Iraq has launched an investigation into Saddam's execution. The most common dictator

Three days after the death of Saddam Hussein, Iraqi authorities begin an investigation directly related to the execution of the former president. Iraqi intelligence services are looking for the person who recorded the entire death of Hussein on his mobile phone. Footage from Baghdad has been posted on the Internet and has already broken all records for the number of views.

The fact is that the official filming of Saddam’s execution did not record the moment of death. And thanks to the secret operator, we now know both how Saddam died and what he was told in the last minutes of his life.

Details of the dictator's life in prison have also become public today. An American orderly who was watching Hussein in the cell told reporters about how the main Iraqi prisoner behaved.

Details from NTV correspondent Vladimir Yakimenko.

A man named Robert Ellis was a military medic who monitored the health of Iraq's top prisoner for over a year. Three days after Saddam Hussein, Ellis spoke to American journalists about the ex-dictator's life behind bars.

The ousted president of Iraq sat in a solitary cell measuring 2 by 2.5 meters. There was a bed, a table and a prayer rug. According to Ellis, his ward rarely complained about anything.

Robert Ellis, US Army Staff Sergeant, former orderly for Saddam Hussein: “The door of his cell had two windows, one at eye level and the other below. Food was served to him through the lower one. He was outraged at being treated like an animal and went on a hunger strike.

He told me: “I’m not refusing food, I just don’t want to be fed like a lion in a cage.” I tried to explain that it was pointless to starve, they wouldn’t let him die here anyway. But he still wouldn’t eat, and I had to contact my superiors.”

Twice a day, Ellis checked the prisoner's well-being and made appropriate entries in his diary. According to the orderly, Hussein often invited him to smoke together.

Saddam explained his desire by saying that cigarettes and coffee help with high blood pressure. Ellis argues that the elderly Saddam did not fit the image of a dictator.

Robert Ellis: “Saddam Hussein adapted perfectly to new living conditions and never complained. And if he had any requests or demands, they were completely legal. Although he still tried not to complain, no matter how hard it was for him.”

Those who still sympathize with Saddam are holding anti-American protests these days. Several hundred residents of the Iraqi city of Samarra paid tribute to Hussein in the central square. People are outraged not only by the execution of the ex-president, but also by the behavior of the executioners.

The actions of the executors of the sentence become the subject of investigation. The Iraqi authorities are interested in how this video recording made using a mobile phone appeared.

On the tape, people can be clearly heard shouting at Hussein to “go to hell” and repeatedly shouting the name of Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of Iraq's Shiites.

The country's authorities believe that because of this recording, Hussein's execution turned into a television show. But even those who participated in the execution do not know how they managed to smuggle a mobile phone to Saddam’s execution.

Munkid al-Ferun, prosecutor: “I can’t tell you the name of the person who filmed the execution on his mobile phone, but I know him. This is a fairly high-ranking government official. How he managed to smuggle the phone in, I don’t know, because using phones was prohibited. We were searched several times, just like before boarding a plane. So we can only guess how he got the mobile phone.”

Another pro-Saddam rally took place today in the Jordanian capital Amman, it was led by Hussein’s eldest daughter Ragad, who does not often appear in public. The current leadership of Iraq considers Raghad a war criminal, and is ready to pay a large monetary reward for her extradition.

But the fact is that Ragat is in Jordan at the personal invitation of King Abdullah. And the likelihood that official Amman will hand over Hussein’s daughter to the Iraqi authorities is extremely low. During Saddam's reign, Jordan twice became a refuge for the Iraqi president's relatives.

12 years ago, Saddam’s daughters fled from their father to Amman, but returned after negotiations, the second time Hussein’s relatives left for a neighboring kingdom after the American invasion of Iraq. But for now they have no plans to return to their homeland.

At 6 o'clock in the morning in the suburbs of Baghdad.

The execution took place shortly before morning prayers, marking the beginning of the Muslim festival of sacrifice. She was filmed and now national Iraqi television is broadcasting this recording on all channels.

Representatives of the Iraqi authorities present
reported that Hussein behaved with dignity and did not ask for mercy. He stated that he was "glad to accept death from his enemies and become a martyr" rather than vegetate in prison for the rest of his days.

Talks about the life and death of the overthrown dictator NTV correspondent Pavel Matveev.

Saddam Hussein should have been executed 46 years ago. An Iraqi military tribunal sentenced him to death in absentia for participating in a failed assassination attempt on the then prime minister, and four years later Saddam was arrested for preparing to overthrow a new regime.

But he escaped from prison, and the paths of life raised the future dictator not to the scaffold, but to the very pinnacle of power - to power and wealth that other rulers of the Middle Ages had never dreamed of.

