BAGHDAD'S CRUEL PRINCES

DAVID ROSE

Saddam Hussein's elder sons terrorized Iraq. Uday, 38, a sadistic megalomaniac, survived his father's wrath and an assassination attempt. Qusay, 37, a ruthless schemer, brutalized his way to the top. With new intelligence from recent defectors, DAVID ROSE reveals how each inherited a different side of Saddam

At his Baghdad palace and country retreats; in his offices at his newspapers, TV stations, and Iraq's infamous Olympic Committee; in the trunk of any of his hundreds of cars, Uday Hussein, Saddam's eldest son, likes to ensure that the tools for inflicting what Arabs call falaqa are always close at hand. They consist of a wooden club and a heavy wooden beam, with plastic straps at either end: as two bodyguards hoist the beam onto their shoulders, the victim dangles by the backs of the knees, with legs secured by the straps, and head and bared feet pointing toward the floor. With the soles thus set at a convenient height, Uday uses the club to beat them mercilessly: 20, 30, 50 times. Afterward, says one who has witnessed many such beatings, the victim is made to dance, "to get the circulation moving again," a time of purest agony.

Those made to suffer this punishment are not enemies or political prisoners, but Uday's friends—members of his entourage of business cronies and high-school classmates—and sometimes, most shockingly, women he plans to seduce. "u can get it if you turn up a little late for a meeting because of traffic," says the same source. "If he says come at 9:30 and you come at 9:37, you get one falaqa for every minute. Afterwards, you can't walk. He does it to a girl if she says she doesn't want to go out with him, or if she finds another boyfriend, or is late or reluctant. She will often piss herself, screaming." Uday warns his victims not to flinch while the falaqa is being administered. "If you move, you get your leg broken."

In the traumatized country that is Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the most visible manifestations of the dictator's power have for some years been his elder sons, Uday, who turns 39 in June, and Qusay, 37 in May. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Saddam has kept himself largely hidden, moving furtively from palace to palace, seldom spending consecutive nights in the same bed, and often relying on body doubles for public appearances. But Uday and Qusay are everywhere, perfectly embodying in their very different personalities the two sides of their father's conflicted nature—Uday the unstable, capricious megalomaniac, the sadist who kills on a whim; Qusay the ruthless strategist and organizer, the enforcer who kills when it is the way to achieve measured and rational objectives.

These contrasts explain their differing positions within the Iraqi state. Uday remains an officially sanctioned robber baron—his wealth bloated by billions of dollars of stolen commissions on sanctions-busting trade deals—and Iraq's media magnate, the controller of at least six newspapers and several TV and radio stations. But although he is the nominal chief of the Fedayeen Saddam ("Saddam's Martyrs"), a chillingly brutal militia, his only formal government role is as head of Iraq's Olympic Committee. Qusay, on the other hand, has moved with skillful efficiency to the top of Saddam's apparatus of terror, and is now in overall charge of military intelligence and all of Iraq's competing secret police forces: the Amn al-Khass, or special security organization; the Mukhabarat security and intelligence service; and the Mudiryat al-Amn al-A'ma, or general security organization. Next to Saddam, Qusay is the most powerful man in Iraq.

Through interviews with two recent Iraqi defectors who were longtime members of the brothers' circles of intimates, and with others who watched them grow up, Vanity Fair has learned new details of their lives. Both defectors have been debriefed by Western intelligence: one by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, the other by the British Secret Intelligence Service, M.I.6. Officials say both defectors are regarded as reliable sources on the inner workings of Saddam's family and regime.

During my interviews with both men, in central London, and at a safe house run by the anti-Saddam Iraqi National Congress, with a breathtaking view of the waterways and domes of Istanbul, one observation occurred to me repeatedly. Through their proximity to Saddam's sons, both defectors had effectively involved themselves in instances of terrible cruelty. Yet they seemed palpably wounded, victims struggling to make sense of horrors endured, rather than former perpetrators pining for their vanished power. I believed, in other words, their protestations that their friendships and involvement with Uday and Qusay had been essentially coerced.

