Ali took lessons from a private tutor. Although the boy did not excel in his academic work, it did not take him long to work out that all was not well with his parents. Kamel had expected to be seen by the world as the potential successor to Saddam. But he had too much blood on his own hands. The Americans came only to pump him for information about the Iraqi military establishment. Even the Iraqi opposition shunned him.
Early in February, Ali often saw his father walking in the palace garden despite the cold and rain, speaking on his cellular telephone. Hussein Kamel had become so disillusioned with exile that he had begun discreet negotiations to return to Baghdad.
It was part of Saddam’s game plan that he responded by making strenuous demands. Not only would Kamel be obliged to return millions of dollars he had hidden in a German bank; he would also have to provide a detailed written account of everything he had told his western interrogators, a lengthy process for a man who was barely literate.
His departure was precipitated by the growing impatience of his hosts with public statements in which he criticised the king. On the first day of the Muslim feast of Eid, he was visited by Prince Talal of Jordan, who told him he was ‘free to go’, the unspoken message being that he had outstayed his welcome.
Kamel strapped a pistol to his hip, drove to the home of the Iraqi ambassador and sat in animated discussion with him in the reception hall. Then they went to the embassy and telephoned Baghdad.
Once he was sure that Kamel had fulfilled the conditions set for his return, Saddam sent a video of himself, in which he promised he had forgiven his son-in-law. ‘Come during the feast,’ he said. ‘The family will be together.’ He implored him to bring all his relatives back with him. A written amnesty followed from the Iraqi leadership council.
Kamel made his decision abruptly. ‘We are going home,’ he announced to a family gathering. Ragda and Rana, suddenly frightened, began crying. At the last moment, Ragda telephoned her mother, seeking reassurance. But the phone was answered by Uday, who, in his latest outrage, had shot an uncle in the leg in an argument over an Italian car that he wanted to add to his collection of classics.
Ragda begged her brother to tell her the truth: would they be safe if they came home? ‘Habibti [Arabic for my love], I give you my word,’ he said.
Hours before he left, Kamel telephoned one of his few friends to say goodbye. The man, a fellow Iraqi, was appalled. ‘You know you are going to your death,’ he said. Kamel bragged that he had obtained personal assurances from Saddam. ‘To this day, I don’t know why he trusted Saddam,’ the friend said last week. ‘He was one of them. He should have known.’
Arriving at the border, the returning defectors were greeted by a smiling Uday in sunglasses and suit. The men were separated from their wives and children. Kamel would never see Ragda and Ali again.
With his brothers, he was taken to one of Saddam’s presidential palaces, where they were rigorously questioned about their experiences in Jordan and their contacts with western representatives and opponents of the Iraqi regime. After three days, they were released and went to the home of Taher Abdel Kadr, a cousin. Here, they were joined by two sisters and the women’s children. But their relief and jubilation were short-lived. Within 48 hours, they learnt from a statement broadcast on television that their wives had denounced them as traitors and had been granted divorces.
As dawn filtered through the windows of their villa on 20 February, a cousin who still worked at the presidential palace woke them with the news that they had been betrayed. He brought weapons. Grimly, the Kamels prepared for their assassins as the children slept on.
Their killing was a family affair. While army vehicles and police cars blocked off the neighbourhood, an armed gang led by Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam’s second son, surrounded the house. Uday and Qusay were accompanied inside by the former husband of one of Kamel’s sisters. He showed his loyalty to Saddam by opening the firing on his family’s house.
The attack, carried out with assault weapons, was ferocious. Although Kamel’s men fired back, they were swiftly overwhelmed. Some of the family were killed in the initial onslaught; others when the armed men entered the house. They included Kamel’s elderly father, all the women and at least five young children, gunned down in their nightclothes.
Outside in a parked Mercedes sat Ali Hassan Al-Majeed, a cousin of Saddam’s who had earned the nickname ‘The Hammer of the Kurds’ after gassing villages in northern Iraq with chemical weapons in 1989. Al-Majeed was on a mobile phone, describing each step of the assault to Saddam as it happened.
‘We have 17 bodies,’ he said. The only member of the family who was missing was Kamel himself. Saddam barked: ‘I want his body.’
As bulldozers were brought in to destroy the house, Kamel, naked to the waist, wounded and bleeding, burst from a hiding place inside and appeared at a door brandishing his personal pistol and a machinegun.
He had barely fired a shot before he was riddled with bullets. When the gunfire ceased, Al-Majeed walked up to the body and emptied his pistol into it. He dragged Kamel by one foot through the sand, yelling to his men and to neighbours cowering behind closed doors: ‘Come and see the fate of a traitor.’ The bulldozers moved in and the house was razed.
The massacre was a vivid reminder to the people of the ruthlessness of the regime under which they live. If Saddam was willing to eliminate close and even innocent members of his own family in such a fashion, there was no limit to what he could do to them.
During the summer, however, came two further reminders of the apparent futility of resistance. In June a member of the presidential bodyguard fired shots at Saddam and was executed. Less than a month later, according to western diplomats and Iraqi exiles, a rebel group of Iraqi officers planned to kill Saddam by bombing a presidential palace from a plane that was to have taken off from Rasheed airport in Baghdad.
The conspiracy was discovered and hundreds of members of Saddam’s armed forces were arrested. Between 1 and 3 August, 120 of the officers were executed.
Iraqis have grown used to atrocities since Saddam came to prominence. His first known political act was an attempt in 1959 to gun down Abdel-Karim Qassem, then the Iraqi leader. When he became president 20 years later, he began by accusing 21 senior members of the leadership of treason. He formed a firing squad with his remaining colleagues, and together they shot all the condemned men.
In the years that followed, his people learned to voice their opposition only to close friends and family. Criticism of Saddam is punishable by death, and the security services are ubiquitous. Iraqi couples do not even speak in front of their own children for fear they might innocently repeat something and bring down the wrath of the regime.
The long series of confrontations into which Saddam has led Iraq has made life immensely difficult in a country whose citizens should be as pampered as those of Saudi Arabia. Iraq, unlike most Arab states, has both oil and water. Two huge rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, nourish the land, and before the imposition of United Nations sanctions following the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Iraq earned $10 billion a year by lifting 3m barrels of oil a day.
Much of the money was spent on creating not comfort, but the largest army in the Middle East. Within a year of taking power, Saddam ordered the invasion of Iran, starting a bitter war that lasted for eight years and left 1 million people dead.
The attack on Kuwait was another miscalculation. The 43 days of allied bombing, supported by Arab countries afraid of his might, destroyed not only military sites but roads, bridges, oil refineries, communications, sewage facilities and the rest of an extensive infrastructure built by oil revenues.
Last week’s conflict, in which Iraqi support for one group of Kurds against another provoked two waves of bombardment with American cruise missiles, was by no means the first test of the allies’ resolve since the Gulf War. But after previous confrontations, Saddam has simply waited out his enemies. Those close to him say he is proud to have outlasted in office both George Bush and Margaret Thatcher, who led the