Saddam Hussein Abdalmajid Al-Tikriti was born in 1937 into a poor Sunni family from Tikrit. At the age of 19, he joined the growing Baath Party, and at 31, after the Baathist revolution, he became the second person in the country.

Hussein headed the Ba'athist counterintelligence. At the same time, he was in charge of social and economic reforms, including the fight against illiteracy, thanks to which the proportion of literate Iraqis increased from 30 to 70 percent.

Saddam gradually pushed fellow Tikritians into leadership positions. They became his reliable support when Hussein became head of state in 1970.

The first thing he did in office was to destroy almost all political opponents within the country. A year later, he denounced the Algerian agreement with Iran - something like a peace treaty, which led to an 8-year Iran-Iraq war with a colossal number of casualties.

Saddam's best friend in this war and in general during that period was the United States, which, among other things, helped Iraq create chemical weapons. Saddam used it both against the Iranians and against his own rebels. He still remembers the gas attack on the Kurdish village of Halabzhi.

Internal rebellions were generally punished harshly. In 1982, 140 people were killed in a Shiite village in response to a failed assassination attempt on Saddam. It was for this episode that Hussein was now executed. Of all his sins, this was the easiest to prove.

The war with Iran has depleted the Iraqi economy. Money was needed, and in 1990 Saddam attacked the small but fabulously rich Kuwait. From that moment on, the general line of US relations towards him changed dramatically.

From a friend, he overnight turned into a fierce enemy. The line of his life also rapidly changed - the invasion of Kuwait and the famous American “Desert Storm”.

Hussein's long and painful fall began from those heights from which one always falls to death. George Bush Sr. did not begin to eliminate Saddam then. He only applied sanctions and forced the destruction of weapons of mass destruction.

His father's work was completed by his son, George W. Bush. In 2003, he dreamed that Hussein had that same weapon. Despite protests from almost the entire world, based on false intelligence, the forces of the international coalition entered Iraq, where they were stuck for a long time.

Chemical and bacteriological weapons, or at least traces of them, were never found. But Saddam himself, six months later, is in an underground shelter. The trial of him and his associates began a year and a half ago.

It turned into a tragic farce. The ex-dictator churned out catchphrases, three of Saddam’s lawyers at different times were resigning from the hands of unknown persons, and two judges were resigning. On November 5, Saddam and two other defendants were sentenced to hanging.

Within a matter of weeks, after Pinochet, the second ex-dictator of the century and ex-protégé of the United States left the world. But if, albeit with frayed nerves from old age, he left on his own, then a shameful and violent death awaited Saddam. The quarrel with Washington cost him too much.

When necessary, the West appears in the guise of a defender of human rights, a categorical opponent of the death penalty. But when it comes to the interests of Western powers, then “humanistic fairy tales” are instantly forgotten. You can enjoy the brutal murder of the elderly Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, and send unwanted politicians from all over the world to rot in prison, allegedly by the verdict of an international tribunal, and not pay attention to mass public executions in oil-bearing allied countries.

On December 30, 2006, exactly ten years ago, Saddam Hussein, one of the most famous Middle Eastern politicians of the twentieth century who dared to enter into a direct war with the United States of America, was executed in Iraq. Now we will not go into tendentious assessments of his domestic and foreign policies - like every ruler, Saddam had “black” and “white” sides. But at least during his reign there was no chaos and bloodshed that began on Iraqi soil after his overthrow and death.

As you know, on March 20, 2003, the armed forces of the United States and Great Britain began aggression against sovereign Iraq. Baghdad and other Iraqi cities were bombed. Although Western propaganda stubbornly asserted that attacks were being carried out exclusively on military and administrative targets, in reality they bombed everything. Thousands of civilians became victims of air raids. During the fighting, the American command repeatedly reported the death of Saddam Hussein. But these rumors were not true - the Iraqi president remained in Baghdad until the last. Even in early April, when it became clear that Baghdad was about to fall, Saddam Hussein called on his fellow citizens not to lose courage and continue to resist American-British aggression. Although American troops entered Baghdad on April 9, it was on this day that Saddam Hussein's last videotaped speech to his compatriots was dated. On April 17, 2003, the remnants of one of the elite formations of the Iraqi army, the Medina Division, capitulated. In fact, this date is considered to be the official end of the Saddam Hussein regime’s resistance to American aggression, although in fact the war against the Americans simply turned into a phase of terrorist activity.

