Word: tikrit
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...hatter might feel at home in the Wonderland of Iraq. The day is already growing hot as lines of ramshackle buses and black-windowed Mercedes jam the normally empty highway to Tikrit, the rural hometown of Saddam Hussein. It's April 28, Saddam's 65th birthday. Crowds of military men with fat moustaches, sheiks in flowing robes and farmers in shabby pants spill onto the expansive parade ground Saddam has built for special occasions like this. High-ranking guests fill up chairs in a large pseudohistorical reviewing stand where Mussolini would have felt at home...
Saddam is nowhere in sight for his Tikrit party or any of the other parades and cake cuttings orchestrated across Iraq during the six-day birthday celebration. He is, more than ever, an invisible ruler, his authority wielded from the shadows, where he hides from potential assassins. The Potemkin parties were intended to deliver a message to any Iraqi citizen feeling restive, to any foreign government contemplating his overthrow. The all-powerful puppet master can make his whole nation sing his praises as a blunt reminder: I am still here. It won't be easy...
Saddam has always been obsessed with building. The Pharaonic size of his enterprises--vast palaces, gigantic mosques, even the idea of an atom bomb--reflect his self-image as history's hero. He never forgets he was born in Tikrit, home nine centuries ago to the great Saladin, the Islamic victor in the Crusades. Saddam's latest Baghdad palace features columns topped with huge replicas of his own head bearing Saladin's helmet. He shaped the minarets on the grand new Mother of All Battles mosque to resemble the Scud missiles he fired at Israel during the Gulf War. These...
...conspiracy against Saddam Hussein in the latest attempt to overthrow the Iraqi leader since the end of the Gulf War. Iraqi dissidents said all the suspects are Sunni Muslims -- a group commonly considered to be Hussein's main base of power -- and included several trusted officers from Tikrit, Hussein's hometown. Last week, in possibly another planned attack, a former head of army intelligence claimed that several Republican Guard officers were charged with planning to assassinate Saddam and his two sons. The general, Wafiq al-Samarra'i, told the Arab media that Hussein responded by reorganizing the elite force that...
...even reporters were picking up rumors that it was imminent. "If the press knew about the coup, you could be sure Saddam knew," said a U.S. intelligence analyst. He did. The week before the coup attempt, Saddam put his entire military on full alert. He never set foot in Tikrit. Samaraii, it turns out, had overstated the strings he could pull in Baghdad. "Clearly there was a lot of wishful thinking in this operation," admits Walid al-Tamimi, an Iraqi National Congress member in London...