As the interviews proceeded, I began to realize why. In Iraq, the country the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya called a "republic of fear," the fear is greatest at the center, within Saddam's own family and those closest to it. Friendship with Uday and Qusay, as one of the defectors puts it, "isn't like friendship to you or me. To them it's everything: business, social life, girls—everything. You can't live a normal life and be their friend. Y>u are involved with everything." In Uday's case, that means intermittent experience of the falaqa and other punishments, from a head shaving by one of his bodyguards to days or weeks of torture and imprisonment. With either brother, it could mean a trip to witness a beheading. "Until the moment I left, 1 thanked God every morning when I woke up still alive," one defector says, "because I could be killed at any moment and there would be no reason. The policy of these people is that if you know all about them, and you want to leave them, you have no chance to stay and live in Iraq. You die or you run."

"UDAY WOULD SEND SEND TO HIS BROTHER, ASKING FOR PEOPLE T0 BE KILLED OR ARRESTED. QUSAY WOULD MAKE SURE [OF IT], WITH NO QUESTIONS ASKED."

One of the themes of the propaganda issued on behalf of Iraq's self-styled "uncle," Saddam Hussein, is that of the dictator as family man. As Uday, Qusay, and their three sisters were growing up, the Iraqi media frequently published photographs of the children playing with their doting father. According to the defectors, who knew the boys at school, these images were a sham. Saddam spent much of Uday's infancy in prison, the result of a botched coup attempt in 1963, the year before his son was born. Saddam's release and Qusay's birth in 1966 made little difference. At first, Saddam was busy with the successful coup by his Baath Arab Socialist Party in 1968, and then, as the country's vice president, he was busy enlarging his power base.

A year after becoming president, in 1979, he launched the eight-year war with Iran, in which a million people died. "Uday's father was usually absent, and there was no one to control him," one of the defectors says. "It was not like a normal family." In an average year, Uday would see Saddam just three or four times. But his mother, Saddam's wife and first cousin, Sajida, adored her firstborn son. "He demanded things and he got them," the defector adds. Years later, whenever Uday bought himself diamonds—a regular event—he would make sure to buy at least one for Sajida.

Like their sisters, Uday and Qusay attended the Karakh elementary school in Baghdad, where Sajida was principal. Arras Karem, now the head of intelligence for the Iraqi National Congress, was a fellow student and knew them both. "Every Thursday there was this ceremony," he recalls. "The pupils would gather, and a soldier with a Kalashnikov would raise the flag while we sang the national anthem; afterwards he would fire a burst into the air. Then the best student from each class would be called to the front and given an award. It was like the movie Groundhog Day. Every week, Uday was always the best." While Uday reveled in this attention, his younger brother preferred to remain in the background, quietly revealing his preference for organization and leadership. "Qusay always had the same gang of kids with him," Karem says. "They used to tie pampas grasses round their heads and carry sticks for fighting. He was always late for class."

Karem is a Kurd, for whom Arabic is a second language. One afternoon, he overheard Saddam's daughter Raghad complaining to her mother about one of her teachers. He understood the beginning of her remark—"If you don't tell the bitch to fuck off, I'll ... ''—but not the Arabic phrase which followed: "Shug kussha." Karem asked his father, a stern disciplinarian, what it meant. "He slapped me hard and told me never to say such disgusting things again." Somewhat later, Karem acquired a translation: Raghad had threatened to rip out her teacher's vagina. At the time, the girl was seven or eight. "It gave me something of an insight," Karem says. "This was the language that her father and mother were using at home."

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At the age of 11, Saddam's children transferred to Baghdad College, founded by the Jesuits, which was once among the most prestigious secondary schools in the Middle East. Unusually for a new boy at a day school, Uday was given a private room, personal tutors, and his own, well-stocked library. At the age of 15, he began to drive himself to school, impressing his friends with the beginnings of his vast collection of cars: new Mercedeses, Ferraris, Bentleys, Jaguars, and the first Porsche Carrera in Iraq. By this point he was also collecting guns—not just weapons for his weekend hobby, hunting, but machine guns and assault rifles. The lack of boundaries that characterized his youth was apparent in other ways. "Even at school, Uday was obsessed with sex," says one of the defectors. "We used to visit prostitutes, Arab girls and Thais, not every day but once or twice a week. He didn't beat the girls in those days. By the age of 17 or 18 he was getting worse, thinking more and more about girls and money."

Uday was pampered abroad as well as in Iraq. In 1980 he broke his leg playing soccer. Saddam arranged for him to have treatment in France, and to take a few friends with him. With bodyguards provided by the then mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac—who had dealings with Saddam while negotiating the sale of a French nuclear reactor—Uday spent three months with his entourage in a luxury hotel while receiving treatment from France's finest surgeons and physiotherapists, according to one defector. "What did we do in Paris?" asks the defector. "My God, what do you think we did? We did everything!"

