The day they tried to kill Saddam
Updated on 18 September 2005
When Iraq's dictator goes on trial next month, the murders that followed an assassination attempt in a village will form the first charge. Previously unseen footage of that day has now emerged, write Paul Eedle and Lindsey Hilsum.
Saddam Hussein strides through the street, a fixed smile on his face, waving to the ululating, cheering crowd swarming around him. Anxious soldiers push people back with rifle butts.
No wonder.
Maybe less than an hour before, on 8 July 1982, a group of militants had tried to assassinate the Iraqi leader, as he visited the village of Dujail, 35 miles north of Baghdad.
What happened afterwards - executions, torture and imprisonment of the people of Dujail, the razing of their orchards and houses - is the subject of the first court case against Saddam, to be heard in Baghdad next month. Previously unseen footage of that day, shot by the former dictator's personal cameraman and obtained by Channel 4 News, reveals not only Saddam's demeanour before and after the assassination attempt, but also serves as a chilling reminder of the fear the man provoked.
Fear of poisoning
The video shows a small convoy entering Dujail. Security seems remarkably light - Saddam sits in the passenger seat of a white Mercedes, from which he steps out from time to time to kiss old ladies and other supplicants. But he must have known his enemies could be here. In power for just three years, he had invaded Iran 18 months earlier. Dujail is a majority Shia town; most people there opposed the war against Shia Iran. The Dawa, a Shia group, many of whose leaders had been killed by Saddam, had strong support in Dujail.
When Saddam enters one home, petting a little girl, he refuses a glass of water despite the July heat. Fearing poison, he would never accept such courtesies.
The footage has not yet been seen by lawyers for the prosecution or defence at the Special Court in Baghdad where Saddam will be tried. It shows the dictator addressing a crowd from the roof of the Baath Party headquarters. He says he will go to the old town. Later he is seen visiting a clinic. The moment in between, when a group of Dawa militants hiding in palm groves shot at his convoy as it drove down the main road, appears not to have been caught on camera.
Traitors in Dujail
After the attack, bodyguards stick to him more closely, but he seems determined to act as if nothing important has happened. He addresses another crowd, apparently from the roof of the clinic.
"These small groups imagine they break the relationship between Saddam and the people," he says to a crowd now hysterically trying to scream their allegiance, knowing the likely fate of those thought to involved in any plot. He equates the attempted assassination with attacks from Iran in the war.
"Neither these few shots nor the artillery bombardments will deflect us from the course we are taking ... the days have gone when Iraq belonged to foreigners. We distinguish between the people of Dujail and a small number of traitors in Dujail," he declares.
No such distinction was made. At the end of the footage Saddam can be seen at the side of the road, interrogating people himself. A young man pleads with him: "I'm fasting and was on my way home." Another being held between two soldiers tries to prove his loyalty by calling out: "Please sir, I'm in the Popular Army [the party militia]." Just before the recording ends, their fate seems sealed - Saddam can be heard saying: "Keep them separate and interrogate them."
What happened next will form the bulk of the prosecution case against Saddam. The people of Dujail call the events of the following months and years 'al karitha' - the disaster. Arrests and killings began immediately, followed by bombardments from helicopter gunships. Soldiers cut down the date palms on which the people depended, and bulldozed their houses.
Channel 4 News interviewed four of the more than 400 witnesses in Dujail who have been questioned by the lawyers prosecuting Saddam. Now aged 75, Um Abbas remembers her four sons, all killed after the assassination attempt - one shot trying to resist the security forces and three executed in prison.
"Some people ran away and some people fought," she said, her lined face framed by her black chador. "Whoever fought was killed. Some people managed to survive by hiding in the drainage pipes in the orchards. My son tried to resist, but he couldn't, so he climbed a palm tree. They struck him from a plane and he was killed. They brought us to their headquarters and showed us eight or nine corpses, which they threw on the ground. Blood was flowing everywhere."
Abu Ghraib
Um Abbas was detained by Saddam's secret police in Dujail for more than three months, before being transferred to Abu Ghraib, already a notorious prison. After two years, she and others were taken to an old British fort in the 'empty quarter', a remote desert area on the border with Saudi Arabia.
"We stayed there two, or maybe three years," she said, trying to recall the passages of her suffering. "Death. People were dying." After being released from the desert fortress, her husband, Jassim Mohammed, tried to establish the fate of their three missing sons who had remained in Abu Ghraib.
"We didn't hear anything about them until the fall of the regime when we finally found out for sure that they had been executed. When I heard that all my four sons were dead, I collapsed with a brain haemorrhage," he said.
148 executed
Although Saddam is accused of crimes involving far larger numbers, not least the use of poison gas against the Kurds, Dujail is an especially well documented instance of mass murder. The prosecution case may centre on a decree, dated 23 July 1985, and apparently signed by Saddam himself, ordering the execution of 148 inhabitants of Dujail.
Others perished in the bombing. Former Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan and Saddam's half-brother, the then head of the Mukhabarat secret police, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, are also expected to be tried for the alleged killings at Dujail, as well as three local Baath Party officials and a judge accused of presiding over show trials.
The new footage may help the prosecution, as it shows Saddam giving orders for interrogations, but it could be used by the defence if they wish to suggest that he was acting in response to a genuine threat on his life by a group plotting to overthrow his government. The defence may also question the motives of the new Iraqi authorities in choosing Dujail for what they see as a show trial, given that Iraq's Prime Minister, Ibrahim al Jaafari, is the leader of the Dawa party.
Today, the spot where Dawa militants took their pot shots at Saddam remains a wasteland. No one has rebuilt the houses or replanted the date palms The survivors of Dujail may get some satisfaction if Saddam is hanged for murdering their sons, but they are Shias living in the heartland of Iraq's Sunni insurgency and as the country slithers towards sectarian civil war, the future they face may be as terrifying as their past.
Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News. This article first appeared in the The Observer.
