Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Evil.

Powerful.

Uncompromising.

Ruthless.

Behind closed doors...

a private hell.

- (woman screams)

- Tyrants often deviate in their sexual behaviour.

- He fantasised about older women.

- He puts make-up on...

- He had thousands of concubines.

They were these glamourous, gun-toting sex objects.

- (alarm blares) PA: Fire on designated targets.

NARRATOR: The psychological insights of the degenerate and deviant.

WOMAN: He was obsessed with aphrodisiacs.

- It is typical of somebody who is sexually repressed.

- Power can...change somebody.

- (wild cheering)

- (rousing rhythmic chanting)

NARRATOR: A tyrant,

a fighter and a notorious sexual deviant.

- He wanted to instil fear in the population.

- He was a textbook oppressive tyrant.

NARRATOR: Saddam Hussein became

one of the world's most despised dictators.

- He was a sexual sadist par extreme.

- All of his sexual fantasies, desires, gratification

are entwined with the... a thirst for violence.

- And I think he maintained the mentality of a torturer

right throughout his career.

NARRATOR: He dropped lethal gas

on his own people.

- Over 5,000 people were killed: men, women and children.

NARRATOR: Murder by day,

before dropping sex stimulants

and calling for his mistresses by night.

- He participated in sexual torture

of his victims,

including those who were political prisoners,

as well as the women that he had in his own bedroom.

- His world view was completely shaped by his belief

that he was the greatest person in the world

and nothing short of an invasion

to capture him in the end was going to stop him.

NARRATOR: Baghdad, Iraq.

The love story of Zabibah And The King plays out on stage.

The searing romance is based on a novel

written by one Saddam Hussein,

perhaps to impress his mistress of 30 years Parisoula Lampsos.

- It's quite amusing to people, if it wasn't so horrendous,

that Saddam Hussein would write,

or at least ghost-write, a romantic novel,

because he was the antithesis of everything

a normal romantic hero would be.

NARRATOR: Who was this Iraqi enigma?

Romance novelist, sadistic killer,

kingpin on the wrong side of the global war on terror.

- (speaks Arabic)

INTERPRETER: I am the helpless...

I am helpless citizen of the Middle East.

NARRATOR: For the future ruler

of one of the world's most oil-rich nations,

Saddam Hussein had an unlikely start.

He was born in 1937 in Al Awja,

near Tikrit, just north of Baghdad.

- He was a Sunni Muslim...

in a country that was predominantly Shi'ite Muslim.

He was brought up

in a fairly poor family

and joined the military

as a way to try to move up

and make a name for himself.

- Saddam's father was a shepherd

who either died or abandoned the family before Saddam's birth,

so he never had a true father figure.

His mother, in her desperation, tried to abort the child,

but when that failed,

she married another man

who, according to his CIA profile,

often beat the young Saddam.

NARRATOR: But Saddam did find a father figure in his uncle,

an official of the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party,

Khairallah Talfah.

He taught the boy to stand on his own two feet

and he railed against the decadent influence of the Imperial British.

- The Baghdad of the 1950s

was a real jewel in the crown.

It was a beautiful place with ancient temples,

beautiful buildings and it attracted tourism

from all over the world.

Not just that - it was a very liberal city.

Women were able to go to work.

Young girls went to school.

WOMAN: People were free to drink.

People were free to cohabitate.

People were free to express...

their opinions - politically, religiously, um...so on.

- Now, to an Arab nationalist,

all of this represents "the decadence of the West",

which is there to undermine the "pure Arab way of life"

and he would have reacted strongly to that.

NARRATOR: Fuelled by his uncle's hatred of British imperialism,

Saddam was an activist from a young age

and he wasn't going to wait for permission to lead.

- If you try to understand Saddam Hussein,

you've got to look at his course,

from his... slightly difficult upbringing,

the absence of a father

and his immersion at a very early age in Arab nationalism,

with this uncle, who was a mentor.

- Especially that his uncle was...

he fought in the battles against the UK in Iraq in 1941

and that has influenced

Saddam Hussein's upbringing

in terms of looking up to his uncle

and looking at Western imperialism

as an ideology that needed to be...rid in Iraq.

NARRATOR: But unlike his uncle,

Saddam had no intention of running for political office.

