LATIF YAHIA spat in the mirror when he saw himself for the first time after being forced to undergo plastic surgery. But it was too late. He now looked exactly like Uday Hussein, the eldest son of the Iraqi president. He spent the next four years as Uday’s double, a time he now refers to as “years of blood”.
Yahia has spoken for the first time about how he was turned into a terrible imitation of Saddam Hussein’s murderous and licentious son, how he eventually escaped and how he is now trying to exorcise the evil persona that entered him.
Yahia attended public parties and football matches in his assumed role and posed with soldiers at the Kuwaiti front, so Uday would face no danger but the Iraqi people would believe that Saddam had sent his son to serve in the “mother of all battles”. Yahia survived nine assassination attempts.
He came to think of himself as a monster. The man he had to impersonate is feared as much as his father in Iraq. He is a spoilt, brutal playboy who flies into uncontrollable rages when crossed. Uday even fell out with his father when he beat to death Saddam’s favourite retainer in a drunken rage in 1988 and was briefly exiled to Geneva.
Now in exile in Vienna, Yahia, 30, is trying to recover his lost identity. It is disconcerting to meet him. He still looks like Uday, still dresses in the same sharp suits the dictator’s son favours, sports the same gold jewellery and black Ray-Ban sunglasses.
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Old habits die hard. Taking out a cigar, he holds it until somebody lights it, even though the retainers who swarmed around him in his old role as Uday are long gone.
Yahia attended the exclusive Baghdad high school for boys. Uday was in the same class and the two boys resembled each other. One day Uday asked: “Do you want to be a son of Saddam?” Wary, Yahia answered: “We are all sons of Saddam.”
“Well, I would like you to be a real son of Saddam. I want you as my double.” Two weeks later, surgery began at the Ibn Sina hospital in the palace complex. Dentists removed his front teeth and replaced them with teeth like Uday’s; doctors cut a cleft into his chin.
“I hated myself,” he said. “All my family and friends hated Saddam; so, looking like his son, I was disgusted with myself.”
He began his “special education”: 16 hours a day watching videos of Uday walk, dance, drive, talk, get in and out of cars, light cigars, drink Scotch. “I never drank before, or smoked or danced,” Yahia said. “I had to learn to drink Dimple [Uday’s brand of whisky], smoke cigars and talk differently. I had to learn to be rude with people, like him.”
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Yahia made his first public appearance as his double at a football match, where he was surrounded by people who knew the president’s son. He remembers thinking when he arrived back at the villa that Uday had given him: “Latif Yahia doesn’t exist any more.”
Four lost years followed. Yahia appeared as Uday and travelled with him to London, Geneva and Paris. Whenever Uday wanted a suit — he preferred Christian Dior and Yves Saint Laurent — he bought two: one for himself, one for Yahia.
During the years of their “partnership”, Uday gave him only one rule: “Don’t touch my girls.” At one point Uday sent him to prison for 21 days because a girlfriend claimed he had tried to seduce her. When he was released, Uday gave him a Mercedes by way of apology. Yahia had three villas, six cars, all the money he wanted, beautiful women in droves. “But I was afraid,” he said. “I was afraid Uday would kill me. I was afraid of being killed instead of Uday.”
Yahia made the decision to flee almost a year after the allies liberated Kuwait in 1991. His relationship with Uday had become tense.
The master apparently sensed that his double was going to make a break for freedom. As Yahia stepped from a lift into the lobby of the Babylon hotel in Baghdad, Uday appeared and shot him. The bullet hit him high in the chest, missing vital organs. Badly wounded, he escaped to Kurdistan and, with the help of the Americans, was granted political asylum in Vienna.
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Today, in exile, he finds it difficult to recover any sense of himself: “Uday stole my life, my future, my identity.”
Latif Yahia now divides his time between Ireland and Britain. He has said he has no wish to return to Iraq. Uday was killed, aged 39, in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq