Saddam Hussein's massive monuments to himself have been toppled this week, but he will be forever remembered by the Iraqi people for his unspeakable cruelty. Lara Marlowe reports from Baghdad
He compared himself to the Prophet Mohamed; the ancient Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar; Saladin, the Muslim warrior who defeated the crusaders in Jerusalem. Saddam Hussein's megalomania was boundless. But this week, US troops bivouacked in the international airport he named after himself, marched beneath the Arch of Triumph commemorating his "victory" over Iran, and helped Shiite looters pull down his statue.
Did the Iraqi dictator watch these humiliations on television, from some luxurious underground bunker? Or is he perhaps, as some US officials claim, already dead? It matters a lot to Iraqis.
"I'm not sure the government is really gone," a woman in Sa'adoun Street said fearfully as she watched US Marines roll into east Baghdad on Wednesday. After all, Saddam Hussein lost control of 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces in the 1991 uprising, then survived to rule for another dozen years.
"We want him caught alive, so we can punish him," a seemingly gentle, middle-class Sunni Muslim Baghdadi told me.
When Iraqis use the verb "punish", they don't mean tribunals and prison. The 1958 massacre of the Iraqi royal family is on everyone's mind here. When the king's pro-British prime minister, Nouri Said, tried to escape dressed as a woman, a mob dismembered him and dragged the body through the streets of Baghdad - a fate that could still befall Saddam.
Ever since he became Iraq's de facto ruler in a Ba'athist coup 35 years ago, Saddam knew that many of his compatriots wanted to tear him to pieces.
"Do not think you will get revenge," he warned a family who protested at the arbitrary execution of a relation. "If you ever have the chance, by the time you get to us \, there will be not a sliver of flesh left on our bodies."
In three-and-a-half decades of absolute power, Saddam turned the Ba'ath Party and his personality cult into the bedrock of Iraq. When Ba'athist officials vanished mid-week the state ceased to function and despite the presence of US "liberators". Even the US Marines encamped around the Palestine hotel relied on vestiges of the regime's authority, preferring Iraqi government press cards to US or British passports as ID.
There were no Iraqi police to stop looters, no city engineers to restore electrical power. Transport, petrol stations, shops, restaurants - everything stopped, as if the poisonous glue that held the country together had come unstuck. Banks and money changers stayed shut, and no one seemed certain whether the dinar was still legal tender. Hospitals overflowed with casualties from three weeks of war, but doctors stayed home to fight off the looters who threatened their families. Ambulances and medicine were pillaged. At Kindi Hospital, bearded men donned doctors' blue operating gowns and chased journalists away at gunpoint. They were rumoured to be an Islamist group, hostile to the US takeover of the capital.
For despite Saddam's fall from power, Baghdad is far from peaceful. The aerial bombardment has stopped, but looters and ordinary civilians trade gunfire. US Marines have repeatedly shot motorists who approached their positions. A day after they received their warmest welcome in the Shiite slums of Saddam City, a man wearing a belt of explosives walked up to a Marine position there on a suicide mission, killing himself and reportedly some Marines.
Saddam's supporters claimed dictatorship was preferable to anarchy; some fear that argument is being vindicated. Though the vast majority of Iraqis were happy to see Saddam fall, there was sorrow and resentment at the deaths of so many civilians in the US bombardment, and deep anxiety about the future.
When Iraq eventually returns to something approaching normality, countless bridges, hospitals and schools will have to be renamed. Yesterday, after a two-day orgy of looting, Shiites from the slums doused the central bank, a hotel, government ministries and other buildings in petrol and set them alight. At sunset, the Baghdad skyline was a series of huge bonfires.
Saddam's main presidential complex, soon to be Gen Tommy Franks's headquarters, was saved by the presence of US troops. Most of the furniture was evacuated before the war, and looters didn't get a chance to strip the gold fittings from his bathrooms, or the imported videos from his underground cinema; Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather was one of Saddam's favourites.
