Doubling as Saddam’s son

Latif Yahia never got his revenge, he tells Newsweek. In the late 1980s, Yahia was an officer in the Iraqi army when he received an order to report to a Baghdad palace to meet Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. “‘I want you to be my fiday,’” he remembers Uday saying. “In Arabic, fiday means body double or bullet catcher.” Yahia refused and was thrown in jail. After a week, Uday threatened to rape his sisters unless he complied. “‘I’ll do it, but leave my family alone,’ I told him.”

As Uday’s double, Yahia saw his boss torture and kill. Once, Uday ordered Yahia to shoot a man whose daughter Uday had raped. “I went crazy. I grabbed a knife and cut my wrists in front of him. He was shocked. He never asked me to shoot anyone again after that.”

Yahia escaped from Iraq in the 1990s, but he remains traumatized by his experiences. In 2003, he heard that Uday had been killed by U.S. soldiers. “I had a coffee cup in my hand, and I smashed it straight into the TV. I was very angry. I wanted him to be tried in court. I wanted to be in court to be able to say, ‘Look at what this guy did to me.’”

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