But even after the surrender of the Medina division, Saddam Hussein could not be found for a long time. It was even suggested that he was killed during air raids or shelling. It was only at the end of the year, on December 13, that Saddam Hussein was discovered. He was hiding in the village of Ad-Daur, 15 kilometers from his hometown of Tikrit. Saddam's hideout was the basement of an ordinary village house, about two meters deep. Saddam was found with two Kalashnikov assault rifles, a pistol and $750,000. Saddayl was arrested around 21.15 local time. But, by the way, these circumstances of the detention of the former Iraqi president were questioned by some sources. So, the second version presents Saddam’s detention in a more favorable light for him - that he fired back from the second floor of the house, killing an American soldier, and only then was captured.

Saddam Hussein spent almost two years in prison while the investigation was underway. It was obvious that he was going to be executed. Initially, the occupation authorities abolished the death penalty in Iraq, but then it was restored for a short time - specifically to deal with Saddam. The trial of the Iraqi leader began on October 19, 2005. He was charged with a very large list of war crimes, including: the massacre of civilians in the village of al-Dujail, populated by Iraqi Shiites, in 1982; the mass execution of more than 8,000 people from the Kurdish Barzan tribe in 1983; the genocide of the Kurdish population of Iraq during Operation Anfal in 1987-1988; the use of mortars during artillery shelling of Kirkuk; the use of chemicals against Kurdish rebels in Halabaja in 1988; the Iraqi army's invasion of Kuwait in 1990; the brutal suppression of an Iraqi Shiite uprising in 1991; the expulsion of several thousand Shiite Kurds to Iran; numerous political repressions against opposition political figures, objectionable officials, religious authorities, public organizations and citizens of the country who are simply objectionable for any reason; organization of construction work on the construction of dams, canals and dams in the south of Iraq, as a result of which the famous Mesopotamian swamps, which had long been the historical habitat of the so-called. "Marsh Arabs" Of course, all these actions actually took place in the political life of Iraq. Kurds and Shiites had every reason to hate Saddam Hussein as their main enemy, who carried out massive repression against the Kurdish people and the Shiite religious community for decades. However, the occupation authorities clearly did not act out of concern for the well-being of the Kurdish and Shia population of Iraq.

The entire time the investigation was ongoing, Saddam Hussein was in captivity under the guard of American troops. He was placed in a tiny solitary cell measuring 2 x 2.5 meters. The cell contained only concrete bunks and a toilet. Apparently, such a small camera was chosen by the American military command specifically - to humiliate the Iraqi leader. After all, it would have cost nothing to provide Saddam with more humane conditions of imprisonment. If you believe the American military personnel who guarded him, Saddam Hussein was fed well, given cigars, and allowed to go for a walk. True, in the cell where Saddam was kept, a portrait of George Bush was hung - again, to inflict moral suffering on the defeated Iraqi president. But, in turn, they satisfied Saddam’s request to allow him to have in his cell portraits of his sons who died in battle with the Americans - Uday and Qusay.

Because the American leadership needed to create the appearance that Hussein would be tried by the Iraqi people and not by the occupation authorities, the former president appeared before the Iraqi Supreme Criminal Tribunal. On November 5, 2006, the Iraqi High Criminal Tribunal found Saddam Hussein guilty of organizing the murder of 148 Iraqi Shiites and sentenced the former president to capital punishment - death by hanging. On December 26, 2006, the tribunal's verdict was upheld by the Iraqi Court of Appeal. The appellate court also decided to carry out the death sentence within 30 days. On December 29, 2006, the execution order was published. Saddam Hussein, who had been imprisoned for three years, was now in a hurry to remove him as quickly as possible. Opponents of Saddam Hussein insisted that the former Iraqi dictator should have been executed in public. They were eager to see how Hussein would be hanged in the central square of Baghdad and demanded that Saddam's execution be broadcast live on television. Many Iraqis from among the relatives of people killed during the reign of Saddam Hussein appealed to the court with a request to appoint them as executioners of the former president. However, the court, which was under the influence of the American leadership, still did not dare to carry out such an execution. In the end, it was decided to carry out the execution of Saddam Hussein in the presence of a special delegation of representatives, and the process of hanging the former Iraqi president to be filmed.

According to the testimony of people who communicated with Saddam Hussein after the death sentence was passed, the Iraqi president took it quite dignified, if not stoically. US Marine Major General Doug Stone, who was responsible for military prison issues in the US military administration, emphasized that Saddam Hussein never showed any concern about his future fate. In the last months of his life, he often remembered his daughter and asked her to tell her that his conscience before God was clear, and he was just a soldier sacrificing himself for the Iraqi people.

