Saddam's daughters to seek asylum in UK

Two of Saddam Hussein’s daughters are to seek asylum in Britain, a relative said in remarks published today.

Izzi-Din Mohammed Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of the deposed Iraqi president, said he was returning to London in a week to help Saddam’s daughters, Raghad and Rana, obtain asylum in Britain. If their asylum bids were rejected, the sisters would prefer to stay in the Arab world, living somewhere like Egypt, Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, he said.

Al-Majid said Saddam’s fall from power has hit home for two of his daughters, who have gone from living in palaces to two cramped rooms in a humble Baghdad home with their nine children.

He said he met Raghad and Rana several times in the Iraqi capital last month, the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat reported.

He also said neither he nor the two daughters knew of the whereabouts of Saddam and his two sons, who top the coalition’s most wanted list.

Al-Majid is also the cousin of the women’s late husbands, brothers Lieutenant General Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel, who defected to Jordan in 1995. They were lured back in February 1996 and killed shortly after on the Iraqi leader’s orders on suspicion of passing on information concerning Iraq’s weapons programmes to Western officials.

Al-Majid also fled Iraq in 1995 and later settled in London. He returned to Iraq in late April after US-led forces swept Saddam’s regime from power.

Al-Majid told Asharq Al-Awsat yesterday in a telephone interview in Baghdad that Saddam’s daughters were “very enraged for what had happened to Iraq and I saw the tears in their eyes, especially when we talked about the war and the fall of the regime”.

Raghad, Rana and their nine children, long accustomed to living in palaces and being served by hired staff, now lived in two rooms of a small house owned by a trusted middle-class family, al-Majid said.

Saddam’s daughters now “wash clothes by their own hands, cook their own food and clean the house by themselves and live without electricity. They live in a severe psychological disorder”.

Al-Majid said the daughters blamed Saddam’s closest aides for betraying him “at the last moment” before trying to obtain asylum in Britain or other Arab states.

“The regime fell because of the aides employed by my father, whose only interest was to stay in power and seek personal gain,” al-Majid quoted Raghad as saying in reference to Iraqi officers and ministers who held senior positions within Saddam’s regime.

Al-Majid said Saddam and his son, Oday, treated the two sisters and their children cruelly following the 1996 killings of their husbands.

Saddam’s third and youngest daughter, Hala, lived with her two sisters in their humble Baghdad abode for a short period but left with her children to an unknown location.

Hala’s husband is Jamal Mustafa Abdallah Sultan al-Tikriti, who worked at the presidency office and has been in custody since April 19. The US military listed him as the nine of clubs in its deck of the 55 most wanted Iraqi officials, ranking him No. 40.