Saddam : His Rise and Fall (17 page)

With the formidable resources of the state's security apparatus at his disposal, Saddam was able to plot against his political rivals, and concentrated his energies on undermining their reputations. In particular he seems to have been successful in persuading President Bakr that the ambition of both Tikriti and Ammash could ultimately pose a threat to his own position. Bakr certainly seems to have taken this on board for, in November 1969, a reorganization of the Baath was announced, at which Saddam's position as deputy chairman of the RCC was officially confirmed, even though he had been carrying out the deputy's functions since the start of the year. Simultaneously the two positions of deputy prime minister were abolished, thereby depriving Tikriti and Ammash of the privilege of chairing cabinet meetings in Bakr's absence (among his many titles, President Bakr was also prime minister). In April 1970 they were made vice presidents, but relieved of their other positions; two of their main rivals in the military replaced them in their cabinet posts, Hammad Shihab as minister of defense and Saadoun Ghaydan as minister of the interior. It was simply a matter of time before Saddam applied the coup de grace.

For Tikriti this came in October 1970. He was stripped of all his positions on the spurious pretext that he had failed to help the Palestinians during the Black September uprising against King Hussein of Jordan, even though it was official Iraqi policy, personally endorsed by Bakr and Saddam, not to get involved. Tikriti heard the news while in Madrid on an Iraqi mission that Saddam had devised to get him out of the country. Saddam even drove Tikriti to the airport, kissing him on both cheeks before he boarded his flight. The next day the government-owned Baghdad press carried front-page pictures of Saddam and Tikriti embracing at the airport. But no sooner had Tikriti arrived than he was informed that he had been stripped of his government position and was to be made Iraq's ambassador to Morocco. Saddam had arranged to have the photograph published so that when news of the popular Tikriti's demotion was announced, his supporters would be unlikely to hold Saddam
directly responsible. When Tikriti heard the news he was outraged, and ignoring an order to take up the post, flew back to Baghdad to face down Saddam. Upon arrival, however, he was seized by Saddam's security agents and bundled onto a waiting plane and flown to exile in Algeria. The irony of Tikriti's fate could be attributed to Saddam's perverse sense of humor. The man who had led the tanks into the Presidential Palace on July 17, 1968, to depose President Arif would now share the same fate as his fellow conspirator and the Baath Party's first prime minister, Abdul Razzak Nayif—escorted to the Baghdad airport by Saddam and forced into exile in Algeria. And like Nayif, who was murdered in London in 1978, Saddam's gunmen would eventually catch up with Tikriti; he was gunned down in Kuwait in March 1971, where he had moved to be closer to his children, who were still at school in Baghdad.

Tikriti's murder was a textbook Baathist assassination, inspired by fears that his presence in Kuwait might make him a rallying point for disgruntled Iraqi officers. On the morning of March 20, Tikriti, accompanied by the Iraqi ambassador to Kuwait, set off for an appointment at the government hospital. As the car arrived at the hospital four armed men ambushed the car. As one of the assassins forced open the car door, another, standing behind him, fired five shots at Tikriti at point-blank range, killing him instantly. They then made good their escape. The Baathists had clearly improved their assassination techniques from those early days when a nervous Saddam Hussein had ruined the plot to murder General Qassem by firing his weapon too early.

By contrast to the dramas that attended Tikriti's bloody exit from the Baathist stage, the removal of Ammash was a more civil affair. After Tikriti's fall, Ammash was fully aware that his own position was untenable. He made a series of scathing comments about his Baath Party colleagues, which only served to isolate him further. The end came in September 1971 when he was stripped of his government positions and sent into exile as Iraq's ambassador to the USSR. Unlike Tikriti, Ammash accepted his demotion with grace—no doubt he was fully briefed on the circumstances concerning Tikriti's murder—and made the most of his new posting in Moscow. Indeed, he made such a success of his diplomatic career that three years later he moved to be ambassador to Paris, and served one last posting in Finland where he died. Despite his continued service to the country, many Iraqis believed that Ammash was poisoned, while on a visit to Baghdad after Saddam had become president, with thallium, a heavy metal used in commercial rat poison and one of the Iraqi security forces favored methods of dispensing with its opponents.
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The removal of Tikriti and Ammash, who had both enjoyed distinguished careers in the Iraqi armed forces, represented the triumph of Saddam and the civilian wing of the Baath Party over the military echelon. Henceforward the Iraqi military establishment would be firmly under the control of the government, and the prospect of the military mounting a successful coup, as it had done on several occasions since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, became more and more remote. After the departures of Tikriti and Ammash, several leading military officers who were suspected of being supporters or friends of the deposed men were themselves removed, or arrested. With the rest of the officer corps constantly under surveillance by Saddam's commissars and security services, Saddam felt sufficiently confident of his control over the military that he was moved to declare that “with our party methods, there is no chance for anyone who disagrees with us to jump on a couple of tanks and overthrow the government.”
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As someone who had done just that in July 1968, Saddam knew precisely what he was talking about.

