Twice in his life Abdullah Mohammed Hussein, a 57-year-old Kurdish farmer, found himself face to face with Saddam Hussein – and the circumstances of the two encounters could hardly have been more different.
The first came in 1988 when – following the genocidal “Anfal” campaign by the Iraqi army that is held to have killed 180,000 Kurds in the north of the country – he was given a short audience with the dictator to plead for the release of nine missing relatives. The Saddam response was curt, according to the farmer: “Shut up. Your family are gone.”
