145;He could charm, scare people at will146;

When we arrived in Iraq, it was the day he took over as President. We saw 16 people being hanged on that day in the Central Square.

8220;When we arrived in Iraq, it was the day he took over as President. We saw 16 people being hanged on that day in the Central Square. We found a country growing from strength to strength and prosperity but it was too early to judge the kind of person the new President was. Later, we had indications of the things to come.8221;

Air Marshal Tej Mohan Asthana, who rose in the ranks to become India8217;s first nuclear commander in 2003, was part of a training team of 75 Indian Air Force personnel who landed in Baghdad on July 16, 1979, the very day Saddam Hussein assumed power. Asthana8217;s team shifted base to Kut, about 180 km from Baghdad, to train Iraqi cadets on fighters, while another shifted to Tikrit for basic pilot training.

Air Marshal Asthana has, since his return from Iraq 25 years ago, kept in touch with the politics of the country, one that New Delhi had to snap military training ties with four years into the Iran-Iraq war, ending over a decade of Indian training of Iraqi pilots in fighter combat flying.

8220;We never had a chance to meet Saddam, but from what we saw, he had an electric personality. He could charm people or frighten people at will. He travelled in a multitude of vehicles so no one would know which vehicle he sat in. The day he took power, his predecessor Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr disappeared. This was, in one sense, an indication of the things to come,8221; Air Marshal Asthana told The Sunday Express today.

A little over a year later, when the Iran-Iraq broke out, the IAF team was at the H2 airfield close to the Jordanian no-man8217;s land. 8220;We stayed there and hoped nothing would happen, but Iranian bombed the airfield. But under Saddam, the country seemed well-united at the beginning of the war. They were fighting for the same cause,8221; he remembers.

8220;The Iran-Iraq war took us by surprise. Saddam8217;s invasion of Kuwait was just an extention of his expansionist ideal, so there were no surprises there. There was an apparent build-up of Saddam8217;s NBC nuclear biological chemical capability. I was in Baghdad at the time Israel pre-emptively bombed the Osirak reactor. But the 2003 invasion was a big surprise,8221; he said. 8220;I was confident that Iraq was nowhere close to possessing a nuclear weapon. If they did, they would have attacked Israel, I am sure of it.8221;