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As the first-born son, generally an unassailable position in an Arab family, Uday was seen as his father's natural heir. But he lost that status when his brutal tendencies directly touched his father. In 1988 Uday clubbed to death Saddam's favorite food taster, bodyguard Kamel Hanna Jajjo, because the man had introduced Saddam to the woman who would eventually become the President's second wife. Furious, Saddam had Uday jailed for 40 days and beaten after he struck a prison guard. The jailing fueled Uday's anger. "Your man is going to kill me," he wrote his mother, according to a copy of the letter obtained by TIME. He demanded that she find someone who can "release me from this torture." Uday said he had not been given anything but water for eight days and had spent four days in iron handcuffs. "I will either die, or I will go crazy," he wrote.
Eventually, Saddam would soften and allow Uday to return to his duties as head of Iraq's Olympic Committee. But it was only after Saddam's humiliating defeat in the 1991 Gulf War that he would begin to carve out a significant role for Uday and his younger brother. In them, Saddam found complementary strains that reflected elements of his psyche. Uday was cunning, cruel, ambitious and headstrong. Qusay was secretive, politically ruthless, hardworking and so idolatrous of his father that he aped his clothing style, bushy mustache and choice of cigar, Cohiba Esplendidos. "Saddam himself couldn't kill everyone he wanted to or spy on everyone he needed to," says Kenneth Pollack, an ex-CIA and White House expert on Iraq who works for the Brookings Institution in Washington. "Having those two boys to do it for him was a critical element in his reign of terror."
Qusay had been working for his father in small jobs in internal security when his big break came. Iraq's Shi'ite Muslims, who make up a majority in the country but have long been repressed by the minority Sunnis, revolted against the regime in dozens of cities when Gulf War I ended. Saddam gave Qusay broad authority to oversee the crushing of the uprising. He did not entirely delegate the task. An eyewitness recalls watching Qusay, dressed in gray trousers and a blue jacket, arrive in Suera, where armed guards herded 300 Shi'ite detainees onto a field. The President's son, dangling a pistol in his right hand, walked up to the men and shot four of them in the head, according to a military officer at the scene. As he pulled the trigger, Qusay screamed out, "Bad people! Dirty criminals!" Qusay then ordered the execution of the remaining prisoners, got into his car and drove back to Baghdad. It was just one of many Shi'ite exterminations that Qusay ordered or personally performed in 1991, the ex-officer told TIME. The same source, one of Qusay's security commanders, said Qusay, for example, directed the execution of 15 families in Saddam City, a Shi'ite enclave in Baghdad.
His loyalty and ruthlessness proved, Qusay would move on to other assignments. He became commander of the Republican Guard and head of the Special Security Organization, which was part secret police, part security detail for Saddam and part umbrella group for his elite military forces. Before the regime collapsed, Qusay was widely regarded as the second most powerful man in Iraq.