Around the world, shots of American soldiers using a pulley to tear down a six-meter-high statue of Saddam Hussein, and Iraqis dancing on top of an effigy of a man who ruled them with an iron fist for 24 years, went around the world. Previously, they tied a rope around the neck of the statue, trying to destroy it with hammers.

American soldiers briefly covered the statue’s face with an asterisk, a move criticized by the Arab world, but then replaced it with an Iraqi flag. A statue of Saddam was installed in the center of the Iraqi capital in 2001 on the site of a building called the Monument to the Unknown Soldier.

In fact, the statue in Firdous Square was only a small part of the vast array of monuments and palaces that Saddam erected to demonstrate his power. 20 years after his fall, all his statues and images have long since disappeared.

The famous Firdos Square was renovated at the expense of private banks. The building overlooking the square features a large mural depicting Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike in 2020, and Imam Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Similar images are circulating around Baghdad due to the dominance of Iran-backed Shia parties in the country’s government.

It is not known what happened to most of Saddam’s statue, but parts of it have been removed. A group of young US Marines from Utah claimed in 2003 that they sawed off the statue’s right arm and intended to sell it on eBay. However, he disappeared from their cargo when they tried to smuggle him home on the return military flight. All they have is a photo of them holding him as a trophy. In 2016, a German antiquities dealer said he bought Hussein’s left leg and then resold it on eBay for more than $100,000. British journalist Nigel Ely wrote a book in 2017 about a piece of Saddam’s left buttock torn from the statue. He tried to sell it at a charity auction, but the offer was not high enough.

Saddam’s policy of filling Baghdad and other cities with palaces, statues and portraits of himself “created the image of a divine leader,” Chatham House senior fellow Renad Mansour told AP. Saddam “needed to project power in different ways to remind people who was in power.”

Some of Saddam’s iconic monuments remained in place, largely because they had a nationalist meaning beyond his understanding. Still rising above the Tigris River are, for example, the Arch of Victory, an arch formed by two giant hands holding crossed swords, and two large turquoise semi-circular domes called the al-Shahid Monument or Martyrs’ Monument. They were built in 1983 and 1989 respectively to commemorate those killed in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.

Al-Faw Palace was built on an island in the middle of an artificial lake by Saddam in the 1990s to commemorate the wartime recapture of the peninsula of the same name. It was used for the first time since 2003 as the military headquarters of an American coalition called Camp Victory. It was later transformed into the American University in Baghdad with funding from an influential Iraqi businessman.

Source: Associated Press.