Uday and Qusay had several friends in common. But Qusay had his own special circle, to which he has stayed fiercely loyal: a small group of the sons of the Baath elite. Those who know both brothers say that reports of rivalry between them are exaggerated, and that, despite Uday's tempestuous rages, sprees, and wanton killings, Qusay has always treated his elder brother with deference and respect. Just as he did when they were teenagers, Qusay will stand when Uday enters a room. But as the boys reached adulthood, the contrasts between them were becoming all too apparent.

Entifadh Qanbar, who now runs the Iraqi National Congress office in Washington, D.C., was on the fringes of the brothers' social scene in the 1980s. While the slaughter of the Iranian war unfolded, Uday and Qusay could be seen in Baghdad's clubs and restaurants with their friends and bodyguards, drinking champagne, cognac, or Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch. "Uday used to wear white suits and Italian designer clothes, like Versace," Qanbar says. "Sometimes he'd wear these disgusting jackets in lurid colors; he was completely addicted to showing off, to trying to look good, to being the boss, always very flashy. His bodyguards were running after him like a little prince. Qusay was completely different. He wouldn't look you in the eye, was always very polite, very quiet, though actually he was much better-looking."

Uday's show of bonhomie hid an emerging sadism. Qanbar, who owned a women's accessories store in Baghdad, recalls, "One day this woman came in—she was really gorgeous—and started hitting on me. I asked her out because she was just too beautiful to be left alone. We went on a date and she asked to come back to my place. She seemed very attached to me, very affectionate, but something made me suspicious. So when she went to the bathroom, I looked in her bag. She had this really expensive Smith & Wesson pistol. I asked her, 'What the hell's going on?,' and she breaks down and says she's Uday's girlfriend, that he'd picked her up at a party, given her a Merc, everything she wanted: all of a sudden, she was a queen. But then she goes on, 'He works out every day, he's really strong, and he can't fuck me unless he whips me. Imagine this: he beats me until he falls tired.' She said she'd escaped from his palace and he'd threatened to kill her if she ever left." Frightened for his life, Qanbar begged her to go and never come back. Later, he says, she managed to leave the country.

Qusay, too, had girlfriends. But even when on a romantic adventure, say the defectors, he was always sure to spend the night in his own bed at home. Married when he was only 20, in 1986, to Luma, the daughter of a general, Maher Abd alRashid, Qusay went on to have four children, and however arid the emotional climate of his upbringing, he appears to place his own family at the center of his life.

Uday was never to achieve this grounding. Like most of Saddam's inbred family, he married a relative, his cousin Saja Barzan Tikriti. Their union, in 1990, lasted 10 days before she fled to Switzerland. She has never spoken of what transpired. Later he married another relation, Hanan, the daughter of the sometime Iraqi defense minister Ali Hassan Majid. His failure to father a child may help explain his promiscuity. Once, says one of the defectors, after tests established he had an abnormally low sperm count, he abstained from sex for an unprecedented 10 days, in the hope that this would boost a subsequent test's results. The stratagem failed.

It seems likely that, throughout most of A the 1980s, Saddam, together with the rest of Iraq, saw Uday as his natural successor. He may have been a little out of control, but this could be ascribed to youthful excess, and he did not lack talent. He had acquired an engineering degree from Baghdad University; fluent in English and accomplished in French, he has always read voraciously. In 1987, Saddam gave him his first official post, as head of the Olympic Committee, where he seems to have made an impressive start, raising its profile by turning it into a ministry for youth. (It was not for some years that a steady stream of former athletes, including soccer players, began to emerge from Iraq, describing how Uday would have them jailed or tortured for losing or performing badly.) But the events of October 18, 1988, were to ensure that this first government job would also be his last.

There are differing accounts of exactly how Uday murdered one of his father's closest friends, Kamel Hannah Jajo, who had worked for Saddam as a bodyguard, food taster, and pimp. Some reports say he hacked his throat with an electric pruning knife, although one of the defectors, who was with Uday before and during the attack, says he used a mugwar, a club he always kept in his car. The motive may have been the fact that Jajo had introduced the polygamous Saddam to his second wife, Samira alShahbander, who had recently given birth to a son, thereby threatening both Uday's position and that of his indulgent mother. There is, however, no doubt that it happened at a party on the Tigris River for Egypt's First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak, and le tout Baghdad, and that Saddam responded with a terrible righteous anger.