Power was there to be taken by force.

At just 22, he made his move.

- In 1959, the young Saddam Hussein

led a failed assassination attempt

on the Iraqi Prime Minister.

Because it failed, he had to escape the country,

first by horseback

and then swimming across a river,

which gave him a mythical outlook

and the admiration of the Iraqi people.

NARRATOR: The mythology of the foiled assassination plot

would later be used to help create Saddam's "cult of personality".

For now, however, he was content

to lie low and study law in Cairo

until he found his way back to Baghdad.

That chance came in February 1963,

after the Ba'ath Party overthrew the Iraqi leader Abdul-Karim Qasim

in a violent coup.

ARCHIVE NEWSREEL: The historic city of Baghdad,

capital of Iraq, has been the scene once more of bloody revolt.

For five years, General Abdul Qasim, right,

ruled the country by armed might.

Now, like many before him,

he has fallen as he rose - violently.

NARRATOR: The coast was now clear to return to Iraq and take a wife.

An arranged marriage to his first cousin,

Sajida Talfah,

the daughter of his mentor and uncle Khairallah Talfah.

It was a calculated move on Saddam's part,

designed to shore up his support within the Ba'ath Party.

MARIAM FARIDA: Maybe he had a romantic side to him, I'm not sure.

I mean, I'm sure he had...

..exposed some sort of romance,

but you also see that brutal...leader,

the one who is oppressive,

so you have that bipolarity

in his, in his leadership and in his persona, as well.

NARRATOR: Iraq was free, but by no means united.

ARCHIVE: For a brief time, Iraq's three peoples,

the Kurds, the Shi'ia and the Sunni, shared power,

but there followed a series of coups

and then, in 1969,

the Arab Nationalist Ba'athist Party took over for good.

NARRATOR: Saddam Hussein's cousin Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr

became President,

with Saddam as his unofficial deputy.

- He was also extremely ambitious

and when he came close to power,

he proved to be absolutely ruthless.

NARRATOR: Not only ruthless, but also,

as he ascended closer to power,

an increasingly roving eye.

In 1968, the then 31-year old married Saddam

attended a dinner in Baghdad

and was besotted by the daughter

of his host's neighbour.

She had jumped the fence to join the gathering.

Parisoula Lampsos was only 16,

a Greek businessman's daughter.

It's said they danced cheek to cheek

to Frank Sinatra's Strangers In The Night.

The Butcher of Baghdad would meet with Parisoula

for at least three nights a week

for the next 33 years of war and suffering.

By 1979,

Saddam Hussein had risen through the ranks,

from Ba'athist hitman to President of the Republic of Iraq.

- Saddam Hussein wanted to portray himself

as the father of the nation,

father of the Iraqis and the Iraqi nation

and he often used narratives and propaganda

that, um, supported that story.

He saw himself as the natural leader of the Arab world.

NARRATOR: By the time he became President, he had five children.

Two sons, Uday and Qusay,

who would later become as infamous as their father,

and three daughters, whom he married off to prominent political allies.

Soon after becoming President,

it's believed he had multiple mistresses,

including Parisoula Lampsos.

When he wasn't gratifying himself in the bedroom,

he was ruthlessly cementing his grip on power

and eliminating his enemies.

On the 22nd of July 1979,

just one week after he became President,

Saddam Hussein called his party members to a special meeting.

As their new leader arrives,

those attending think it will be business as usual.

But Saddam is about to reveal his true intentions.

Saddam's deputy announces

that there are traitors in the audience,

members disloyal to their new leader.

One by one, their names are read out.

- (reads out names in Arabic)

NARRATOR: One by one, the accused are ushered out,

never to be seen again.

- In 1979, Saddam Hussein staged

a very public - in fact, televised - purging

of his political party.

The images of him sitting on a stage, smoking a cigarette,

while names are called of party members

who are brought forward...

- (names read out in Arabic)

- No-one knowing where they're being ushered,

and you talk about top-leadership army...personnels.

You just find them getting ushered out, one after another,

and then, soon after, you realise what's happening,

because you can see, even on live television,

that people's reactions were starting to look bizarre.

People starting to look scared.

You could only imagine what was happening to those called outside.

