Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
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This was written by Saddam Hussein’s half-brother. It talks about eight or nine assassination attempts that were made against the president. These assassination attempts were mostly by the Iranians, because they wanted to topple the Baath regime and they have been trying to do this since the late 1970s. In the end they achieved what they wanted. (Not Currently Available Via Amazon)
Your next book is The Assassination Attempts against President Saddam Hussein by Barzan al-Tikriti.
This was written by Saddam Hussein’s half-brother. It talks about eight or nine assassination attempts that were made against the president. These assassination attempts were mostly by the Iranians, because they wanted to topple the Baath regime and they have been trying to do this since the late 1970s. In the end they achieved what they wanted.
The book was factual so you didn’t really get much of an idea about their relationship. But, what is interesting is that the book was removed from the market and it is very hard to get hold of these days.
Why?
Well we were never told the reason why things happened during the regime. In a dictatorship you don’t get given an explanation and we certainly didn’t dare to ask!
But there must have been speculation; what were people saying?
I didn’t discuss it with anyone, you just don’t discuss the president – you really could get into trouble if you did.
It sounds like a very frightening time. You actually ended up in Syria because you feared for your life.
Yes, my husband and I ran away because it was very bad in 2007. We reached a point where we were being shot at and there were bodies lying at our front gate. For three days a body lay at my front gate and nobody dared to move it. I still remember it was a young man with a can of Pepsi rolling just near him.
It was a nightmare. There were troops and extremists from all sides fighting and there were people trying to get into the district to push us out of our house and to take our things. It was complete chaos. That is why we ran away, we were scared. A lot of Iraqis felt like us and went to Syria. It was just too unsafe to carry on living in Iraq with all that violence going on around us.
You are living in the UK now. Would you ever go back to living in Iraq?
I don’t think so at the moment. It is just so difficult. We left everything in our house and locked the door. There was nowhere to take it. There is no cultural life in Iraq any more; it’s so sad. I miss the old days. If it could go back to how it was back then, I would go back and live there.
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May Witwit is an Iraqi who is now living in the UK. She was forced to flee Baghdad when her life became too dangerous – leaving her job as a university lecturer in literature behind her. She has recently published a book about how she managed to escape Iraq with the help of a gutsy BBC journalist.