Followed by his own entourage, Uday fled the party and drove to the home of his uncle Adnan Tulfah, his mother's brother, who during his youth had given him the closest thing he got to paternal guidance. There he learned that Jajo—though personally driven to the hospital by Saddam—had died from his wounds, and that his father was now threatening to have Uday killed. Instead, Saddam jailed Uday and his friends for 60 days at Radwaniyah, a notorious prison north of Baghdad. There, even Uday experienced the brutal norms of detention in Iraq.

"One day Uday hit a guard in the jail," says one of the defectors, who was a fellow prisoner. "Saddam had six soldiers from the Republican Guard brought in to punish him—all from different units, so they didn't know each other and it would be much harder for Uday to track them down. They beat him with sticks, so badly he couldn't remember anything. We didn't see him for six days. When we did, he had blue bruises all over his head." In this darkest moment, one member of Uday's family stayed completely loyal—Qusay. "He brought food to the prison for us and Uday," the defector says. "He would ask the guards to let us take a shower."

Eventually, Saddam forgave his son. A few weeks after Uday's release from prison, Saddam restored him to the Olympic Committee, gave him back his cars and the palace he had confiscated, and presented him with a huge diamond ring. But the defector says that Uday was never the same again, and that the violence and anger which had always lain close to the surface erupted full force. "This was the turning point. After this he wanted to use all his power: to take all the money, all the women, hurt people. He wasn't nice before, but he was more normal: he would go to parties, swim, take foreign trips. Not afterwards."

Qusay, meanwhile, was prospering. In 1989, equipped with a law degree and none of his brother's maniacal flamboyance, Qusay was asked by his father to begin his apprenticeship in his private office, under the tutelage of his senior secretary, Hamid Hamadi. "He taught him how to read official papers, and how to write comments," says one of the defectors. After six months, Saddam asked Qusay to join the special security unit, Amn al-Khass, working under Hussein Kamel, who was the husband of his sister Raghad, as well as his cousin. In the spring of 1991, the regime's moment of deepest peril, when Saddam's armies were driven from Kuwait and the Shiites and Kurds rebelled, Qusay demonstrated just how well he deserved his father's increasing trust.

One of the defectors stayed close to Qusay throughout those dreadful weeks. With his authority apparently crumbling, Saddam deputed close members of his family to restore control, area by area. To Qusay was entrusted one of the most important—Baghdad, and especially its vast Shiite enclave, Saddam City, which was in open revolt.

First, says the defector, Qusay softened up the district by ordering the Republican Guard to shell it indiscriminately, without regard for civilian casualties. Then came wave after wave of arrests. "He rounded up hundreds and hundreds and herded them into warehouses. There the prisoners were stripped naked: men, women, and children all together.

Qusay questioned many of them himself. They were shot on the spot if they were not cooperating." In this intifada, Qusay believed, his family was sure to lose its power, and as a result he became "utterly ruthless."

Most of his victims were buried in mass graves dug by bulldozers.

However much Qusay took care to soothe his brother's feelings, Uday took Saddam's transfer of affections hard. "Why has my father chosen Qusay?" he used to ask the defectors repeatedly. At the same time,

"he always remembers, when he was in jail and had no power, who still gave him friendship and who didn't.

Now he became like a wolf—to give a lesson to the people who hadn't supported him."

The main object of Uday's attempted revenge became his brother-inlaw Hussein Kamel, Saddam's security chief and, sources say, one of the key architects of Iraq's chemicaland nuclear-weapons programs. Uday's tools were articles attacking his relative in one of his newspapers, Babil, and personal complaints to his father. Each man created his own intelligence network to spy on the other, with agents among their servants and guards. "This is a very bad family," one of the defectors says. "One day Uday even found a bug at his home—it must have come from Hussein Kamel."