Later on, we realised that they were being shot to death,

while Saddam was just sitting on the stage and smoking cigars.

- As the remaining members of the party realise what is going on,

this atmosphere of adulation starts to build up,

as all of a sudden they are claiming and declaring

their support of Saddam Hussein.

MARIAM FARIDA: But I think the grandiosity of it is the performance

and to try to create fear amongst those

who are even willing to consider the possibility

of going against his wishes.

It's also known that he...

he even assassinated close family members of his,

because he felt that they are plotting against him.

NARRATOR: Murdering members of his own family

sent a clear message:

"Stand up to Saddam and you won't be standing for much longer."

The wives and sisters of opponents

learned their President had little mercy for them, too,

and a pattern of sexual terrorism was emerging.

WOMAN: Hussein was a sexual sadist.

He entwined his sexuality with violence.

He would use his power, control, over these women...

to sexually abuse them

and to sexually torture them,

but alongside that,

it gave him pleasure to instil fear and terror into his victims.

Just like all sexual sadists,

this was the only way

for him to receive sexual pleasure.

NARRATOR: Yet in public, like so many of his fellow dictators,

he was at pains to present a very different image.

- When he goes to visit places,

he often goes on walks

and there's a lot of children around him cheering for him,

a lot of women and elderly,

and that helped creating and boosting that narrative

as being the "father of the nation"

and I think he did that on purpose.

NARRATOR: In 1980, fresh from his coronation

as undisputed ruler of Iraq,

he surprises his family and the nation by taking a second wife.

- (chanting)

NARRATOR: Totally unrelated but equally surprising,

he decides the Ayatollah-led Islamic revolution in neighbouring Iran

is a threat to his brand of Arab nationalism,

so he flexes his muscles with a pre-emptive strike.

Saddam funded his military with oil dollars,

but Iran hits back - hard.

ARCHIVE: This oil installation at Kut

received a direct hit from Iranian planes three days ago.

Whilst outside, those who have not fled

cower beneath anything that will give them cover.

NARRATOR: As the war dragged on,

Saddam relied on the United States for support.

Oil was black gold in the 1980s

and the West was thirsty for it.

- In 1980, when the war sprang up with Iran,

he was supplied or helped by not just the West, but also by Israel,

because, of course, at that stage,

the enemy was seen as the mullahs in Iran.

So at that point, the West was being good with him,

but it didn't last.

- Emboldened by that support from the United States,

he invaded Iran.

The war lasted eight years

and was one of the bloodiest conflicts in the Middle East,

claiming over a million lives.

ARCHIVE: With so many other conflicts in the Middle East,

Iran-Iraq has become the forgotten war.

- During the course of the war,

he ran Iraq's economy into the ground,

ending up owing billions of dollars to oil-rich Kuwait.

ARCHIVE: In the capital, huge pictures of Saddam Hussein

look down on a city and an economy in deep trouble.

- You've got to look at the other factor of his grandiosity.

He just couldn't restrain himself.

NARRATOR: Even as the war with Iran dragged on,

crippling Iraq's economy,

Hussein built huge, opulent palaces.

He released propaganda photos

depicting a happy and homely family life.

Years later, however, when US troops stormed one of his palaces,

they referred to it as his "love shack",

a labyrinth of mirrored walls,

beanbag chairs, lamps shaped like women,

bottles of Cognac and a Jacuzzi.

The walls were adorned with seedy, semi-pornographic murals

and in the bedroom,

American troops found photos - not of Saddam's loving family,

but of his many conquests.

- Saddam Hussein was like all other dictators

in that there was a public front

and there's what he did behind the public front, in his personal life,

and it was very important that this be kept hidden.

The reason, of course, was, it was against his image

as the sort of "father of the nation"...

but also, it would have actually made some people

step back in horror,

so he had to keep it separate and keep it hidden

and, like so many others of his kind,

this only emerges after his downfall.

NARRATOR: It also became clear Saddam had discovered a new weapon

to keep any Iraqi opposition at bay:

the widespread use of torture and sexual sadism.

- Hussein was a sexual sadist

and what that means is that all of his sexual fantasies,

desires, gratification

are entwined with a thirst for violence.

