Their hated father is hunted and in hiding. Their husbands are gone: Two were shot to death long ago at the behest of their father; the third—the ‘‘loyal’’ one—is now in the custody of US officials. The palaces where they once lived in grandeur have been blasted by US bombs. Now, their brothers are dead. In Baghdad, Iraqis took to the streets to rejoice over the deaths of Saddam Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusay. And so Saddam’s three daughters—Raghad, Rana and Hala—hide. And wait. Uday and Qusay were known worldwide for the horrors. The sisters, though, are a different story. They mostly lived in the background while their father and brothers committed terrible crimes. According to a telephone interview Raghad gave to The Times of London in mid-June, she and Rana and their children fled Baghdad the day the city fell but remained in the country in an undisclosed location. Hala, the youngest of the sisters, is hiding elsewhere with her children. Her husband, Gen Kamal Mustafa Abdallah Sultan al-Tikriti, was No. 10 on the list of Iraq’s 55 most wanted. He surrendered to US forces on May 17. Both of Saddam’s wives also are believed to be in hiding. ‘‘Once Baghdad fell it was all so quick, all the family went our own ways,’’ Raghad said. She described how she and Rana feared being killed by US missiles the night the war began. Their life in seclusion was far different from what she was accustomed to as Saddam’s daughter, she said. ‘‘I spend my days cooking typical Iraqi food, washing dishes, doing housework, laundry,’’ she said. ‘‘I do things I never did in the past.’’ The relationship between father and daughters is a twisted one. Raghad and Rana married brothers who once held prominent places in Saddam’s regime. They were later killed at the behest of their father-in-law. Andrew Cockburn and Patrick Cockburn in the 1999 book, Out of the Ashes: The Resurrection of Saddam Hussein, write that Raghad and Rana, ‘‘once Saddam’s favourite children, never forgave him for the killings. They assumed he had orchestrated the attack. They continued to live with their . children in a family house in Tikrit, never going out, always wearing black, and refusing to see any member of their family apart from their mother.’’ (LAT-WP)
