namiq’s arrest or detention. A spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command said that most details of Hussein’s capture remain classified.
Hussein’s attorney, Khalil Dulaimi, quoted the former dictator in a 2009 book as saying that he had known the Namiq family since 1959 and that they had hidden him. In the book, Qais Namiq is accused of eventually turning Hussein in to the U.S. troops, which Alaa Namiq vehemently denies.
The Namiq family has become something like royalty in Dawr for sheltering a local tribesman who is still idolized by many here.
“We consider it a heroic act,” said Col. Mohammad Hassan of the Iraqi National Police, who is stationed in Dawr. “This act doesn’t concern this family only, but it represents all the citizens of Dawr because this city embraced Saddam.”
Hassan said that if the people of Dawr felt differently, the Namiq family would not have been able to continue living here. He said the family members were already well respected because they had worked for years as cooks and fishermen for Hussein.
“Now,” he said, “the people of Dawr respect and appreciate this family even more than before.”
Hussein was buried just up the road in Auja, the village where he was born. Aware of the former dictator’s enduring popularity around here, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has ordered his grave site closed to the public to keep it from becoming a shrine.
On the farm where Hussein was captured, the “spider hole” sits at the base of a date palm tree, covered with a four-foot-square concrete cap, largely forgotten beneath dirty cages filled with doves and parakeets.
Chickens and dogs roam the grounds, and huge orange carp swim in two ponds. On a midsummer evening, the trees are so full that with every strong breeze, small yellow pears fall like raindrops.
Across the narrow road at his restaurant, Namiq excuses himself and gets up from the table. He walks around the dirt courtyard, table to table, greeting customers who all know him by name.
Loading...
Comments