For the majority of people,

their sexual appetite,

their sexual interests, they develop during puberty

and if you are... attracted to violence,

this is when that cultivates and culminates

into sadistic tendencies,

so it is likely

that well before Hussein gained the power that he had,

that he was likely participating in various forms of sexual sadism.

NARRATOR: Bizarrely, Saddam's mistress Parisoula

would write in her memoirs

that one of the dictator's favourite pastimes

was donning a cowboy hat, sipping whisky

and smoking his favourite Havana cigars

whilst watching torture,

to the musical accompaniment

of Frank Sinatra's Strangers In The Night.

Small wonder that his sons Uday and Qusay

were showing signs of following in his predatory footsteps.

- Hussein's sons had...

and overindulgent, excessive lifestyle

that almost exceeded the sexual conquests of Hussein.

One of his sons, Uday, was rumoured

to have any woman brought to his pleasure dome at any time.

They demanded numerous sexual partners

and it's not so hard to recognise

that this is how they viewed masculinity,

that they grew up...their father was Saddam Hussein,

so when they became men, they built their sexual lives

around these extreme sexual appetites,

somewhat thinking that they're normalised,

especially that they DESERVE that level of sexual satisfaction,

as the sons of the ruler.

NARRATOR: Uday had become a violent sexual predator,

cruising Baghdad night clubs to pick up young women.

Those who resisted were kidnapped and dealt with by his bodyguards,

as were any who dared to criticise him.

JOURNALIST: He and the Colonel took us to see the morgue.

Kareem says he was told, "Go and find your brothers there."

They were lying in a pile of 50 stinking bodies.

Their main crime appears to have been

insulting Saddam Hussein's son Uday.

NARRATOR: With his country devastated by war and poverty

and his sons wildly out of control,

Saddam continued his regime of sex pills and sexual liaisons.

It was at this time

that Saddam Hussein committed

his most heinous atrocity.

- (gunfire) NARRATOR: In March 1988,

with Kurdish peoples in Northern Iraq

rebelling against his ruinous reign,

Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons to quash the unrest.

ARCHIVE: A week ago, the Iranians captured it.

Within days, they claim, Baghdad ordered it to be destroyed

with chemical weapons,

even though 50,000 of their own people were still living there.

- Saddam Husseins's murderous regime turned to genocidal

when on the 16th March 1988

Iraqi forces dropped a lethal mix of gas

onto a Kurdish town, Halabja.

FEMALE JOURNALIST: Can she say why she fears Saddam Hussein?

- (speaks emphatically in Kurdish)

WOMAN: Because Saddam make for her this problem.

- The weapons Saddam's regime used

in the chemical attack in Halabja

was a combination of mustard gas and sarin.

NARRATOR: Iraq became the first government

to ever attack its own people with chemical weapons...

..and it remains the largest such attack

in human history.

- Over 5,000 people were killed.

Men, women and children.

ARCHIVE: The people, the families we found lying all around

had not been injured.

They'd been poisoned by chemical bombs and shells

containing cyanide, mustard and other nerve gases.

NARRATOR: It was one of the worst atrocities of the modern era.

- I think he wanted to set an example.

I think he wanted to set a precedent

for whatever group wanted to demand change

is going to be met with the same brutal response...

and that worked, cos after that

there was no other political demands,

no political representation.

It was only Saddam's regime, the Ba'athist regime.

- You're always reluctant to put labels on people,

but if you want to use the word "supremely psychopathic",

then there's no doubt that Hussein was...would fit that.

NARRATOR: After the Iran-Iraq hostilities finally ended

in August 1988,

at the house of Hussein a revelation was about to tear the family apart.

Saddam had secretly married his mistress Samira

two years earlier in 1986.

When his polygamy became public,

Saddam's wife of 25 years, Sajida, was furious

and her oldest son Uday murderous.

- At a party held by the Egyptian President,

Uday got completely out of control

and actually beat a man to death.

That's how bad things were getting.

NARRATOR: The victim of Uday's frenzied attack was no stranger.

He was his father's own bodyguard.

- He beats people to death because...

I mean, his father kills people

just for the mere fact of saying, "We want better life,

we demand better living standards,"

so why would you think this is an unacceptable behaviour?

But, yeah, even to Saddam's measure,

his sons, Qusay and Uday, were even more brutal than him.

