Arab News

BAGHDAD, 28 June 2003 — Mohammad Saeed Al-Sahaf’s surprise re-emergence has stunned Iraqis, although many joked that Saddam Hussein’s famed wartime “lying machine” who appeared with his hair turned white was “his older brother.” Sahaf’s reappearance on two Arab television channels late Thursday was the talk of the town yesterday, even though many Iraqis could not watch the broadcasts because of power cuts and not having access to satellite TV.

Clients at the Hajj Ali cafe froze in silence and abandoned their domino games at the news of Sahaf’s first appearance since dropping out of sight after US-led forces captured Iraq on April 9, ending Saddam’s 24-year rule. The former information minister, who gained world fame for upbeat assessments of the military situation on the eve of the collapse of the regime that were in stark contrast with developments on the ground, came across as a subdued version of his old self, looking thinner and with his hair turned white.

“He looked like an older version of the once almighty minister. He looked much thinner, more tired and his hair is now all white,” said Wissam Al-Ani, who runs the downtown Hajj Ali cafe. “He aged in two months. It’s like it is his older brother,” said Ani, who like many Iraqis, was used to having members of the collapsed regime, including Saddam, use look-alike doubles for security reasons.

Ageing cafe-goer Ahmed Jassem said it proved Sahaf did “not have the means to import expensive hair dying products. We all lived in poverty at the time Saddam’s people abused public money.

“I am happy to see him without his hair dyed. He now looks more normal and serene. It is as if he removed the ugly mask of the Saddam regime,” he added. Various rumors had circulated about Sahaf’s whereabouts, with some saying he had fled to neighboring Syria, others insisting he was at the Iranian Embassy and most believing he was at his sister’s house in Baghdad.

Sahaf confirmed press reports that he had been detained and interrogated by US coalition forces before being released. He is not on the list of the 55 Iraqis most wanted by the United States. “Sahaf was not really close to Saddam. He was aggressive with people, but was not known to have taken part in the horrible crimes of the former regime,” said taxi driver Qazem Ali Hussein.

During the war, Sahaf won fans worldwide for his in-your-face defiance of the US, forcing many to search in dictionaries for the meaning of words rarely used in Arabic to insult the Americans.

The most famous such expression was “uluj”, the subject of differing definitions on Arab TV shows with meanings including nonbelievers, strongly-built air-headed people, blood-sucking creatures and wild animals. The word “uluj” has today become a common reference by the Iraqis to the Americans.

But if Sahaf was a popular figure during the war, many Iraqis now denounce him, in the words of grocer Abdel Hussein Al-Shummari, as being “as big a liar as the Americans who said they were coming to liberate us when they were just coming to steal our oil and left our country in complete chaos. “At first we believed him, but then we saw that he continued to say that the ‘uluj are not in Baghdad,’ when in fact we were watching them in Baghdad with our own eyes,” he added.