OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF LATIF YAHIA
  • Home
  • Books
  • Documentary
  • Interviews
  • News
  • Videos
  • عربي
  • Contact

"People like to bring up ur past, when ur present and future look better than theirs."

My Life as the Devi's Double.

17/7/2011

0 Comments

 
sandance film festival,cannes film festival,berlin film festival,Columbia Pictures,Black Tiger Media Group,Arcanum Media Group,Uday Saddam Hussein,The Devil's Double,The Black Hole,CIA,America,Iraq,War,Obama,Bush,Books,Film,The Hangman of Abu Ghraib,Forty Shades of Conspiracy,Irish,Ireland,Autobiography, Life story, ,Son of Saddam,National Geographic Channels,Locked Up Abroad,Ebay,Human Rights,Cambridge,Al Jazeera,Xarabank, Maltese TV,HARDtalk,Stephen Sackur,Gerry Ryan,Ryan Confidential,Eoin Butler Pimp,Haytham Adjmaya pimp,Dhafir Mohamed Jabir pimp,Ed Caesar Pimp,THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE,The Hangman of Abu Ghraib,Latif Yahia,USA,‪Skyhorse Publishing‬,Unlucky Bastard,Iraq,BBC,TV,The Black Hole,Picture,Saudi the Kingdom of terror,Documentary,Stand my Ground,Human Rights,The propaganda of Human Rights,Saudi the Kingdom of terror,Our President Saddam,Black Tiger Media Group,The Hangman of Abu Ghraib,Raghad Saddam Hussein,Dhafir Mohamed Jabir,Eoin Butler pimp,Ed Caesar asshole,Documentary,House of Saddam, Uday saddam Hussein, Latif Yahia, Yigal Naor, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Uri Gavriel, Libyan, Gaddafi Our Best Enemy, The Devil's Double, Iraq, Newt Gingrich, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Barack Obama in His Own Words, Bill Clinton, joe biden, Ronald Reagan, Ron Paul, George W. Bush, Let's Make MONEY,لطيف يحيى,جلال الطالباني,عدي صدام حسين,رغد صدام حسين,قصي صدام حسين,الاحتلال الامريكي,افلام وثائقية,افلام عربية,مسعود البارزاني,اياد علاوي,نوري المالكي,طارق الهاشمي,بغداد,صدام حسين,الملك فهد بن عبدالعزيز,اللجوء في اوربا,تاريخ العراق,الاحتلال الامريكي,قناة الجزيرة,قناة العراقية,قناة السومرية,قناة البغدادية,قناة الشرقية,الشيخ صباح الاحمد,علاء مكي,تلفزيون الشباب
Jul 17, 2011 10:00 AM EDT
They forced me to stand in for Saddam’s son. I escaped—but never got my revenge.
sandance film festival,cannes film festival,berlin film festival,Columbia Pictures,Black Tiger Media Group,Arcanum Media Group,Uday Saddam Hussein,The Devil's Double,The Black Hole,CIA,America,Iraq,War,Obama,Bush,Books,Film,The Hangman of Abu Ghraib,Forty Shades of Conspiracy,Irish,Ireland,Autobiography, Life story, ,Son of Saddam,National Geographic Channels,Locked Up Abroad,Ebay,Human Rights,Cambridge,Al Jazeera,Xarabank, Maltese TV,HARDtalk,Stephen Sackur,Gerry Ryan,Ryan Confidential,Eoin Butler Pimp,Haytham Adjmaya pimp,Dhafir Mohamed Jabir pimp,Ed Caesar Pimp,THE DEVIL'S DOUBLE,The Hangman of Abu Ghraib,Latif Yahia,USA,‪Skyhorse Publishing‬,Unlucky Bastard,Iraq,BBC,TV,The Black Hole,Picture,Saudi the Kingdom of terror,Documentary,Stand my Ground,Human Rights,The propaganda of Human Rights,Saudi the Kingdom of terror,Our President Saddam,Black Tiger Media Group,The Hangman of Abu Ghraib,Raghad Saddam Hussein,Dhafir Mohamed Jabir,Eoin Butler pimp,Ed Caesar asshole,Documentary,House of Saddam, Uday saddam Hussein, Latif Yahia, Yigal Naor, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Uri Gavriel, Libyan, Gaddafi Our Best Enemy, The Devil's Double, Iraq, Newt Gingrich, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama, Barack Obama in His Own Words, Bill Clinton, joe biden, Ronald Reagan, Ron Paul, George W. Bush, Let's Make MONEY,لطيف يحيى,جلال الطالباني,عدي صدام حسين,رغد صدام حسين,قصي صدام حسين,الاحتلال الامريكي,افلام وثائقية,افلام عربية,مسعود البارزاني,اياد علاوي,نوري المالكي,طارق الهاشمي,بغداد,صدام حسين,الملك فهد بن عبدالعزيز,اللجوء في اوربا,تاريخ العراق,الاحتلال الامريكي,قناة الجزيرة,قناة العراقية,قناة السومرية,قناة البغدادية,قناة الشرقية,الشيخ صباح الاحمد,علاء مكي,تلفزيون الشبابLeft: Uday Hussein.; Right: Latif Yahia. (Karim Sahib / AFP-Getty Images (left); Courtesy of Karen Yahia)
During the late 1980s, I was working as an officer in the Iraqi Army when my commanding general received a letter that demanded I report to a palace in Baghdad within 72 hours. When I went to the palace, I was brought to see Uday Hussein, Saddam’s older son. “I want you to be my fiday,” he said. In Arabic, fiday means body double or bullet catcher. I didn’t understand. “Do you want me to be your bodyguard?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Our intelligence service says we look like each other, and I want you to work as my double.”

