yellow cake found in iraq

Saddam's demon seed

The headquarters of the Iraqi house lasted five hours, starting with a call to go loudspeakered and ending with the crash of missiles from a helicopter gunship United States. By the time he was more than half of the house of the wedding cake-style facade was gone, with only the support by the rocket-hole circuit when they were finally allowed to close.

Then came the dramatic fall of notorious Uday Saddam Hussein's son Qusay, and whose life resembles a gangster movie in real life, and whose death in July 2003 has produced one of the few universal moments in a good mood in the shadows growing post-war Iraq. For the U.S. military, it was a morale boost more than necessary on a mission steady unraveling, thread both the Ace of Heart and Ace of Clubs in the "deck 55" Most Wanted. For Iraqis, meanwhile, it meant the passing of two of the regime’s most feared men – in particular Uday, whose psychotic, unhinged brutality made his father look statesmanlike.

Yet as celebratory gunfire erupted over Baghdad, Latif Yahia, a 39-year-old former commando, was one of the few Iraqis who didn’t reach for his Kalashnikov. Not just because he was thousands of miles away in exile in England, where assault rifles are still frowned upon as party poppers, but because he didn’t want to cheer. He wanted to cry.

“The Americans should have taken Uday alive,” he tells me now. “I wanted him to face trial, so that I could tell the world what he had done, all the killing.”

Playboy, murderer, and sadist extraordinaire, Saddam’s elder son left no shortage of people with horror stories to tell in his wake. Yet for Latif, the trauma of his encounter with him was uniquely personal, one that still haunts him every time he looks in the mirror. For back in 1987, after noticing his striking likeness to Saddam’s son, Iraq’s secret service picked him to be Uday’s “fiday”, or body double, a job that involved becoming the living, breathing copy of the nation’s greatest hate figure.

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