On the night of December 30, 2006, security guards came for Saddam Hussein. He was taken to execution. The former president of Iraq, a once all-powerful dictator who exerted enormous influence not only on the life of his country, but also on all Middle Eastern politics, was hanged between approximately 2.30 and 3.00 a.m. on December 30, 2006. As the Al-Arabiya news agency then reported, Saddam Hussein was hanged at the headquarters of Iraqi military intelligence, which at that time was located in the Baghdad quarter of Al-Haderniyya - the traditional place of residence of Baghdad Shiites. Directly during the execution of Saddam, representatives of the American military command, the Iraqi government, the Iraqi criminal tribunal, the Islamic clergy, a doctor and a videographer were present. Before his execution, Saddam Hussein said that he was glad to accept death and become a martyr, and not rot in prison forever.

At the same time, other evidence has been preserved about the last minutes of Saddam Hussein’s life. According to unofficial video footage published in the media, before ascending the scaffold, the former Iraqi president recited the Shahada, the holy symbol of faith for Muslims, and uttered a phrase that was supposed to become the quintessence of his views: “God is great, the Islamic community will win, and Palestine is an Arab land." In response, representatives of the new Iraqi administration present at the execution shouted curses and slogans at Saddam Hussein in memory of the executed Shiite leader Muhammad Baker al-Sadr. When one of the judges present at the execution demanded that his colleagues calm down, Saddam Hussein shouted curses at the Americans and Iran. Then he read the Shahada again and when he began to read it for the third time, the platform of the scaffold lowered. A few minutes later, a physician present at the execution pronounced the death of the man who had been the all-powerful head of the Iraqi state for 24 years.

There is another very interesting evidence about the death of Saddam Hussein. It belongs to a soldier who served as chief of security at Saddam's grave. He claimed that six stab wounds were found on the body of the former Iraqi president after his execution. But whether this is so is unknown - the official version does not confirm these words.

After the execution and confirmation of the death of Saddam Hussein, his body was placed in a coffin, which in the evening of the same day was handed over to representatives of the Arab tribe “Abu Nasir”, to which Saddam Hussein belonged. Tribesmen took Saddam Hussein's body in an American helicopter to his hometown of Tikrit. The former president was commemorated in the main mosque of Tikrit, Auji, where numerous representatives of the tribe to which the Iraqi leader belonged gathered. Early the next morning, Saddam Hussein was buried in his native village three kilometers from Tikrit - next to his sons Uday and Qusay and grandson Mustafa, who died three years earlier. To protest the execution of Saddam Hussein, his supporters staged a terrorist attack in the Shiite quarter of Baghdad. During this explosion, 30 people were killed, and about 40 more people were injured of varying degrees of severity.

By the way, it is interesting that Saddam Hussein was sentenced to death for the first time 44 years before his execution. Back in 1959, the young Iraqi revolutionary Saddam Hussein, then only 22 years old, participated in a conspiracy against the then leader of Iraq, General Abdel Kerim Qassem. Young Saddam was not part of the main group of conspirators, which was supposed to deal with the general. His functions included covering up the assassination attempt. But when Abdel Kerim Qassem's car appeared, Saddam could not stand it and began to shoot at the car himself. Thus, he actually thwarted the assassination attempt on the then head of state. Qasem's guards opened fire on Saddam, but the wounded revolutionary was able to escape. According to the official biography of Saddam, which tends to glorify the exploits of the Iraqi president, Hussein rode a horse for four nights, then performed an operation on himself, pulled out a bullet stuck in his shin with a knife, swam across the Tigris River and walked on foot to his native village of al-Auja, where he hid from persecution. Saddam Hussein was then sentenced to death in absentia. But he managed to leave Iraq and move to Egypt, where Hussein studied for two years at the Faculty of Law at Cairo University, and returned to his homeland in 1963, when the regime of General Qassem was nevertheless overthrown by Saddam’s fellow party members in the BAath Party (Arab Socialist Renaissance Party).

The overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein became an epoch-making event for modern Iraq. Despite the fact that Hussein was a brutal dictator, and many people died during his reign, American military aggression and the subsequent civil war in the country brought great casualties and destruction to Iraq. In fact, Iraq, which was a single state under Saddam Hussein, was disorganized into territories practically independent of each other. The ambiguity of Saddam Hussein as a political figure is also recognized by many of his opponents. The years of his reign will go down in the history of Iraq not only as a brutal dictatorship and a time of bloody war with neighboring Iran, but also as an era of tremendous economic and social modernization of the country, the development of science and education, culture and technology, healthcare and social protection of the population. For example, Iraqi historians and archaeologists claim that during the reign of Saddam Hussein, huge funds were allocated by the Iraqi government to preserve the memory of the country’s historical heritage and to restore numerous unique architectural monuments of the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian eras in the history of Mesopotamia. Then these monuments were destroyed by religious extremists, whose activation on Iraqi soil was also a direct result of American military aggression and the overthrow of the regime of Saddam Hussein.