Marie Colvin - On the Front Line

The attack, carried out with assault weapons, was ferocious. Although Kamel’s men fired back, they were swiftly overwhelmed. Some of the family were killed in the initial onslaught; others when the armed men entered the house. They included Kamel’s elderly father, all the women and at least five young children, gunned down in their nightclothes.

Outside in a parked Mercedes sat Ali Hassan Al-Majeed, a cousin of Saddam’s who had earned the nickname ‘The Hammer of the Kurds’ after gassing villages in northern Iraq with chemical weapons in 1989. Al-Majeed was on a mobile phone, describing each step of the assault to Saddam as it happened.

‘We have 17 bodies,’ he said. The only member of the family who was missing was Kamel himself. Saddam barked: ‘I want his body.’

As bulldozers were brought in to destroy the house, Kamel, naked to the waist, wounded and bleeding, burst from a hiding place inside and appeared at a door brandishing his personal pistol and a machinegun.

He had barely fired a shot before he was riddled with bullets. When the gunfire ceased, Al-Majeed walked up to the body and emptied his pistol into it. He dragged Kamel by one foot through the sand, yelling to his men and to neighbours cowering behind closed doors: ‘Come and see the fate of a traitor.’ The bulldozers moved in and the house was razed.

The massacre was a vivid reminder to the people of the ruthlessness of the regime under which they live. If Saddam was willing to eliminate close and even innocent members of his own family in such a fashion, there was no limit to what he could do to them.

During the summer, however, came two further reminders of the apparent futility of resistance. In June a member of the presidential bodyguard fired shots at Saddam and was executed. Less than a month later, according to western diplomats and Iraqi exiles, a rebel group of Iraqi officers planned to kill Saddam by bombing a presidential palace from a plane that was to have taken off from Rasheed airport in Baghdad.

The conspiracy was discovered and hundreds of members of Saddam’s armed forces were arrested. Between 1 and 3 August, 120 of the officers were executed.

Iraqis have grown used to atrocities since Saddam came to prominence. His first known political act was an attempt in 1959 to gun down Abdel-Karim Qassem, then the Iraqi leader. When he became president 20 years later, he began by accusing 21 senior members of the leadership of treason. He formed a firing squad with his remaining colleagues, and together they shot all the condemned men.

In the years that followed, his people learned to voice their opposition only to close friends and family. Criticism of Saddam is punishable by death, and the security services are ubiquitous. Iraqi couples do not even speak in front of their own children for fear they might innocently repeat something and bring down the wrath of the regime.

The long series of confrontations into which Saddam has led Iraq has made life immensely difficult in a country whose citizens should be as pampered as those of Saudi Arabia. Iraq, unlike most Arab states, has both oil and water. Two huge rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, nourish the land, and before the imposition of United Nations sanctions following the invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, Iraq earned $10 billion a year by lifting 3m barrels of oil a day.

Much of the money was spent on creating not comfort, but the largest army in the Middle East. Within a year of taking power, Saddam ordered the invasion of Iran, starting a bitter war that lasted for eight years and left 1 million people dead.

The attack on Kuwait was another miscalculation. The 43 days of allied bombing, supported by Arab countries afraid of his might, destroyed not only military sites but roads, bridges, oil refineries, communications, sewage facilities and the rest of an extensive infrastructure built by oil revenues.

Last week’s conflict, in which Iraqi support for one group of Kurds against another provoked two waves of bombardment with American cruise missiles, was by no means the first test of the allies’ resolve since the Gulf War. But after previous confrontations, Saddam has simply waited out his enemies. Those close to him say he is proud to have outlasted in office both George Bush and Margaret Thatcher, who led the coalition against him in 1990.

The few who have risen in revolt have been crushed, but his inner circle has tightened around him and now consists almost solely of relatives from Tikrit, his home town.

According to Arab dignitaries who have visited Saddam, he has become so paranoid about his security since the Gulf War that he maintains 250 safe homes. The staff in each house prepares dinner every night as if he is to arrive; nobody knows where he will sleep until he shows up at the door.

The Kamel clan was not the first to betray him. Last June he was shaken by a coup attempt led by the powerful Dulaimi clan from his Sunni heartland that had been a pillar of his armed forces. Provoked by the torture and death of a clan member accused of involvement in a previous coup attempt, General Turki al-Dulaimi led his troops in a bold but suicidal march on Baghdad. The rebels were defeated in a day.

It has not escaped the attention of most Iraqis that while the latest confrontation has occurred less than six years after the Gulf War, the reaction around the world this time has been quite different. America’s use of missiles was backed wholeheartedly only by Britain, Canada and Germany. Although he lost a few isolated radar and anti-aircraft batteries, Saddam succeeded in dividing the coalition that had been ranged against him.

The main reason for the change was the nature of Saddam’s offensive. He did not roll his army across an international border and occupy another country, but sent a limited force of tanks and infantry into Arbil, a Kurdish city 12 miles inside the Kurdish ‘safe haven’ patrolled by allied jets.

He was also invited in by the Kurdish faction that represents the majority of Kurds, the Kurdish Democratic party (KDP). Other Middle Eastern countries saw the American intervention as a blatantly inconsistent piece of interference in an internal problem. The United States had not objected when Turkey sent 35,000 troops into northern Iraq last year to attack bases of rebellious Kurds; nor when Iran sent 3,000 troops across the border into northern Iraq last month.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia, among the countries that are the closest allies in the Middle East, refused Washington permission to launch strikes from their soil. The Arab League, for once in agreement, denounced the attacks on Iraq.

Just as striking, the first criticism of the American bombing came from a Gulf newspaper, condemning the action and saying that all Arabs should oppose it ‘as a matter of honour’. It was the first time since the Gulf War that any paper in the region used the word ‘brothers’ to refer to Iraqis.

France was critical and Britain was unable to get a resolution denouncing the Iraqi incursion through the UN security council following strong opposition from Russia. By the end of the week, Saddam’s tanks were still dug in in northern Iraq and the allied coalition was in tatters.

For now, Saddam may have little choice but to accept the establishment of a security zone inside its territory by Turkey, which says this is needed to fight Kurds battling for independence from Ankara. He should not be expected to be quiescent forever, however. He has every prospect of increasing his power and has a lot of grudges to settle. Those who know Saddam say the one certainty is that he never forgets and never forgives.

For the ordinary Iraqi, life seems likely to get harder. While the so-called ‘war rich’ who have profited from the black market in Baghdad continue to work on new palaces, most people are worried about food prices driven to new peaks by the crisis.