NARRATOR: This was the first public sign

of a family dynasty increasingly consumed

by sexual deviancy and extreme violence,

but from both father and eldest son

there was even worse to come.

ARCHIVE: The woman had just handed over £10,000 worth

to add to the growing mountain of gold.

Those who forget to donate are visited by soldiers

who remind them of their civic duty.

NARRATOR: While the Husseins continued to enrich themselves,

their people starved,

yet Saddam had now all but lost touch with reality.

- Saddam Hussein comes to see himself

not only as indestructible...

..but also loved by the majority of the people in Iraq.

He sincerely believes he IS loved, but...

at the same time, he keeps up this threat

and this fear in the population.

NARRATOR: By 1990,

with the country deeply and irretrievably in debt,

Saddam responded in the only way he knew how:

he accused neighbouring Kuwait,

who had helped bankroll his war with Iran,

of siphoning off Iraqi oil.

- (speaks Arabic)

TRANSLATOR: We said to him that what you are doing to us

was an...an...uh...

an act of war.

NARRATOR: On the 2nd August 1990

Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Whatever the aim,

the United States' response was swift and uncompromising...

- (dramatic music)

NARRATOR: ..and other world leaders joined in.

ARCHIVE: On the steps of Downing Street tonight,

Mrs Thatcher spoke of war.

- The peaceful solution would be

for Iraq to get out of Kuwait.

That is a matter for them. We hope they will do it.

If not, we shall have to take the military option

and see that Iraq DOES leave Kuwait.

- I mean, the invasion of Kuwait in 1990

was predominantly one of... Saddam's ambitions, personally.

He saw Kuwait as a significantly smaller country in size to Iraq.

He saw that he is capable militarily to take over,

to occupy it and stay there...

and control...um...

and he invaded it, in fact.

It was, luckily for Kuwait, in that sense,

in that time that the US and the West came and aided Kuwait.

Otherwise, it would have easily gone into the hands of Iraq

and Saddam's ambitions.

NARRATOR: But rather than withdraw,

Hussein took hundreds of Western foreigners hostage

and paraded them to the world as his "guests",

human shields against a Western attack.

ROBERT M KAPLAN: He should never have gone to war against Iran.

Because of that war,

he was bankrupt

and that's why he had to invade Kuwait

and then, of course, this time the West was fully against him,

so having started off on a possibly good note with the West,

it swung to the complete other side.

- So they realised that they had to stop him at some point.

NARRATOR: On 17th January 1991,

a US-led coalition of more than 30 countries

crushed Iraqi forces

with a massive onslaught of cutting-edge military technology.

ARCHIVE: In their opening attack,

the Allies combined their stealth and precision technology,

electronic warfare tactics

and the classical elements of mass and surprise.

NARRATOR: It took just five days, 100 hours,

for them to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.

US FIGHTER PILOT 1: There's the hit. There's the shock.

US FIGHTER PILOT 2: Oh, yeah! Keep hitting those...

Secondaries, quick five secondaries.

NARRATOR: But before they retreated, Iraqi forces

set the oil wells on fire...

- (flames roar)

- ..creating an environmental and economic catastrophe!

- Iraq, let's not forget,

is the second-largest exporter of oil in the world

and they can easily fluctuate and control the oil prices

around the world, which they did, at some point,

and that was unacceptable for the West,

so they wanted to have control over these uh...these decisions.

NARRATOR: Mistress Parisoula recalls

the only time she saw Saddam cry

was when he lost Kuwait.

He had gambled on Western apathy

and their previous support for him in the conflict with Iran

and he had lost - heavily.

With the West now calling for his overthrow

and his friends in the region deserting him,

Saddam Hussein was now a tyrant without teeth.

- But then, you see stories

and you see images of Iraqi men and women

who are dying on the street after the sanctions,

because of the scarcity of basic food and basic life.

Um, you know, there's... there was absolutely nothing,

so when there were sanctions on Iraq,

it was mainly the Iraqi people that struggled.

He maintained, Saddam Hussein maintained his lavish lifestyle.

- (clamouring)

ARCHIVE: The suffering is far greater than anyone had anticipated.

