Uday Hussein

Uday Hussein shared a complicated relationship with Qusay. They were quite close as children and went on to enjoy each other’s company as adults. That changed after Saddam replaced Uday with Qusay as his successor. Uday grew envious of his brother and kept a distance from him as Qusay became more influential in their father’s government.

Uday reportedly married three times. When he was attending university, he wanted to marry a fellow student who hailed from a prominent Iraqi family. However, his father rejected the notion as he staunchly believed a marriage should strengthen loyalty within the family and occur within the clan. In 1983, on Saddam’s order, Uday married Nada, the daughter of Saddam’s first cousin "Chemical" Ali Hassan al-Majid. Despite the closeness between the families, the union did not last long and they eventually divorced.

While the validity of Uday’s union with Nada is still often questioned, his next marriage is well-documented. During his stay in Geneva, Uday married Saja, the daughter of his father’s half-brother and then-ambassador to the United Nations Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, in an Islamic ceremony. Their relationship was a tremulous one. He repeatedly emotionally and physically abused her as well as was unabashedly unfaithful. She eventually fled back to Switzerland.

Uday Hussein was born on June 18, 1964, in Tikrit, Iraq to Saddam and his first wife Sajida Talfah. He was about two years older than Qusay, who was born on May 17, 1966. Saddam was still in prison for attempting to assassinate the 24th Prime Minister of Iraq, General Abd al-Karim Qasim, when Uday was born. Sajida used to take the baby whenever she visited him, carrying concealed messages from other Ba’athist members in the baby’s nappies. Uday and Qusay had three sisters, Raghad, Hala, and Rana.

Since his childhood, he idolized his father. When Uday was five years old, he participated in a family picnic in a public square and witnessed the executions of several “spies”, mostly Iraqi Jews. His father took pride in toughening his sons up by letting them watch the torture of the “enemies of the nation” and liquidation of “traitors”.

Despite immensely respecting his father, Uday was never really close to him. His mother, Sajida, on the other hand, shared a deep bond with him. Scholars speculate that it was the relationships he had with both of his parents that shaped his character.

He was an accomplished student at school and later enrolled at the Baghdad University College of Medicine. However, only three days later, he left and began attending the College of Engineering, which is situated only a kilometre away.

He received a degree in engineering and graduated summa cum laude from the Baghdad University, coming first among 76 students. Many of his professors have since revealed that he barely managed to maintain passing grades and only won the honour of being the valedictorian because of who his father was.

In 1985, Uday Hussein began running a youth radio station and then a television station and set up a youth paper. In 1990, he established Babel, a daily newspaper which eventually became the mouthpiece of Ba’athism.

Initially, he was being groomed to be his father’s successor but Saddam himself was weary of his increasingly excessive and violent lifestyle. In October 1988, after the murder of Saddam’s personal valet and food taster, Kamel Hana Gegeo, Uday permanently fell out of his father’s favour. Some claim that Sajida asked him to kill Gegeo, as he had introduced Saddam to Samira Shahbandar, who eventually became Saddam’s mistress and later second wife.

During a party organized in honour of Suzanne Mubarak, wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Uday bludgeoned Gegeo with a club, stabbed him with an electric carving knife, and by some accounts, eventually shot him to death in front of horrified guests.

The incident angered Saddam, to whom Gegeo’s loyalty and fidelity was unquestionable. Uday was imprisoned and sentenced to death. While in prison, he was even tortured and Saddam ordered his precious car collection to be set on fire. He was finally freed after personal intervention from King Hussein of Jordan and sent to Geneva, Switzerland to serve in the Iraqi mission in the UN. He was deported in 1990 by the Swiss authorities following his repeated arrests for fighting.

Back in Iraq, Uday began to work on regaining his father’s favour. Saddam made him the chairman of the Iraqi Olympic Committee and the Iraq Football Association. Uday tortured athletes and footballers after they failed to perform to his expectation. Moreover, he set up the sports club Al-Rasheed, signing all the top footballers in the country to the team. They dominated the Iraqi club football and won several competitions before they disbanded in 1990.

On March 20, 2003, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq, accusing it of stockpiling nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and claiming that they had found definitive proof of connection between the Iraqi government and Al-Qaeda. The war was over by 1 May and the entire country was in ruins.

Surprisingly, Uday performed much better as a military commander during the war than Qusay. While the latter was indecisive and nervous and ordered the Republican Guard to retreat, Fedayeen Saddam was the most active branch of the government during the war.