Uday was growing fabulously rich in his own right, siphoning commissions of 10 or 20 percent on every foreign-trade deal—illegal sales of Iraqi oil, smuggled across the Persian Gulf and into the United Arab Emirates; imports in breach of United Nations sanctions of everything from computers to steel. Hussein Kamel was a direct competitor, with his own commercial networks, and Uday launched a searching investigation. One of its leaders was Jamal Abu Zeinab alQurairy, a former Mukhabarat brigadier who defected from Iraq in 2000, whom I interviewed for Vanity Fair in Beirut. "When we were investigating Hussein Kamel's links with businessmen, we were operating like the Mafia," he says. "We arrested people, beat them up, because we had to reflect Uday's anger. We confiscated their wealth without a single legal document." Most of these victims were detained and tortured in Uday's private prison, an underground warren of rooms painted red beneath the offices of the Olympic Committee. Many subsequently died, part of a ceaseless stream of extrajudicial detentions and killings sponsored by Uday which al-Qurairy likens to "the flow of oil."

The feud with Kamel came to a head on August 7, 1995, the anniversary of the end of the Iran-Iraq war, a public holiday when Kamel knew most of Iraq's leadership would be at parties, getting drunk. Presumably through his spies, he also knew that Uday was about to deliver a damaging report to Saddam, accurately claiming that Kamel had stolen millions of dollars from the government by taking illegal commissions on weapons deals with Russia and Ukraine.

Hussein Kamel decided to flee, together with his brother Saddam, a colonel in Amn al-Khass, and their wives, Saddam Hussein's daughters Raghad and Rina, as well as their children and 15 friends and relatives. While Baghdad celebrated, we learn in Andrew and Patrick Cockburn's book Out of the Ashes, they sped across Iraq's western desert in a fleet of Mercedeses, crossing into Jordan before dawn. This was no pleasure trip, but a full-blown defection. Within a fortnight of his arrival in Jordan's capital, Amman, Hussein Kamel had given a press conference and announced his intention of toppling Saddam's regime. Much more damagingly, he and his followers met with both the C.I.A. and Rolf Ekeus, then the head of the United Nations weapons-inspection team. Their defection enabled Ekeus to prove that Iraq had a hitherto unsuspected biological-weapons program; in addition, they gave him the secrets of how other banned armaments had been successfully concealed.

For Saddam Hussein, the Kamels' defection was a devastating blow, delivered to the heart of his murderous, dysfunctional family. For Uday, however, it came as a blessing. On the very night of their flight to Jordan, Uday had been with much of the extended first family at a gathering near Baghdad. The reasons for its descent into chaos are complicated. But it ended with Uday spraying the room with bullets from a submachine gun. Several traditional Gypsy dancers and singers were killed outright. However, Uday's main target had been his uncle Watban, Saddam's beloved half-brother. He was hit in the leg and badly wounded— crippled for life, according to the defectors. Had the Kamels not fled, Saddam's wrath would have been as great as it had been after Uday's earlier public murder, in 1988. As it was, says one of the defectors, Saddam went to one of the huge airconditioned parking lots where Uday keeps his cars, poured gasoline over 30 or 40 vehicles, and set them alight. But he also gave Uday a vital mission: to lure the Kamels and their families back to Iraq.

Uday's first approach—a visit to Amman two days after the Kamels' arrival—was a dismal failure. Fearful of an assassination, King Hussein refused to allow him to see his relatives. Afterward, says one of the defectors, Uday adopted a less direct method. Using an intermediary who was trusted by both his sisters and their husbands, he sent a series of secret messages to Amman, promising—in the name of their clan and Saddam Hussein—that if they would only return to the motherland they would be safe. In Jordan, after a few heady weeks during which he had been the center of the world's attention, Hussein Kamel was frustrated and bored. Ignoring the protests of his wife and brother, he wrote to Uday, saying they wanted to come home. On February 20, 1996, the caravan of Mercedeses drove back to the Iraqi border. Uday was there, waiting. He hustled his sisters and their children into cars in his own motorcade, leaving the Kamels to drive on into Iraq alone. Witnessing this scene, a Jordanian security official reportedly telephoned the royal palace in Amman. "He's finished," he said.

The story of the Kamels' bloody demise three days later at one of the family's homes in Baghdad could have come from one of the gorier ancient Greek myths. Saddam compelled his daughters to divorce their husbands, and then, in a symbolic gesture supposedly meant to convey that the ensuing fight would be fair, Uday had breakfast delivered to the Kamel brothers. "Uday sent guns in the cold boxes," says one of the defectors. Finally the house was surrounded by members of the Kamels' own clan, the alMajids, who were also members of Iraq's presidential guard. The battle raged for several hours, leaving at least eight of the attackers dead, together with all the Kamels— Saddam and Hussein, their brother Hakim, two of their sisters, and four children.