He had quotations from himself engraved in marble on his palace walls. In case anyone doubted their origin, each pearl of wisdom was signed, "His Excellency President Saddam Hussein". They were often couched in the crude, violent language of an Arab tribesman.
Until its last issue was published on Monday, the Iraq Daily reprinted the same Saddam quote on its masthead every day: "Don't provoke a snake before you make up your mind and muster the ability to cut its head. It will be of no use to say that you have not started the attack, if it attacks you by surprise."
In the huge meeting room in the palace, a throne-like chair sat before an oil painting of the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. The throne faced a floor-to-ceiling fresco of flaming missiles, each decorated with an Iraqi flag, shooting through dark clouds towards the heavens.
To ensure he was remembered by future generations, Saddam had the ancient city of Babylon rebuilt with clay bricks etched with his name. At his monumental Arch of Triumph, 40-foot long metal forearms clutch giant steel sabres. The arms were cast in Basingstoke in England, from a mould taken of the presidential limb, true to every vein and wrinkle.
A Koran in the "Mother of All Battles" mosque, which celebrates the invasion of Kuwait, was written with 13 litres of Saddam's blood, by Iraq's finest calligrapher. The minarets are shaped like Scud missiles, a decorative pool like a map of the Arab world. Now the dictator's pet project, the world's largest mosque, named after him, will never be completed. Like all Iraqi mosques, it was to have been inaugurated on April 28th, the president's birthday.
Saddam's self-adoration spawned a nation of imitators. Like the 66-year-old dictator, most Iraqi men dye their hair black and wear moustaches. The whisky paunch was a characteristic shared by members of the regime, from vice-presidents down to the seedy, omnipresent mokhabarat intelligence agents who vanished with their masters. Journalists who followed looters into the office of a high-ranking information ministry official found on his desk a photograph of him being decorated by Saddam Hussein, his Ba'ath Party membership card and a packet of Viagra.
Saddam's 20 palaces reflected his fear of assassination as well as greed. Diplomats and other visitors were never sure to which palace they'd be taken. Cooks in all 20 locations prepared three meals a day for the president. And in the event that a traitor managed to lace his food with anthrax, botulin or VX nerve agents, a presidential food taster was permanently on duty. Saddam had reportedly not used a telephone since the last Gulf War, to prevent US electronic surveillance from homing in on his location.
Whatever fear Saddam experienced, it was far less than the terror he inflicted. For the first 11 years of his rule, he allowed his cousin, Brig Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, to be the figurehead prime minister. In July 1979, Saddam forced al-Bakr to resign and declared himself president. Some of his fellow Ba'athists objected, so Saddam staged a Stalinist-style purge that was the founding act of his regime.
In uniform and smoking a cigar, Saddam rose to the podium at a Ba'ath Party meeting. The party was betrayed by a Syrian plot, he announced. Mohe Abed al-Hussein Mashadi, the secretary general of the country's Revolutionary Command Council, was brought out from behind a curtain. He'd been tortured for several days, and one by one, listed his fellow "plotters". As each man was named, a video camera filmed him being escorted out of the room by guards. If the doomed Ba'athists dared protest, Saddam shouted, "Out, out!". When it was over, 60 "traitors", including 21 top party officials, were dead. Saddam made sure that videos of the party session circulated throughout the country.
The clique who until this week were Saddam's top aides - among them Izzat Ibrahim el-Douri, Taha Yassin Ramadan and Tariq Aziz - allegedly joined their president in the firing squad, shooting the "traitors" with revolvers in the basement of the conference hall. Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, aged 15 and 13 at the time, are believed to have witnessed the executions. Uday later boasted that his father sent him and Qusay to prisons to watch torture sessions, as training for their future.
Nominally the head of the Iraqi Olympic Committee and Journalists' Union, known to Iraqis as "the Prince", Uday grew up to be a drug addict, rapist and psychopathic killer. Saddam made the more stolid Qusay head of Iraq's vicious intelligence services, to groom him for the succession. In the present war, Qusay was meant to lead Iraqi forces in defending Baghdad.
