As for the Wife ...

By Daren Fonda Saturday, July 26, 2003
    • Uday and Qusay Hussein are accounted for, but what about Saddam's other close relatives? It's hard to say. A butler who worked for the Iraqi leader until the regime fell says Saddam's first wife Sajida and the couple's daughters—Raghad, Rana and Hala—fled to Syria after the war started but were deported back to Iraq. Another butler, who served Uday, says the women made their way to Mosul, where Uday and Qusay died, and remain there—presumably with at least some of their combined seven children—protected by a tribal chief.

    According to a former secretary to Saddam, the strongman's second wife Samira is in Beirut with the children from her first marriage and her grandchildren. Saddam and Samira are rumored to have had a son named Ali, but the family butler says there is no such person. (Saddam does have a nephew named Ali.) The young man mistakenly known on the Baghdad street as Ali, according to the butler, is actually Samira's grandson Saif, 20. The butler and the former secretary claim that the marriage contract between Saddam and Samira specified that she not bear him any children.

    Samira and Saddam were close, says the secretary. "He listened to what she told him." But a Pentagon official in Iraq says the U.S. has little interest in the female relatives, noting that Iraqi women are usually kept out of men's affairs. The U.S., he adds, has no reason to think Saddam's wives and daughters would know his whereabouts. "If they came in here, I'd offer them tea," the official said in his Baghdad office.

    —Reported by Brian Bennett and Simon Robinson/Baghdad