According to the defector, this flagrant breach of tribal honor affected Uday deeply. "Afterwards he told people that Hussein Kamel died a hero. He didn't want to have him killed, because he'd given him his word." Both Uday and Qusay watched the start of the attack, but Qusay left within minutes, saying "he didn't want Hussein Kamel's son to think he had killed his father." At the end of that terrible day, Qusay took his sisters and their children into his own home and later built them mansions next door. Although he promptly took over all of Hussein Kamel's central roles in the regime, his relationship with the family survives: he has, say the defectors, become like a father to the Kamel children. As for his sisters Raghad and Rina, they blame Uday for the killings and have not spoken to him since.

Nemesis of a kind caught up with Uday 10 months later, on December 12, 1996. He was in the first car of a threeMercedes motorcade, with his friends and bodyguards in the vehicles behind. For once, Uday was not driving. This saved his life. As the cars slowed to a stop at a busy intersection on Mansour Street, a gunman, who had been waiting there for hours, drew a Kalashnikov from a sports bag and opened fire, killing the lead driver instantly. Uday, according to the Cockbums, managed to crouch beneath the dashboard. Then, however, one of two further would-be assassins realized that their principal target was not yet dead and emptied his magazine into him. The attack was over in less than a minute, and the attackers—members of a then unknown opposition group, al-Nahda—ran from the scene, with a fourth member providing covering fire. They managed to escape in a waiting getaway car. But as Qusay deployed the full power of Iraq's secret state against them, one by one the gang was picked offaccording to the Iraqi National Congress, its last surviving member was assassinated by Amn al-Khass agents in Iran in early 2003.

Uday was shot at least eight times, in the chest, abdomen, pelvis, and legs. Much of his left femur was reduced to useless and bloody fragments: for a length of four inches, there was effectively no bone at all. With him bleeding copiously, his survival seemed improbable, but one of his bodyguards, Ali Saha, who was traveling in the Mercedes behind, ignored the still-present gunmen and dragged Uday into his own car, in which he was rushed to a hospital. The Iraqi doctors there were unanimous: Uday might live, but he was unlikely to walk again. It was improbable he would ever be able to have sexual relations again. As he lay sedated, his widowed sisters celebrated. Alone of his close family, they did not visit him in the hospital.

Saddam's grief was heightened by guilt. He knew that the gunmen had been made aware of Uday's route that night because of a leak from Iraq's security services, and he suspected that the reason was revenge for the bloodshed he had ordered within his own family. He begged his aides to scour the world for doctors who might be able to prevent his eldest son from becoming a cripple. First a French team came: they kept Uday's leg wound open, in order to preserve the chance for a bone graft, but declined to try an operation in Baghdad. Uday agreed to be flown to Paris. At the last minute, fearful for his safety, he changed his mind.

Finally, Vanity Fair can reveal, the Husseins found their surgeon in Dr. Ulrich Holz, a renowned orthopedist and medical-school professor from Stuttgart, Germany. While Saddam sat in the operating theater, according to a defector, Holz replaced the missing femur with titanium. "He asked for no payment," says one of the defectors, who helped secure his services.

In a telephone interview, Holz confirms that he had performed the procedure. "How do you know about this operation?" he asks. "I'm not ready to talk about it. It was years ago and I don't have the patient's consent. What I did there was in the scope of any good trauma surgeon." How does he feel about treating a man who was known to have committed murders on behalf of a regime which had already been accused of genocide? "I have not heard this before," he says. "I am sure there are many people in the world who have killed, but a doctor should not look upon the person, he should look upon the problem." It was true he had not asked for payment: "Why should I? Normally in these Arab countries you don't ask for payment. They pay you what they want. Saddam was very generous."

Holz did his work well. In time, Uday learned to walk again, albeit with a special orthopedic boot, to ride a horse, and even, though with much greater difficulty than before, to have sex. As for AJi Saha, who saved Uday's life by pulling him from his shattered car while the gunmen still hovered and getting him to the hospital, in January 2003 he was arrested, while allegedly planning an escape to the autonomous Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq. One of the defectors says he has word of his fate from a family member who stayed in Baghdad: "Uday told them to cut out his tongue, cut off one of his ears, break his legs, and leave him on the road. He had 20 years' service."

U day's shooting was a second turning point in his life, after which he became still more depraved. "After the attack Uday said, 'God doesn't want me to die. He wants me for a big mission.'" According to this defector, his faith is misplaced. "I think God wants him to live for one reason: so he will see for himself how much the Iraqi people hate him, and how much they want to punish him."