With the military safely in his pocket, it was time for Saddam to turn his attention to senior civilian officials in the Baath Party who might present an obstacle to his vaulting ambition. Even while he was engaged in suppressing the communists, laying traps for the Shiites, destabilizing the Kurds, and persecuting the armed forces, Saddam still found time for the odd purge of the party's nonmilitary hierarchy. In March 1970, Abdullah Sallum al-Samurrai, the minister of culture and information and one of Saddam's associates since the late 1950s, was removed from office and made ambassador to India. Several other members of the RCC, even those who were Tikritis and claimed kinship with President Bakr, were purged during the summer of 1970. But by far the most important, and most significant, scalp claimed by Saddam was that of Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly, his long-standing comrade-in-arms and the country's foreign minister.

Shaikhly, it will be recalled, participated with Saddam in the abortive assassination attempt on Qassem in 1959. Like Saddam, he fled to Damascus, and later moved to Cairo where he continued working for the Baathist cause. In Cairo he organized, and was guest of honor at, Saddam's party to celebrate his engagement to Sajida Tulfah. He returned to Iraq in 1963 and helped Saddam to establish the party's new security apparatus. After the Baath's expulsion from government in late 1963, he again linked up with Saddam and helped to draw up plans for the assassination of the first President Arif. On one occasion in 1964 he even saved Saddam from arrest
when they were sitting in his apartment in Baghdad. “It was just one o'clock in the morning. Saddam rose to his feet and was about to leave. ‘Where are you going?' Shaikhly asked. ‘To sleep in the hideout where the arms are hidden,' replied Saddam. ‘The police patrols are very active these days,' said Shaikhly. ‘You had better spend the rest of the night here.' That night the arms cache was raided and, had it not been for Shaikhly's advice, Saddam would have been caught red-handed.”
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When the pair was finally detained during Arif's crackdown on the Baathists in 1964, he was the only party member jailed with Saddam himself. Shaikhly was at Saddam's side when the two men escaped from jail in 1966, and Shaikhly was heavily involved in preparing the party for government, and deposing the second President Arif. At times Saddam felt so close to Shaikhly that he referred to him in public as “my twin.” In short, if anyone should expect a display of loyalty from Saddam, with, perhaps, the exception of his uncle, Khairallah Tulfah, it was Abdul Karim al-Shaikhly.

It has been said that attempting to untangle the various personal feuds that afflicted the early years of the Baath in ideological terms is rather like a historian of Chicago during the Prohibition era attempting to explain the interaction between Al Capone and his rivals. Inasmuch as any of the participants in the rise to power of the Baath Party were interested in ideology, then Shaikhly passed for an ideologue. Born about the same time as Saddam in 1935, Shaikhly came from a distinguished Baghdad family whose ancestors had been responsible for administering Baghdad during the Ottoman Empire. Saddam, who had no idea of his own birth date, had taken Shaikhly's birthday, April 28, for his own. One of the first members of the Baath, the university-educated Shaikhly was highly regarded by the founding fathers of the party and was regarded as someone who actually understood the principles of Baathism. By the summer of 1971, however, Shaikhly's own career was progressing too well for Saddam's comfort. As foreign minister and a senior figure in the RCC, Shaikhly was regarded in some circles as a future prime minister, or even president. Apart from Saddam, he was also the regime's highest-ranking civilian.

