(4 of 9)
Uday held less impressive posts. Apart from heading the Olympic Committee, he supervised various Iraqi media outlets and oversaw the Fedayeen Saddam, a ragtag band of armed militants, mostly ex-felons, that eventually became part of Saddam's security apparatus. Whereas Qusay would icily and efficiently murder for his father to further a political aim, his brother pursued a brand of terror that was personal, arbitrary and spontaneous. He was a threat to any father whose daughter might cross his path, to the women themselves, even to his own friends, who, it turns out, were subjected to torture and humiliation at his hands just as his perceived enemies were.
Uday demonstrated an insatiable sexual appetite. Five nights a week, some two dozen girls, all of them referred to him by his friends, were taken to the posh Baghdad Boat Club on the bank of the Tigris to meet Uday, close associates of his confirm. After drinks, music and dancing, the young women would be lined up like beauty queens for Uday's approval, and all but one or two would be dismissed. Those who stayed would join Uday in his bedroom at the club and leave with a gift of 250,000 dinars ($125), gold jewelry or sheer lingerie. "He never slept with a girl more than three times," says a former butler. "He was very picky." Uday took two days a week off from girls. He called it "fasting," his close associates say.
A chef at Baghdad's exclusive Hunting Club recalls a wedding party that Uday crashed in the late 1990s. After Uday left the hall, the bride, a beautiful woman from a prominent family, went missing. "The bodyguards closed all the doors, didn't let anybody out," the chef remembers. "Women were yelling and crying, 'What happened to her?'" The groom knew. "He took a pistol and shot himself," says the chef, placing his forefinger under his chin.
Last October another bride, 18, was dragged, resisting, into a guardhouse on one of Uday's properties, according to a maid who worked there. The maid says she saw a guard rip off the woman's white wedding dress and lock her, crying, in a bathroom. After Uday arrived, the maid heard screaming. Later she was called to clean up. The body of the woman was carried out in a military blanket, she said. There were acid burns on her left shoulder and the left side of her face. The maid found bloodstains on Uday's mattress and clumps of black hair and peeled flesh in the bedroom. A guard told her, "Don't say anything about what you see, or you and your family will be finished."
Although Uday had no children, Qusay's marriage resulted in four kids, and he projected the image of a family man. An officer in the Republican Guard who reported to him says he occasionally took two of his sons to the unit's headquarters. If he didn't have an important meeting, he would sometimes play with them there. Still, Qusay did have mistresses, according to associates. They say he was discreet about them and would return home to his wife every night.