Two of Saddam's close relatives - his cousin "Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid, and his nephew and son-in-law Hussein Kamel - distinguished themselves by "specialising" in the massacre of Kurds and Shiites. Al-Majid was reportedly killed by British forces on April 5th. Hussein Kamel and his younger brother Saddam Kamel defected to Amman, in Jordan with their wives - Saddam's daughters Raghad and Rina - in 1995.
Inter-marriage was a way of strengthening ties within the regime. After revealing the continuing existence of Iraqi nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programmes, Hussein Kamel and company were insane enough to return to Iraq six months later. Saddam forcibly divorced his nephews from his daughters, then had them machine-gunned and dragged away with meat hooks through their eyes.
Saddam's maternal uncle and surrogate father, Khairallah Tulfah, published a text in 1981 entitled: Three things that God should not have created: Persians, Jews and flies. It was a sentiment he passed on to Saddam. Under the Ba'athist regime, the Sunni minority, one fifth of Iraq's population, oppressed the Shiites - whom Saddam considered Persians - and the Kurds.
The Shiites comprise 55 per cent of the population, and they have been mercilessly persecuted. In 1980, Saddam had their leader, Ayatollah Mohamed Bakr Sadr, and his sister Bint Houda, tortured to death. Before they died, Bint Houda was raped in front of her brother. Bakr Sadr's beard was burned and nails were hammered into his head.
On Thursday, Sayid Majid al-Khoie, the son of the late Grand Ayatollah, was knifed to death in the Shiite shrine in Najaf. Al-Khoie had just returned from 10 years' exile in London, during which he often represented Iraqi Shiites in talks with US and British officials. Saddam's supporters would have had strong motives for murdering him, and al-Khoie's death augurs ill for relations between Sunni and Shia.
By failing to stop looting across the country, US invasion forces have given Iraqi Sunnis the impression they are supporting the Shia. When Saddam's statue was toppled with the help of US Marines on Wednesday, some of the crowd chanted, "Ya Hussein, ya Hussein," a Shiite cry recalling the "martyrdom" of Imam Hussein at Kerbala.
It sent shivers through Iraqi Sunnis.
But Saddam was nearly as cruel to his fellow Sunnis. In 1990, Gen Omar al-Hazaa downed a whisky too many at his club, and made the mistake of criticising Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. His tongue was cut out before he was executed. A nephew of al-Hazaa sought revenge by assisting an assassination attempt against Uday in 1996. Shot eight times, Uday was partially paralysed. A French source who met him recently said he moves "like robo-cop". Saddam imported physical therapists from Europe to care for his eldest son. Last year, a European embassy in Baghdad spirited a woman therapist out of the country, to save her from Uday's unwelcome advances.
Now Saddam, his family and acolytes are on the run, perhaps holed up for a last stand in Tikrit.
Several rumours involve the Russian ambassador and embassy, or Moscow. One of the more plausible theories is that Saddam escaped across the border to Syria. The US administration - encouraged by its friends in Israel's Likud government - is already gunning for the Syrian capital, Damascus. After decades of intense hatred, the rival Ba'athist regimes made peace in recent years. But young Bashar al-Assad would run a huge risk by welcoming the fallen Iraqis.
Saddam sought refuge in Damascus once before, in 1959, after participating in a failed assassination attempt against Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qassim. Shot in the legand disguised as a bedouin, he swam across the Tigris and escaped to Syria. The episode was recounted countless times; part of Saddam's mythical self image as an Arab hero.
As recounted in Andrew and Patrick Cockburn's excellent book, Out of the Ashes; the Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, Saddam believed that God saved him in 1959, and that every additional day of life was given to him by Allah to do his bidding.
This fatalistic streak made Saddam reckless and impervious to advice. He began to think of himself as an invincible, living god. Whether he perishes under a US bomb, resurfaces in exile or is torn to pieces by his erstwhile subjects, Saddam's place in history is guaranteed now. Some Arabs will venerate him for defying America, but that legend will be overshadowed by a record of unspeakable cruelty and folly.