BAGHDAD (AP) – Of his countless stories of his life as a hairdresser in Iraq, the one Qaiss al-Sharaa most enjoys retelling is about the day April 9, 2003, when he watched Iraqis pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in front of his salon in Baghdad’s Firdos Square.
The 12-meter (39-foot) statue of the Iraqi dictator extending his right hand had been erected just a year earlier to celebrate his 65th birthday.
“There were lots of younger Iraqis from around the country — who naturally wanted their freedom,” al-Sharaa told The Associated Press. “The statue showed the face of a man everyone feared.”
For the world, it became an iconic moment; live TV coverage as Marines tied the statue to a vehicle to pull the statue down inflated it into a symbol of the end of Saddam’s quarter century rule. In reality, the Firdos Square statue was a minor part of the huge number of monuments and palaces that Saddam erected to show off his power.
All his statues and images are long gone now, 20 years after that day. Many of his palaces and buildings have been repurposed for a new Iraq. But much of the hope that came in wiping away Saddam’s oppressive visual presence has also evaporated, burned away first by years of brutal violence and now by a wrecked economy.
Firdos Square has been refurbished as a small park, funded by private banks.
It’s not known what happened to most of the Saddam statue, but pieces of it were taken away by souvenir hunters.
A group of young U.S. Marines from Utah in 2003 said they sawed off the statue’s right hand and intended to sell it on eBay. But it disappeared from their cargo as they tried to smuggle it home on their military flight back. All they have is the photo they took of themselves holding it like a prized fish.
Saddam’s policy of filling Baghdad and other cities with palaces and statues and portraits of himself “created this image of this leader,” Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House Renad Mansour told the AP. Saddam “needed to project power in different ways to remind the people who was in charge.”