The Day Saddam Fell
On December 30th 2006 Saddam Hussein was hanged. This is how I remember the fall of his regime.
It needed a flashlight to see them in the unlit darkness of a spring night: rows of rust-coloured butcher’s hooks arranged along the ceiling of a vast hangar-like facility. This looked to be the bleakest area of Iraq’s penitentiary, on the desert floor 20 miles west of Baghdad.
A brisk breeze blew through open doors at one end of the Abu Ghraib compound. The light revealed a windowed chamber at the far end that seemed to be a control room. Baggy pants, like those worn among many Iraqi males, were strewn across the concrete floor. Some were dusty, as if they had been worn in the last, humiliating moments of a condemned man’s life.
This was a location for mass hangings, which were a documented aspect of life under Saddam Hussein. This was one of the first scenes aired on Kurdish television as a tribute to the fallen lives.
I recall the day Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship toppled like it was yesterday. I was sitting in my father’s office, enthralled to the television, as the news unfolded in front of my eyes. For years, I and many others had hoped for this moment, for the day when the tyrant who had tormented my people for so long would be overthrown.
As a child, I remember the sense of hope and possibility that filled the air in those early years. As the images of jubilant crowds flooded the screen, tears of joy streamed down on so many faces. We knew that this was a moment that would change the course of history for the Kurdish people, and for the entire Middle East. It was like a dream come true. The streets of our cities and towns erupted in celebration as people danced, sang, and hugged each other in joy. For the first time in our lives, we were free from the fear and oppression that had weighed on us for so long.
As the days and weeks passed, it became clear that the road ahead would not be easy. The fall of Saddam Hussein had unleashed a wave of chaos and violence across the country, and the Kurdistan region was not immune. We faced economic difficulties, political instability, and ongoing violence in the region. But despite these challenges, Kurds remained determined to rebuild their region and create a better future for the next generation; the generation who would rebuild the country.
In the years before Saddam’s fall in 2003, we used to tore the pictures of Saddam out of our schoolbooks as a way of symbolically rejecting the repression and violence of his rule and our determination to build a better future for our communities.
Saddam Hussein’s reign of terror had been paralleled to that of Stalin, whom the Iraqi leader is claimed to admire, even if his own atrocities have been on a smaller scale. Historians believe Stalin murdered 20 million of his own people. Even on a proportionate basis, his atrocities greatly outnumber Saddam’s, yet statistics of a million dead Iraqis in war and terror may not be far off in a country of then 22 million people.
The regime’s relentlessly vicious nature appears to be the closest parallel. Iraq had its own gulag of jails, dungeons, and torture chambers, some of which were openly visible, such as Abu Ghraib, and many more that are hidden under hotels, fitness centres, and other seemingly harmless facilities. It had overlapping secret police agencies and a culture of treachery, with family members accusing one other and offices and industries turning into hives of duplicity.
I’ll never forget the day I watched Saddam Hussein on TV in court. Every Kurd had hoped that he would be brought to justice for the atrocities he had done against my people and Iraqis.
I sat in front of the screen, my heart racing with anticipation, as the camera panned across the courtroom. There he was. The tyrant dictator, the man who had terrorised my people for so long, was finally standing trial for his crimes. He looked older and weaker than I had imagined, but there was no mistaking the hatred and defiance in his eyes.
As the trial went on, I watched with a mixture of emotions. On one hand, I was relieved to see Saddam finally facing justice for his crimes. But on the other hand, I was filled with sadness and anger as I heard the testimony of survivors and witnesses first hand who described the horrors they had endured at the hands of Saddam’s regime.
The court has heard grim testimony from Kurdish witnesses who told of entire families killed in chemical weapons attacks against their villages. They said survivors plunged their faces into milk to end the pain from the blinding gas or fled into the hills on mules as military helicopters fired on them. This was all part of Al-Anfal campaign.
The campaign saw the death of at least 180,000 Kurds. Thousands went missing and hundreds of villages were destroyed. In 1988, the Iraqi government used chemical weapons against the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing an estimated 5,000 innocent children, women and men; every living things). This attack was one of the worst crimes against humanity (and nature) committed by the Iraqi government during his rule. The Iraqi government launched a campaign of forced relocation against the Kurds, moving many of them to so-called “collective towns” in an effort to Arabise the Kurdish cities and erase their ignites. They also implemented a number of other measures to suppress the Kurdish population, including imposing strict controls on the use of the Kurdish language and culture, and denying Kurds access to education and employment opportunities.
It is worth mention that after the 1991 Gulf War, the Kurdistan region of Iraq gained a degree of autonomy as part of the safe haven and no-fly zone established by the United Nations. This period saw the Kurds hold their first election and the emergence of the first government and the first democratically elected parliament led by Jawhar Namiq Salim.
Following the fall, America’s failed policy, in collaboration with regional powers, contributed to the instability that led to the current situation in Iraq. Other variables, such as internal differences inside Iraq and the broader regional and global political background, also had a role in the events that led to today’s situation in Baghdad.
I’d want to conclude this column with a personal anecdote shared with me by a dear friend during my recent return to Kurdistan.
“My family lived in a small village in the mountains, where we were surrounded by the beauty of nature and the rich culture of our people. But our way of life was shattered when Saddam’s forces came to our village. They burned our homes, arrested and tortured our neighbours, and forced us to flee into the mountains.
As we wandered through the cold and barren landscape, I saw firsthand the cruelty and brutality of Saddam’s regime. I saw children my own age starving and sick, their families torn apart by violence and fear. I saw women and men beaten and humiliated, their dignity stripped away by their captors.
Despite the horrors we faced, my family and I never lost hope. We knew that one day, Saddam’s regime would fall, and that the Kurdish people would be free to rebuild their lives and their communities. And when that day finally came, I was proud to have survived the horrors of Saddam’s rule, and to have stood with my people in their struggle for justice and freedom.
In the end, Saddam was found guilty and sentenced to death. And as I watched him being led away in handcuffs, I knew that this was the beginning of a new era for the Kurdish people of Iraq. We had finally turned the page on our dark history, and were moving forward towards a brighter future.”
