Labourer who cursed Saddam and Oday had his tongue cut off

FIRAS ADNAN need only open his mouth to give evidence of Saddam Hussein’s legacy. Just before the regime fell, the 24-year-old labourer quarrelled with a Saddam loyalist, who punished him by chopping off his tongue with a box cutter.

Now Adnan awaits the prosecution of Saddam with mixed feelings. He is happy the former dictator will have to answer for his crimes but bitter because he must live with the scars from the regime.

“Saddam will stand trial. But I’m handicapped, so what’s the use?” Adnan said, his slurred words barely comprehensible. “Nothing will give me back my tongue.”

Adnan said he would definitely watch if the trial is televised, as officials have promised.

Asked if Saddam should be executed, Adnan said no. That would “only give him relief. It would be better if he is jailed. Let him try what thousands of us have gone through.”

But Adnan’s mother, Fatma Ahmed, interrupted: “I wish I could kill him with my own hands.”

“He didn’t have mercy on a mother. He is a despot, the biggest despot, Iraq will be much better without him,” the 43-year-old Ahmed said.

Millions of other Iraqis understand well what Adnan is talking about. No punishment for Saddam can bring back the thousands of fathers, sons, sisters, daughters and mothers who died in torture chambers, on the streets of dusty Kurdish villages or on the battlefields in Iran.

Adnan’s torment began in December 2002, when he got in a fight with some people in the street. A militiaman loyal to Saddam’s son Oday intervened and threatened him with a gun. Adnan was so angry, he cursed Oday and Saddam.

Adnan escaped but was arrested by the militiamen a few days later. They tortured him for three months, vowing, he said, to “turn me crazy or execute me.”

One day they woke him up early at prison, beat him severely, blindfolded him and took him away in a car. The vehicle stopped and he was pushed out.

“I heard people chanting ‘With our soul and blood we redeem you Saddam.’ When they asked me to open my mouth, I begged them to execute me,” he said.

When they took off his blindfold, he saw he was in his own neighbourhood and that his family were being forced to chant and wave portraits of Saddam.

But instead of killing him, the militiamen cut off part of his tongue with a box cutter.

That was March 5, two weeks before the start of the war on Iraq. He was not released until mid-April. “Had the regime not fallen, they would have executed me,” Adnan said.