By
During the late 1980s, I was working as an officer in the Iraqi Army when my commanding general received a letter that demanded I report to a palace in Baghdad within 72 hours. When I went to the palace, I was brought to see Uday Hussein, Saddam's older son. "I want you to be my fiday," he said. In Arabic, fiday means body double or bullet catcher. I didn't understand. "Do you want me to be your bodyguard?" I asked. "No," he said. "Our intelligence service says we look like each other, and I want you to work as my double."
I felt like somebody had hit me in the head with a hammer. "Do I have a choice?" I asked, thinking this was somehow a joke. "If you refuse," Uday said, "you can go back to the Army. We don't have a problem with you." It was a lie. As soon as I left the palace, his guards threw me in the trunk of a car and took me to jail. Everything was painted red inside the cell to make you stressed and remind you of blood. A completely red room is also disorienting.
They kept me in this jail for a week before Uday asked to see me again; he was trying to torture me psychologically. This time he threatened to rape my sisters, who were only little girls at the time. "I'll do it, but leave my family alone," I told him. And that's when it all started.
After that, I often saw rape, torture, killings. The torture was really sick when Uday was doing it. One time I was sitting in the Iraqi Olympic Committee office, and the father of a girl Uday had raped was brought in. She was a beauty queen—Miss Baghdad. The father had tried to complain to Saddam, so Uday wanted to take revenge. He asked me to shoot the guy in the head, but I refused. He said, "I'm ordering you—shoot him!" I went crazy. I grabbed a knife and cut my wrists in front of him. He was shocked. I was taken to the hospital, and Uday never asked me to shoot anyone again after that.
I escaped Iraq in the early 1990s. But I spent five years afterward in counseling and psychological treatment, dealing with the things I saw: torture and kidnapping of girls, rape, and all these things. Once I tried to commit suicide by taking tablets; another time I tried to hang myself. I was so depressed. I was taking a lot of Valium to calm down. Even now I don't get to sleep until 5 or 6 in the morning. I always have nightmares. When you live in the West, you don't see things like torture.
In 2003 I was watching the news in my office in Manchester, England, when I heard that Uday had been killed by American soldiers. I had a cup of coffee in my hand, and I smashed it straight into the TV. I was very angry. I didn't want to see Uday get killed. I wanted him to be tried in court, to be tried for his crimes. I wanted to be in court to be able to say, "Look at what this guy did to me." I wanted justice. But it never happened.
A movie based on Yahia's Life, The Devil's Double, opens in the U.S. this month.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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