![]() Saddam escaped Iraq with a gunshot wound in the leg and spent the next six years in exile in Cairo where he had contacts with the CIA. Two years later, at the age of 22, Saddam was part of a Baathist plot to assassinate General Abdul Karim Kassem, who had overthrown the monarchy of King Faisal II a year before. Saddam joined the pan-Arab nationalist Baath Party in 1957. It may have influenced his mother's choice of a name for the child: Saddam means "he who confronts." He was raised alternately by his mother and his uncle, a fervent Iraqi nationalist and an early supporter of the Iraqi Baath party who had an early ideological influence on the ambitious young Saddam. Saddam never knew his father, a shepherd, who disappeared six months before he was born. The man who saw himself as a modern heir to Mesopotamian kings like Nebuchadnezzar and Hammurabi was born on April 28, 1937, on the banks of the Tigris in the hardscrabble village of Owja, just south of Tikrit. Webguide The Final Days of Saddam Hussein Rights Groups Concerned Over Saddam Trial ≚ Slain Saddam Trial Lawyer's Final Interview Verdict Closes a Grim Trial Full of Theatrics Saddam Is Sentenced to Death, and Iraq Shrugs The Trial and Execution of Saddam Hussein Was this the same man who had been beamed into Iraqi living rooms for hours on end, delivering speeches in a pressed uniform, his hair smartly dyed black, his mustache full and neat? Was this the man who took on Iran? The man who lobbed rockets at Israel and threatened the President of the United States? Was this the man the country's composers wrote songs for? At that moment, all the artifice and cunning Saddam had invested in his 24 years at the levers of power fell away and the shepherd's son who had his name stamped on the bricks at Babylon was shown to be that last and most pathetic thing every dictator who lives long enough inevitably becomes: a frightened old man, totally alone. It reminded him of a trader checking the teeth of a new donkey, he said. I watched these scenes unfold in Baghdad with my friend Omar, who chuckled when he saw a doctor shining a flashlight in Saddam's open mouth. There he was, shown on television, dirt smeared on his face, his beard unkempt, his thick head of hair matted and graying. No one in Iraq had ever seen him more vulnerable. forces, hiding in a hole on a relative's farm outside his hometown of Tikrit. Follow Hussein may have lost his life today.
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