His difficulty in performing the sexual act appears only to have intensified his priapic urge to attempt it. Since his recovery in 1997, the defector says, Uday has developed an obsession with deflowering virgins: "He likes to see the blood on the sheets. And if he's taken a girl's virginity, he knows she may end up on the streets as a prostitute, because no one else will touch her. Hundreds have been affected this way. He likes joking about it with his friends: 'Look at her, after this she'll be a prostitute.'" His taste in girls—some as young as 12 or 13—spans Iraq's class structure. According to the defector, he has forced the principals of girls' schools in Baghdad's poorer districts to send groups of students to his palace, where he will inspect their looks and arrange dates with those he fancies. "If the girls refuse, they are beaten. If they say the wrong thing or are late, they get falaqa." Sometimes, the defector adds, Uday will spike a girl's drink with Rohypnol and rape her while she remains semi-conscious. "She wakes up next day and finds she's lost her virginity. Many times I've heard them crying; later they will try to phone him, but he won't answer. He never spends the night with a woman. He will fuck her, then go next door."

On other occasions, Uday prefers to take his pleasures among Baghdad's middleand upper-class elite. "He devotes Wednesdays to 'helping' war widows and assisting girls who want to go to university," says the former Mukhabarat brigadier Jamal al-Qurairy. "They turn up in makeup and short skirts." Sometimes he hits on married women, promising favors, such as getting family members out of prison. "He never delivers," says one of the defectors, "and he's caused a lot of divorces. The woman will say, 'I've got to get home to my husband now.' Uday gives orders to the guards: 'Don't let her go.'"

Since the time of what his entourage euphemistically calls his "accident," Uday's cruelty has multiplied in other ways. He gives the falaqa far more often, partly, says one of the defectors, because of his own disabilities, and his desire to see people with damaged or broken legs. Other victims have been branded on the buttocks with hot irons. "Waiters, girls—anyone who he considers has committed a minor crime. Uday tells them, 'This mark is never going to go from your body, so you'll remember me until the day you die.' Scream? You'd think they were dying," says a defector. Uday's rate of random killing has also increased. The defectors say at least one hapless friend has died after being held down and forced to drink enormous quantities of pure distilled alcohol. Those who have crossed him in business have been shot twice, in the arm and leg, and allowed to bleed slowly to death: "He tells the guards not to give any treatment." On one occasion, a defector says, "we were out on a lake, fishing with grenades. After the explosion, the fish floated to the surface. There was a man swimming 200 meters away, and he went to get one of the fish. He didn't hear Uday shouting, 'Don't touch my fish.' Uday shot him."

One afternoon in 2000, Uday phoned the other defector and told him he would be picked up with two of his friends and driven to the city of Nasiriya, where they were to "report on what happened and learn by its example." They were taken to a barracks of Uday's militia, the Fedayeen Saddam, where four alleged traitors were going to be executed in front of a crowd of 300 officials. "They were hog-tied, carried in like sheep. One of them was accused of slandering Saddam. They pulled out his tongue with a fork, and cut it off with a pair of shears. Then all four were beheaded with a sword. It's very strange when you see someone decapitated: the neck collapses, exposing the shoulder muscles. Afterwards, Uday insisted on seeing me before I went home. He kept asking, 'What did you think? What did you think?' I couldn't sleep for days."

Qusay is sometimes directly involved in his brother's crimes. "Qusay is always willing to cooperate with his brother," says alQurairy, "either out of loyalty or tactics. Uday would send slips round to his brother, asking for people to be killed or arrested. Qusay would make sure Amn al-Khass would do this, with no questions asked." But in general, say the new defectors, Qusay's violence remains more discriminate, better directed. "All these things Uday does, Qusay does, too. But only as part of his job."

As Vanity Fair goes to press in March 2003, the fate of Uday, Qusay, and their father's regime is uncertain. By the time this article is published, all three may be dead.

For now, each broods on his exit strategy. One of the defectors describes a recent occasion when the two brothers, for the first time in his hearing, discussed their leastmentionable subject—regime change. "If anything goes wrong, I have my money," Uday said. "I will buy an island, be king on my island. My money will save me." Qusay looked at him quizzically. "If Saddam goes, I go with him. And if Saddam goes, nothing will save either one of us."