Unlike Saddam, however, Shaikhly was a dilettante Baathist. As a bachelor in his early thirties, Iraq's intelligent young foreign minister had the world at his feet, and took full advantage of the opportunity, so much so that he acquired a reputation as something of a womanizer. There were many aspects of the new Baath government that did not appeal to Shaikhly's sensitive
nature, such as the public executions that were regularly taking place in Liberation Square. “We did not like this kind of thing. We considered it uncivilized, as we did all the torture and disappearances that were going on,” recalled one of Shaikhly's contemporaries. “But he was too involved in his own affairs to do anything about it. And he became too full of his own importance to take care of his position in the party.”
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On the same day that Saddam carried out his purge of Ammash, Shaikhly was relieved of his post as foreign minister and given the lesser title of ambassador to the United Nations. It has been generally assumed that the main reason for Shaikhly's removal was ideological, namely that Saddam suspected him of trying to promote a reconciliation between the Iraqi and Syrian Baath parties, a move that Saddam felt would undermine his position as he was the person held responsible for creating the rift in the first place. Shaikhly's appointment to New York was tantamount to being sent into exile, as it was impossible for him to influence events in Iraq from the United States. Shaikhly eventually returned to Baghdad when he retired, and, after Saddam became president, was murdered in 1980 as he visited a post office in Baghdad to pay his telephone bill.
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Another explanation for Shaikhly's removal, however, which affords a fascinating insight into the family intrigues that dominated the Baath Party's inner sanctum during this period, is provided by Shaikhly's cousin, Salah al-Shaikhly, who became Saddam's deputy director of planning before fleeing into exile in the late 1970s. According to his version of events, Saddam and Shaikhly were such close friends that Saddam had hoped that Shaikhly would one day marry his younger sister Siham, as is generally the custom among Arab men. Even though the Shaikhly family would previously have dismissed the idea out of hand of allowing their menfolk to marry into a peasant family from Al-Ouja, Shaikhly was actively encouraged by the family elders to give serious consideration to marrying Saddam's sister as they regarded that the balance of power had moved from the traditional ruling elite and was now with the peasants. Although Shaikhly and Saddam were close, their relationship was more professional than personal. The urbane, intelligent Shaikhly appreciated Saddam's bravery and physical prowess, and saw him as someone who would ensure the success of Baath Party. But away from politics Saddam was not someone whose company Shaikhly sought.

When it came to marriage Shaikhly might have been disposed to keep Saddam happy, but the situation was further complicated by the fact that
President Bakr, who had five daughters, was keen to marry off one of his own offspring to one of the government's rising stars. On several occasions Bakr dropped heavy hints to Shaikhly that he should marry one of his daughters. Caught between a rock and a hard place, Shaikhly opted to marry a woman of his own choice, who was unrelated either to Saddam or Bakr. Saddam is said to have been so upset by Shaikhly's decision that, although he attended the wedding ceremony, he stayed only a half hour at Shaikhly's reception. And within two to three weeks of his wedding, Shaikhly had been thrown out of the government and forced into exile in New York.
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The fact that the political career of one of the Baath Party's most respected performers could be destroyed over a dispute such as this was indicative of the strength of the family and tribal ties that bound together the ruling Baath clique, ties that would lie at the very heart of many of the crises that would have serious implications for the regime's future stability.

Unlike the dismissal of Hardan al-Tikriti, Saddam appeared to have effected Shaikhly's removal without acrimony. On the night of Shaikhly's dismissal from the government the two men were photographed dining at Baghdad's Farouk restaurant. The following day the Baghdad newspapers carried front-page pictures of Saddam and Shaikhly happily dining together. Saddam was keen to absolve himself of any blame for the dismissal of Shaikhly, who had a strong following both within the party and the military. Even if Shaikhly's choice of bride had not soured their relationship, it is unlikely that Shaikhly would have survived in office for much longer. In the opinion of Salah al-Shaikhly, his cousin's dismissal had as much to do with the success he had achieved in Bakr's government as the perceived insult he had caused Saddam by not marrying his sister. “Karim posed too much of a threat to Saddam. He was popular and talented. But, like so many of us, he should have seen it coming. If he had done something about Saddam then, the history of modern Iraq might have been a lot happier.”
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