US and Turkish officials now estimate

as many as 270,000 Kurds may have fled to that country

to avoid Saddam Hussein's vengeance.

NARRATOR: Vengeance, for Saddam,

meant the cruel and prolonged violent humiliation

of anyone deemed an opponent.

- We're starting to see a systematic use of torture...

as a political tool for oppression.

We're starting to read stories

about rape being a systematic tool

to create, uh, shame amongst tribes,

to create more...more control over them,

to persuade them and coerce them.

- The torture that he inflicted upon women

was often associated with rape and sexual violence,

but even men were forced to...succumb

to these sexual... sexually violent proclivities

and this included using electric shock on the genitals,

it included uh...

even emotionally manipulative torture,

such as having a woman

that was a family member of the prisoner, the male prisoner,

having a woman come in and be raped in front of him,

in order to instil terror and pain and violence

through a... orchestrated rape event.

NARRATOR: But Saddam wasn't the only Hussein

who ordered the torture and rape of civilians.

In the mid 1990s, Saddam's eldest son Uday

raped the 15-year-old daughter of Saddam's mistress Parisoula

in front of her.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it,

Parisoula remained Saddam's lover

and Uday was appointed leader of the paramilitary force Fedayeen Saddam,

to try and keep him occupied elsewhere.

- (rousing rhythmic chanting)

- The sons are modelling themselves on their father,

so they do exactly what he is doing.

Also, Saddam Hussein has expectations of his sons...

and he is showing the way

for how they can control society,

so it's a reciprocal relationship.

NARRATOR: Uday's militia organisation

tortured and killed his father's opponents

and reportedly beheaded 200 women

in an anti-prostitution campaign.

MARIAM FARIDA: They are known to be brutal like their father,

but I don't see this as shocking, to be honest.

I mean, why would you prep your sons to rule

if you don't have that kind of ambition?

NARRATOR: Uday was even known to torture Iraqi athletes

who failed to win international events.

By 1996, even Saddam thought his sadistic son was going too far.

Incredibly, Saddam ordered Uday's assassination.

It failed, but he spent the rest of his life

with two bullets lodged in his spine.

As Uday recovered, his father remained leader of a country

now almost entirely dependent

on food and aid handouts from the United Nations.

- In political, or...

what you might call nationalistic terms,

he was a madman.

Whether he was clinically insane is questionable

and, ultimately, doubtful.

What he certainly was, was an undoubted psychopath.

NARRATOR: By 2001,

Saddam Hussein was living in denial,

clinging onto power by encouraging a siege mentality

in his benighted and bankrupt country.

- (emphatic address in Arabic)

ARCHIVE: The presidential address was broadcast

on all Iraq's television and radio channels simultaneously.

Saddam Hussein told his country that the Gulf War,

what he called "the immortal mother of all battles",

had been a triumph for Iraq over the forces of Satan.

- (menacing music)

NARRATOR: In September of that year, however,

his fate would be taken out of his hands.

- (screams of panic)

NARRATOR: The world changed over a few horrifying moments on 9/11.

Now it was the West

who was seeking vengeance.

US President George Bush Junior

declared Iraq a "rogue state".

- Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator

who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction.

America must not ignore the threat gathering against us.

We cannot wait for the final proof,

the smoking gun...

..that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

NARRATOR: Calling out Saddam Hussein

for secretly developing weapons of mass destruction

was a big call by President Bush.

No definitive evidence was ever found

by UN inspectors or American Intelligence,

but Saddam himself had continually encouraged the speculation

and, having shown he'd been willing to gas his own people

and having plotted to assassinate

the US President's father, George Bush Senior,

he had shown himself to be an implacable enemy of the West.

- It was seen as an opportunity to get rid of him,

because for the Bush administration

it was a "now or never" opportunity to get rid of Saddam Hussein,

because you have... the pretext is set, it's there

in terms of, you know, the popular propaganda:

you have the weapons of mass destruction, you have the 9/11,

you have harbouring of terrorist networks...

and you have your regional alliances,

such as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States,

who are seeing Saddam as a threat - as an existential threat...

..and it's a weak state now, it's a weak regime,

so you can get rid of him.

NARRATOR: While his empire continued to crumble around him,

Saddam found ways to distract himself.

