Damned French wizards!
Sorcerer describes Saddam as obsessed with magic
Associated Press
HEET, IRAQ--The wrinkled old man sprays perfume around the sparse, dingy room, then holds out his hands and feet and instructs one of his visitors to tie him up, knot the cloth three times and blow on it.
The lights die and small red flashes go off beneath the black cloak that covers a bowl of magic powders and water. The visitors feel pokes and jabs and things fluttering over their heads in the darkness -- "birds," the wizard says. Water splashes from the bowl.
The genies have arrived, and the questions begin.
Will Saddam be found? A genie answers in the old man's voice: "Yes."
Dead or alive? "Dead."
And the $25 million question: Where is he? "Dhuluaiyah," he says. Dhuluaiyah is a village 55 miles north of Baghdad.
Thousands of magicians, fortunetellers and faith healers make up a huge world of Iraqi spirituality that thrives despite being considered by many Muslims to be sinful.
But this man is different. He was Saddam's own sorcerer, and therefore, for Iraqis his visions of the dictator's demise carry special weight.
The sorcerer asks that he not be identified, and won't even pronounce the name of the man he once served.
"That man is still alive, so I'm afraid," he says. "I helped him, his sons, his ministers, his wife, his cousins, but I can't mention names. When he is dead I can talk about him."
According to the magician and several others interviewed in Baghdad, Saddam was a firm believer in magic, and even applied himself, with modest success, to "studying the sands" and summoning genies.
He consulted frequently with two magicians from Iraq, one from Turkey, one from India, a French Arab and a beautiful Jewish witch from Morocco, the wizard says.
Saddam is still protected, he says, by a pair of magic-infused golden statues. The deposed president speaks daily with the king and queen of genies, the same ones who provided the information on his whereabouts.
Saddam's oppressive rule actually made the magicians stronger, academics say.
"When you are weak, when you are oppressed, where can you go? You can't go outside. You go inside yourself," says al-Haareth Hassan al-Asadi, who studies parapsychology at Baghdad University. "You stimulate the superstitious part of your psyche, which is there innately."
It was Saddam himself who ordered the parapsychology department set up to help him wage psychological warfare during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and later to mind-read U.N. inspectors searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, according to former Iraqi officials.
Al-Asadi reckons more than half of Iraq's 24 million people use some sort of magic, and a tour of magicians in Baghdad bears out his words.
Unannounced storefronts across Iraq boast a rich array of psychics, fortunetellers, healers and spellmasters, most of whom invoke the Islamic, Christian and even Jewish holy books in their bids to control the genies, or spirits, that many Iraqis believe rule their lives.
Khalifa Ahmed al-Duleimi, 53, combines spiritual healing and diatribes against the Jews, whom he says have sent Israel-educated genies to control President Bush.
Abbas Abdullah, 42, walks in to complain that after 1-1/2 years of marriage, his wife, Zeyneb Fadel, 31, doesn't like him anymore. Abdullah pushes her onto a chair and tells al-Duleimi to exorcise the genie, a Jew, of course, that is competing for her affection.
Al-Duleimi screams Quranic verses into Fadel's ear, converses with the genie inside and beats her with a rubber hose. Abdullah, clearly thrilled, yells at the genie inside his wife: "Get out or I'll pour boiling water over you!"
Zeyneb, her face swollen from tears and pain, confesses quietly to a journalist: "I don't like my husband."
Saddam's wizard is in a different category. He has been studying magic since he was 10, learning from his aunt's husband. Now 62, he is one of the most revered magicians in Iraq.
He shows visitors a guest book of other powerful clients: a Saudi prince who paid 20,000 riyals, or about $75,000, for a spell to make a woman love him; a Jordanian businessman who wanted his daughter to divorce her abusive husband; a Syrian singer who wanted more success.
For Saddam's family, he dealt mostly with issues of love, faithfulness and sexual prowess.
He occasionally dabbled in politics as well. But his last attempt to advise Saddam on strategy, just before the war, met with failure.
"I told him through (his son) Qusai's assistant that he faced great dangers in the war," he says. "I told him that for a Rolls-Royce and 100 million dinars ($59,000) I would give him the specifics. I would show it to them on the wall before it happened, but they just laughed. Qusai said the old man had gone crazy."
"I only wanted 100 million dinars," the wizard says, then begins to sway his hips in a clumsy rendition of a sexy dance. "That's what they gave their belly dancers."
As for the magician's information about Saddam's whereabouts, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the coalition commander in Iraq, laughs when told about it. But he notes the name of the town and says he'll order a raid.
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