I felt like somebody had hit me in the head with a hammer. “Do I have a choice?” I asked, thinking this was somehow a joke. “If you refuse,” Uday said, “you can go back to the Army. We don’t have a problem with you.” It was a lie. As soon as I left the palace, his guards threw me in the trunk of a car and took me to jail. Everything was painted red inside the cell to make you stressed and remind you of blood. A completely red room is also disorienting.

They kept me in this jail for a week before Uday asked to see me again; he was trying to torture me psychologically. This time he threatened to rape my sisters, who were only little girls at the time. “I’ll do it, but leave my family alone,” I told him. And that’s when it all started.

After that, I often saw rape, torture, killings. The torture was really sick when Uday was doing it. One time I was sitting in the Iraqi Olympic Committee office, and the father of a girl Uday had raped was brought in. She was a beauty queen—Miss Baghdad. The father had tried to complain to Saddam, so Uday wanted to take revenge. He asked me to shoot the guy in the head, but I refused. He said, “I’m ordering you—shoot him!” I went crazy. I grabbed a knife and cut my wrists in front of him. He was shocked. I was taken to the hospital, and Uday never asked me to shoot anyone again after that.

I escaped Iraq in the early 1990s. But I spent five years afterward in counseling and psychological treatment, dealing with the things I saw: torture and kidnapping of girls, rape, and all these things. Once I tried to commit suicide by taking tablets; another time I tried to hang myself. I was so depressed. I was taking a lot of Valium to calm down. Even now I don’t get to sleep until 5 or 6 in the morning. I always have nightmares. When you live in the West, you don’t see things like torture.

In 2003 I was watching the news in my office in Manchester, England, when I heard that Uday had been killed by American soldiers. I had a cup of coffee in my hand, and I smashed it straight into the TV. I was very angry. I didn’t want to see Uday get killed. I wanted him to be tried in court, to be tried for his crimes. I wanted to be in court to be able to say, “Look at what this guy did to me.” I wanted justice. But it never happened.

A movie based on Yahia’s Life, The Devil’s Double, opens in the U.S. this month.

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

     Eoin Butler and Ed Ceasar, The
    Eoin Butler and Ed Ceasar
    Eoin Butler and Ed Ceasar, The "Freelance" journalists, Dirty Tricks.


    Eoin Butler
    How the American administration and the CIA created terrorists


    الخامنئي
    Protection: Iran's invasion of the world, through the name of religious freedom.


    Buy Latif Yahia Books from Amazon


    Archives

    February 2015
    October 2013
    September 2013
    July 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    August 2012
    May 2012
    February 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    July 2011


©-2023 Latif Yahia All Rights Reserved
  • Home
  • Books
  • Documentary
  • Interviews
  • News
  • Videos
  • عربي
  • Contact