He married a fourth wife in secret

and moved his mistress Parisoula Lampsos

into the grounds of his Presidential palace.

After 30 years, Saddam didn't even give her the dignity of a name,

referring to her only as "Shaqraa" - "the Blonde".

- He actually kept her in her own house

that is rumoured to be gilded in gold

and she had jewels and all of these extravagant things,

but he...she was only kept there for his sexual interests

and she...erm... felt that she could not leave.

She felt imprisoned.

NARRATOR: Lampsos eventually escaped Saddam's clutches

and fled to the West,

where she wrote her memoirs.

Much of what is known about the tyrant's secret sex life

comes from her.

- Hussein is known for using Viagra all of the time...

and this feeds into his sexual sadism.

The sex drive

that somebody that's taking Viagra would have

would result in...multiple demands for sexual encounters,

but because Hussein was a sexual sadist,

this also meant that multiple instances of torture,

pain and violence

would also be...demanded by his sex drive,

so we can see that this relationship

between his unsatiated sexual appetite

feeds into his violent nature.

NARRATOR: Saddam ignored the West's ultimatums to step down,

so on March 20, 2003,

US-led coalition forces invaded Iraq.

- On my orders,

Coalition forces have begun striking

selected targets of military importance

to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war.

NARRATOR: In April, US troops entered Baghdad,

revealing the full extent

of the wealth and corruption of Saddam Hussein.

Images of the opulence hidden behind the doors of the palaces

were shown around the world.

MARIAM FARIDA: Well, then, you look at Saddam Hussein's life,

his houses, his castles, his palaces,

his cars - he was...

he was lavishing in gold.

He thinks he built a legacy...

with his name.

He took ownership of the country,

he took ownership of the Iraqi people

and he wanted to continue and maintain that legacy

for his...future children,

so eventually it will become a monarchy.

He was a textbook oppressive tyrant.

NARRATOR: The tyrant was about to be toppled.

In July 2003,

US troops killed Saddam's hated sons Uday and Qusay

in a four-hour shootout. - (shots ring out)

NARRATOR: Then, in December of that year,

the ultimate humiliation:

Saddam Hussein is found hiding in a spider hole

near his hometown of Tikrit.

- It's a miserable hiding place,

particularly for a man who built

some of the most ostentatious palaces in the Middle East.

The kitchen was filthy.

No palace servants here.

NARRATOR: With his reign of terror over,

his people were at last free to speak.

REPORTER: This man took reporters to a prison

and showed them the crude tools

with which he'd been tortured by Saddam's secret police

and the scars they'd left.

NARRATOR: In October 2005,

Saddam Hussein was tried

before an Iraqi Special Tribunal

for crimes against humanity.

REPORTER: The Judge read the charges

against Saddam Hussein and his seven co-accused:

premeditated murder, imprisonment,

forced deportation.

NARRATOR: Finally, in November 2006,

Saddam was found guilty of crimes against humanity

and sentenced to death

for the murders of 148 inhabitants

of the village of Dujail in 1982.

In reality,

deaths at his hands numbered in the hundreds of thousands,

but he and his followers were so adept at destroying evidence

that the Dujail murders were the only ones

which could be linked directly to him.

On December 30, 2006,

aged 69,

Saddam Hussein was hanged.

He died as he had lived -

violently and defiantly.

- Saddam Hussein has been characterised

as "the madman of the Middle East",

but this implies that he was irrational

and uncalculated.

- When you say someone is a "madman",

you are instantly saying, you know,

they are irresponsible for the behaviour they create or commit,

they are irrational,

and hence, anything that they commit

is because of that irrationality.

My opinion is, Saddam Hussein was a very calculated man.

He was a very smart man.

- He was ruthless. He was meticulous.

We can't just say it was down to madness.

Everything, everything was thought about.

- (wild cheering and whistling)

REPORTER: This act, these images

broadcast around the globe

came to represent the end of a cruel dictatorship.

- He would be seen as not just one of Arab nationalist dictators

who caused a lot of damage and destruction,

not just to their country, but people around,

but as someone who had no limits

and, sooner or later, he was going to overextend himself

and the message was from...

the message to history is

that all dictators have their shelf life,

their use-by date

and he's a classic example.

- (melancholy piano melody)

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