Saddam finally caught a break when, in the fall of 1955, his mother’s more prosperous brother, Khairallah Talfah, an ex–army officer turned hotheaded Arab nationalist and teacher, took Hussein along with his own son to Baghdad to attend secondary school. Saddam had just turned eighteen. Baghdad would change him forever.
In the early 1950s the city was a hotbed of ethnic and political radicalism. Iraq, which in Arabic means “the edge,” was an amalgam of deeply divided tribes and ethnicities, the remnant of the defunct Ottoman Empire and Britain’s Central Asian empire, which, following World War I, had been carved up into Iran and Iraq without taking into account traditionally and ethnically bound territories. Thus, most of southern Iraq, nearly 100 percent Shi’ite, had more in common with Iran than its Sunni “brothers” in the north. In fact, Iranian Shi’ites still revered two southern Iraqi cities as sacred religious shrines, including Najaf, the burial place of Mohammed’s son-in-law, Ali (and the site of the horrendous terrorist bombing of its ancient mosque in August 2003). Meanwhile, distrustful of both the ruling Sunni and the southern Shi’ites were the northern Kurds, who were far closer in history and culture to the Kurdish tribes across the border in Turkey. By the 1950s Baghdad’s tangle of ethnic divisions was further complicated by a slew of competing political parties, ranging from the Hashemite monarchists (the royal Arab family that ruled Jordan and whose scion, Prince Faisal, Britain had elected to rule Iraq in its stead), the right-wing Independence Party, and the centrist Liberal Party to the leftist People’s Party, the Communist Party, and the secretive, socialist Arab nationalist Ba’th, or “Renaissance,” Party.
Despite tutoring by his uncle, Saddam found it difficult to shed his peasant roots in the class-conscious big city, especially the crude accent that marked a rural Tikriti as unmistakably as a Cockney in St. James’s Court. He failed to pass the entrance exam to join the prestigious Baghdad Military Academy. The stigma of outcast propelled Hussein, along with many of the city’s disenchanted youth, toward the young, rebellious, socialist Ba’th Party. Founded in Damascus by two Syrian intellectuals in the early 1940s, the organization espoused vaguely pan-Arab nationalist and socialist principles similar to Egyptian president Gamal Nasser’s Arab Legion. But the party’s immediate attraction to Baghdad’s frustrated young rebels was its intense hatred of Western colonialism, especially what it saw as its expansionist guerrilla state—Israel.
Hussein hagiographies would later attribute his party association to his newfound belief in Islamic nationalism. In truth, the impressionable peasant’s son was greatly influenced by his uncle Khairallah, who having been jailed by the British for his part in Baghdad’s short-lived pro-Mussolini revolt in 1941, was the closest thing Saddam had to a hero. Khairallah mentored him in the tradecraft of Iraqi politicians: manipulation, intrigue, and anti-Semitism. Not one for mincing words, Khairallah’s collective wisdom would later be published for the benefit of future Ba’thi in his book Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies.
Hanging around political meetings and outdoor rallies, Saddam eventually caught the attention of Ba’thist officials, who spotted a use for the young man’s brooding, sadistic personality. They soon put him in charge of recruiting schoolmates and organizing local street bullies into brownshirtlike gangs to intimidate shopkeepers and the suburban middle class. Saddam became a familiar figure at Ba’th street demonstrations and public beatings, where he would stand off to the side, ordering his thug warriors into the fray or pointing out local tradesmen to be beaten. Things changed radically on July 14, 1958, when Gen. Abdul Karim Qassem and his “Free Officers” Brigade, backed by the Ba’th Party, marched into Baghdad and overthrew King Faisal and the fading Hashemite monarchy. It was a remarkably vicious coup, even by Iraqi standards, the carnage sinking to a new nadir when wild-eyed, rampaging mobs—waving sticks and swords and rushing up and down alleys looking for people to punish—discovered the whereabouts of the body of the just-murdered prime minister Nuri al-Said. The crowd promptly dug up the corpse and dragged it through the streets of Baghdad on a rope. (The scene would ironically be reenacted, at least symbolically, forty-five years later when, at the end of the Iraq War, Baghdad mobs, unable to find the real, live Saddam, made do by pulling down the famed statue of their erstwhile leader and then dragging it through the streets at the end of a rope.) Indeed, Saddam watched this day from the sidelines, but the rising twenty-one-year-old politico could not help but learn a valuable lesson he would not soon forget about the true nature of power in Iraq—and the loss of it.