Every muscle in my body tensed up, as I watched the bare-chested man wield a sledgehammer to smash the statue’s base and topple the tyrant from his concrete throne. A crowd tried pulling him down with ropes and  someone even climbed on top to strike the statue on its head. 

I watched the event unfold while in exile in London. It would forever change my life, as well as my country’s history. I jumped up from my chair. My friends joined me, shouting in disbelief. It was an iconic moment. Although the man himself, till then, had managed to escape, the statue still held his symbolic power. So, let’s strike there!

Our most notorious tyrant did not build his powerbase through repression alone, but also through imagery that spread far and wide: at streets, squares, city entries, institutions, school book covers, notebooks, wristwatches, dishes, pens, coins and banknotes. In short, he aimed to nail his image firmly in the citizens’ subconsciousness.

While in exile, I followed him through his pictures in newspapers, and on TV. But I was not content to simply watch. I scrutinized each image to analyze its misleading nature and see what it concealed. 

This was especially needed as the man behind the camera was both actor and director, and adored his role until his last breath. To him, the camera was a tool to replace reality with a contrived portrayal of himself crafted with great care for very specific purposes. 

Upon my return to the country on April 26, 2003, after 25 years of exile, Saddam was the first to greet me at the al-Ruweishid checkpoint on the border with Jordan. Before dawn, I saw him smiling with his traditional headdress (keffiyeh) on a large mural, welcoming all those he would come to host. 

I shuddered as if recalling my nightmares while in exile. I entered the country under the guise of darkness, in oblivion of him and his police. A few angry bullets had pierced his face and lips, yet his smile persisted. I wondered who had fired the shots at his picture. It felt as if they had taken aim at the history of their own personal fear.

Surreal

With his omnipresence, Saddam achieved a perfect blend between instrumental power and symbolic authority over the Iraqi people. His pictures were widely circulated by the security services. As the risks for him to appear in public increased, the man disappeared and became a prisoner of his own palace. As a result, the palace too became a symbol.

People did not see him when he would leave. They only caught fleeting glimpses of his convoy as it passed. Perhaps they saw his shadow or the shadow of his body double behind the car window’s blurred glass. As such, Saddam’s presence became hypothetical, rooted in reality by the massive murals and towering statues at streets and squares.

During the war with Iran, the leader or “the symbol,” as was one of his many titles, modestly refrained from ordering the construction of more statues of himself, famously stating that “martyrs are more honorable than all of us.”

However, the tragic end to the Gulf War in 1991 revealed the ephemeral nature of propaganda and the fragility of symbolic power, as an uprising swept through 14 Iraqi cities. Retreating soldiers angrily fired bullets at a mural representing the leader in Basra. Heeding the call to action, protesters tore down millions of pictures and murals representing his power.

Yet, brutally repressed, the uprising failed and the security services restored power. The first step the authorities took was to form a Supreme Committee for the Restoration of the Leader’s Murals. Saddam replaced paper with iron and concrete, symbolizing strength and stability to withstand the test of time. 

Statues are mostly associated with history, which “is recalled, selected, and reused to meet present requirements,” as said the British orientalist Bernard Lewis.

Saladin

During the eight-year war with Iran, the Iraqi regime used history to serve its purpose, presenting the Akkadian king Naram-Sin standing shoulder to shoulder with Saddam Hussein in a war chariot pulled by white horses. He was holding a spear to fight the Elamites. From Naram-Sin to Saddam: history is a continuous war with Iraq’s eastern neighbor. 

The Second Gulf War marked a turning point in the country’s history. In Tikrit and on the other side of the Tigris River, Saddam built a series of presidential palaces both for security and symbolic purposes, covertly moving between them to avoid being detected by the enemy and their hostile aircraft. 

On a hill at the turn of the river, he built a palace with a gate shaped like a triumphal arch, topped by a helmet shaped like the dome of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and a statue of himself resembling Salah Al-Din Al-Ayyubi (Saladin).

Both were born in Tikrit. And, according to Saddam’s calendar, both were born on the same day, April 27, exactly 800 years apart. Both are like one body, riding a wild horse, with a sword in hand pointing towards Jerusalem.

At some point, as the country’s administrative and partisan bodies sought to cement Saddam’s power, statues of the great leader proliferated everywhere. At first, the towering statues inspired fear. But, as time passed, fear gradually transitioned into feelings of admiration and adoration. 

Firdos Square

The biggest statue was constructed at Baghdad’s Firdos Square a year before Saddam’s fall, in a period Saddam perceived as the Harb Al-Hawasim (the Decisive War). The statue marked his 65th birthday. For that reason, Saddam took off his military uniform to appear in civilian clothes. The statue was 12 meters high. 

For the media, which covered the event live, the smashing of the statue on April 8 was an emblematic moment par excellence. More than 200 journalists and photographers at the square reported the symbolic end to the 20-day war. 

Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense at the time, described the moment as “no less important than the fall of the Berlin Wall.” 

Wars have always had symbolic endings. Take the Soviet soldiers climbing on top of the German Reichstag building to remove the swastika, raising the American flag on the coast of Normandy or the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the Cold War.

Iraq’s final moment was linked to someone who at that point was still very much alive, moving from one hideout to another, sending his threatening messages to “the enemy and their collaborators.” 

As the main person himself was absent, the street’s anger turned towards the symbols representing him, including the statue. The man breaking the fear barrier was a mechanic named Kadhim Hassan al-Jabbouri. 

Tanks and Hammers 

Having landed the first blows to the statue’s base with a sledgehammer, he paused for a moment. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and answered the question from the surrounding journalists, while struggling to catch his breath, 

“This man killed 14 members of my family,” he said, pointing at the statue.

Before Saddam’s statue was erected, Firdos Square used to be home to the Unknown Soldier Memorial, which showed a soldier in the most abstract sense of the word protecting the eternal flame with his body. 

In the 1960s, we would rest on its steps after a long walk. We would eat poached chickpeas with our backs turned to the flame and the soldier roaming back and forth to guard the memorial. We ate leisurely without fear but with a sense of familiarity.

The towering Saddam statue that replaced the Unknown Soldier Memorial symbolically dominates the public square, imposing itself on people passing by on foot or by car. 

Although they may not pay much attention, the statue is meant to serve as an expression of the man’s strength and legacy, a symbol of his self-importance for generations to come. Most Iraqis knew that offending the statue carried the same punishment as shooting the man it portrays: execution. 

Yet, bolstered by the zeal of his supporters, Kadhim persisted in banging on the concrete. Standing in the middle of the square, the statue still embodied the man at the peak of his power. 

Lt. Colonel Bryan McCoy continued the narrative in American weekly The New Yorker. He was washing his socks when he learned a crowd of people was trying to topple the largest of Saddam’s statues at Firdos Square. So, he took his tank and went out to help. 

And thus the historical cycle repeated itself. On the one hand, the unarmed people, defenseless, and on the other hand a military force, foreign, intervening with a tank rather than a hammer to bring the man down. 

This symbolic moment is based on a hypothesis that has become all too real in Iraq’s recent history. A hypothesis that could be summed up as follows: The unarmed people have fought successive uprisings, yet were unable to overthrow their rulers. The army, with its tanks and soldiers accomplishes this on behalf of the people. The people on the street then symbolically topple their rulers’ statues and  tore down their pictures. 

We gathered around the television, far away from the place where it actually happened, and cheered as the statue began to tilt. The leg from the podium broke and the body leaned forward towards the ground … 

The man, whether he manifested himself in a paper, cement or iron version, had stolen half my life and greatest hope. But now he had fallen.