Defections of His Two Sons-in-Law Presage the End for Saddam Hussain

By Richard H. Curtiss

The 60,000 Iraqi soldiers who surrendered during the Gulf war begged their Saudi internment camp guards not to allow journalists to photograph their faces or use their names in interviews. They were convinced that Iraqi President Saddam Hussain's execution squads, who roamed the desert between the Iraqi frontline in Kuwait and the Iraqi homeland looking for deserters to shoot, would visit the homes of anyone identified as having surrendered. The women, the Iraqis said, first would be raped and then the prisoner's entire family would be executed.

How often this actually happened will not be known until Saddam's tyrannical rule comes to an end. Only then can the horror stories that trickle out of a country that has been largely sealed off from the rest of the world for more than a quarter of a century be evaluated. Meanwhile, however, it seems unlikely that execution squads will be visiting the immediate family of the latest party of defectors, who swept into Jordan on Aug. 7 in a caravan of Iraqi government Mercedes limousines complete with machine-gun-toting security guards and uniformed aides. In command was Saddam's cousin, Lt. Gen. Hussein Kamel Hassan Majeed, said to be in charge of Iraq's entire military industrial establishment. Accompanying him was his younger brother, Col. Saddam Kamel Hassan Majeed, head of Saddam's personal security guard, and their wives, Raghda and Rana, the two eldest of Saddam's three daughters.

As perhaps the most powerful man in the country after Saddam and his two sons, Uday, 32, and Qusay, 30, General Kamel had no trouble leaving Iraq. He told border guards his party was headed for a short vacation in Amman, which has a resident Iraqi population of 30,000 people that grows daily as life becomes harder in Baghdad. Nor did King Hussein of Jordan hesitate for long in granting him asylum. The gesture that altered forever his friendly, but increasingly inconvenient, relationship with Saddam Hussain could not have come at a more convenient time.

Although the king was said to have telephoned President Bill Clinton to obtain an assurance of U.S. support in case of Iraqi retaliation, he did not hesitate to put up the party in a royal guest house, grant General Hussein Kamel a microphone to talk to the international press, and then hustle them all into hiding, where high-level intelligence directors from the U.S., Saudi Arabia and probably other countries began making calls.

As the man in charge of all of Iraq's war industries, General Kamel was at the heart of decisions within the Iraqi government over what to reveal and what to withhold from United Nations inspectors about Iraq's program to manufacture weapons of mass destruction—nuclear, chemical and biological. Analysts initially tried to relate the sudden defection to a policy dispute at the highest levels of the Iraqi government over what should be revealed in order to get the ruinous U.N. embargo lifted. Such a dispute, analysts said, would explain seeming inconsistencies in prior admissions on the subject by the Iraqi government.

A family dinner called by Saddam ended in gunfire.

In the Middle East, however, political events soon take on a commonly accepted history, or mythology, of their own. Within 10 days of the defection a major Saudi-owned daily newspaper, Ash Sharq al-Awsat, reported that the defection followed an intra-family dispute that broke out at a family dinner called by Saddam, and ended in gunfire later in the evening. According to the newspaper's account, the dinner was held in Takrit, the family's ancestral village on the upper Tigris River, to discuss Iraq's deteriorating economic and security situation. At the dinner President Saddam's half-brother, Watban Ibrahim Takriti, whom Saddam had dismissed as interior minister on May 22, angrily blamed General Hussein Kamel and Saddam's powerful and impulsive eldest son, Uday, begging Saddam to dismiss them both.

As tempers rose, Saddam asked both Uday and Kamel to leave the dinner while he and the family elders continued the discussion. The two younger men, who are said to be bitter rivals, left as ordered. However, when Watban Takriti arrived at his own home in the village, he was confronted by Uday and his bodyguards, who attempted to arrest his uncle. Shooting broke out, at least six people were killed, and Watban Takriti was hospitalized, and remains in critical condition.

Hearing what had happened, Hussein Kamel and his brother immediately gathered up their wives and their aides and drove in an official convoy straight to the Jordanian border, according to the Sharq al-Awsat report. Only after their arrival in Amman did Iraqi authorities realize they did not plan to return.

Routine Occurrences

Uday Hussain's own newspaper, Babel, has reported that Watban Ibrahim Takriti was accidentally shot at a celebration—a routine occurrence in a culture where festive occasions are observed by firing guns into the air. It was subsequently reported from Amman that Uday arrived in Amman in an apparent attempt to convince his cousins or his sisters to return. It also was reported that Saddam Hussain's wife, Sajida Tolfah, mother of his five children, also visited Amman briefly, apparently in an attempt to convince her daughters to return. (Saddam Hussain and his wife reportedly have been estranged since 1988, when Saddam left her for Samira Shahbander, a flight attendant. The estrangement led to previous severe dissension within the family.)

Meanwhile another member of the family, Ali Hassan Majeed, who is from the same branch of the family as the defecting sons-in-law, absolved in advance anyone who killed them. He thus warded off further trouble for his immediate family and made it clear that any harm suffered by the defectors at the hands of someone from another clan would not set off a blood feud.

The bizarre events seem to bring closer the inevitable collapse of the regime of Saddam, who probably clings to power only because he fears that there is no safety anywhere in the world for a deposed ruler with so much blood on his hands. Other repercussions included a reported series of movements of Iraqi Republican Guards.

Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz summoned senior U.N. official Rolf Ekeus to Baghdad to receive additional information on Iraqi weapons programs which, Iraqi officials said, General Kamel had been holding back. Ekeus also was scheduled to meet later with General Kamel in Amman, from whence a stream of unverifiable press reports issued about what the general supposedly was revealing.

By coincidence the U.S. had planned exercises in which some 2,000 U.S. Marines would maneuver jointly with Jordanian troops and the maneuvers were carried out. On the other side of the Arabian peninsula the U.S. advanced by a month other maneuvers in which 1,400 U.S. troops from Fort Hood, TX, would land in Kuwait, take pre-positioned arms out of storage there, use them in exercises and then clean and recondition them for return to storage.

The U.S. also detained one aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, while another which had come to replace it was positioned in the Eastern Mediterranean. Thirteen U.S. ships carrying pre-positioned equipment, arms and ammunition for 22,000 ground troops embarked on a one-week cruise up the Gulf to Kuwait. There was no indication, however, that the arms, which are permanently stored on the ships, would be off-loaded on arrival. Gulf states played down the significance of the precautionary moves, but U.S. military spokesmen reminded journalists that Saddam was warned almost a year ago that if his Republican Guards venture below the 32nd parallel, about 150 miles north of Kuwait, they will be attacked.

With Iraq in its present drastically weakened condition, there was little likelihood that any of these activities would lead to incidents along Iraq's troubled borders. It is much more likely that the next shootout, whenever it takes place, will be in one of Saddam's many palaces, perhaps after yet another showdown within his fractured, frightened family.