Behind the Bastards - Part Two: The Worst Team Owner in FIFA History: Uday Hussein

Episode Date: July 9, 2026

Robert concludes the story of Uday Hussein, football team owner with guest Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where the president has just found out about that Republican member of Congress or the member of his administration, not Congress, who's been talking about teleporting places? What's that guy's name? I spaced on him. I just read Trump's reaction where he was like, I don't know. He's talking about teleporting? What?

I got to get to the bottom of that. I haven't heard about that. That's that's kind of crazy. It was a very like normal. It was one of those every now and then you get. those moments where Trump has the same reaction to something as like a normal person and it's just like unaccountably funny because he's clearly just hearing about it and he's like he's saying what teleporting that guy's job he works at like dhs now or something yeah something important

job but he'll teleport to a waffle house if he needs to it's really it's really funny just seeing him react to it just clearly like he's who what does he such a bad man is no especially Because that news was from like a month ago. I feel like I would know if one of my subordinates was claiming to have teleported to a Waffle House. You don't know what I get up to in my spare time? I don't, I don't. But I do know what things you claim to do. I at least pay that much attention.

That's a big thing to miss. But hey, he's got a lot of work to do. He's going to get to the bottom of it. He's going to get to the bottom of it. the war and such. You know, Molly, are you ready to talk about Uday Hussein some more? Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys. Weird Little Guys, Weird Little Guys, Weird Little Guys. I'm excited. Excellent. All right. Let me drink more of my horrible health drink. Yeah, drinking strange colored beverage. Robert's drinking pond water. Yeah, it's from the

Reflecting Pool. Mmm. Orange. Wait, your drink is also funny colored, Molly. No, this is plain water in my favorite cup, which is a blue jar. Oh, that is weird. That's upsetting. I don't believe jars should be blue. It's beautiful. Yeah, I don't like that. Yeah, if God wanted jars to be blue, that color would occur in nature.

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It's about the hang. It's the pleasure of hanging out with the people that you're with. You know, Rob and I was always a great hang. Director Morgan Neville. Film School teaches you all the wrong things about making documentary. What do you want to say? Documentary is all by your ear. What do you hear?

I feel like my job is listening really, really hard. Listen to Here's the Thing on the IHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. At the time of Iraq's first World Cup appearance, Uday Hussein was president of the Iraqi Olympic Committee, a job he had received at age 20 and head of the Iraqi foot. Football Association. He was also the owner of Al Rashid, Iraq's premier football club. Their team gets to play in the Iraqi Stars League, which is the highest division in the country. And since Al Rashid was the most prominent club and Uday also ran the Olympic team, this

meant that from age 20 on, Uday is basically dictator of football in Iraq, right? Like he's an even if you're not on his team, if he's not your direct boss, he basically runs how football works in the whole country, right? He's the football. He's the football czar. He's the football czar. Yes, Saddam made his son the football czar. His son who, again, does not particularly care for football.

This would be a dream job for someone who liked the sport. It's not like he grew up playing or like it was an aspiring player. He does not appear to have any interest in this. He just sort of parked him here. It's just kind of the job he wound up with. Like, it's different from all of the other nepotism cases like this and that Ude does not really seem to want to run a football team. He could have made him a general or put him in charge of, like, health care. the other things he'd rather be doing, but he sucks at all of them.

Infrastructure project. Didn't he get a degree in engineering? He could have made a... Yeah, but I don't think that was a real degree, Molly. He didn't go to real school. He has other people doing his classwork for him. But he could have at least parked in infrastructure. I'm not going to...

Saddam was not overall a responsible man, but you could argue that putting Uday in charge of the football team was like the least damage he could do. It was harm reduction. Right? Yeah. Like, if this guy gets... is involved anywhere in, like, the power grid? We're going to have problems.

So we don't know precisely what Uday did to the national team after what he considered to be their failure at the World Cup. But there are suggestions that he began torturing his players around this time. Rod Hamoudi, one of his best players, retired the next year, which is kind of like sometimes seen as a sign that that's probably why, that, like, Rod retires early, which is really weird. And maybe it's because after this defeat, Uday fucked him up. It wasn't a chill vibe anymore. Yeah, I don't want to be in, this is football. I don't want to be in this kind of football.

Uday had his people construct a series of red rooms, what they called red rooms in Iraqi state sporting facilities. These were places where players who failed during important points in games or training or otherwise irritated Ude could be sent and punished. Depending on the trespass in question, this could vary from mere threats. Ude was particularly known to threaten to chop people's legs off. That was like one of his go-toos for whatever reason. No, that's not going to improve their ability. I don't think he ever did this. This appeared.

There was just something he would repeatedly threaten. He may have had some legs broken, though. He would also. That was also not improve your soccer playing. Not going to help. He would also threaten to, like, feed pieces of players to dogs, you know. And he would also use dogs or threaten to use dogs to abuse them. the beatings into this?

I don't know how often he actually had the dogs maim them because he usually didn't hurt them all that badly because again they are still playing. But when he would beat them like... There are ways you can punish people that won't make them less able to play soccer. Yeah, and I do think most of these are like

threats of the crazier stuff because when it talks about the actual beatings that, I mean, it's usually most of the claims that Uday ordered people to do these beatings. Some accounts will say that Uday participated in torture. some accounts will say he never did.

I don't actually know which is true, but I think he generally, at least generally, these are people who are working for him doing the torture. And they're administering, usually the way they're physically punishing these guys is whipping them with electric cables, right? Like that's kind of the go-to physical punishment, at least initially here. Why not make them run laps?

They do that too, but that's not really torture. That's just like normal workout stuff. I mean, you can do it in a way that's abusive, certainly, but that's not going to satisfy a guy like Uday. He is alleged, and there's, I mean, they did find, you know, the, like the Iron Maiden, that thing where it's like this big metal coffin, you put someone in that's got spikes on the inside that you can screw into them. They didn't find one of those at a facility that was supposed to have been Uday's. Like, there are accusations that he was really into that, like specifically into like old-timey torture techniques again.

It's kind of hard to tell how much of this is literally true. Because I don't, I've never run any accounts of him actually that are of any detail of him iron maidening somebody to death. Maybe he just had one because it looked scary. Right, he was just an enthusiast. He may have been, he may have iron maiden people to death who weren't on the team. I just haven't heard of him doing that to team members, you know? Or maybe, yeah, maybe he never got around to it yet. You know, it's like his unpainted models.

It was for show. Or whatever in the corner, right? Because creativity is kind of what gives life its zest, Uday took to experimenting, or at least having his torturers experiment over time, as the early methods of violence did not improve the team's functioning. He found that in time whipping people bloody with an electric cable was fun, but what really took things up a notch was afterwards if you would throw them into like a pit filled with sewage, you know, then you could really mess people up. They get these horrific infections and stuff. And that makes them better at soccer. Yeah, that definitely helps their game, is giving them fucking staff infections. The red rooms, I think as far as I can tell, probably got their name, both for, like, the obvious reason and also as a reference to the red cards that are thrown out in football games when a player makes, like, a penalty.

And if you're not aware of sports, right? A penalty shot is one of those moments in competitive sports where everything comes down to the actions. a single player, right? If you get to take a penalty shot, no one else is kind of, it's just, can you make this shot, right, as an individual player? This means that one person is to blame if a penalty shot is missed. And because people who fail on the Iraqi football team get beaten and tortured, most members of Al Rashid started refusing to take penalty shots because you can't be like, oh, but that wasn't my fault, it was this guy or it was I didn't get the ball in tight, right? Like, everyone watched you fail to make that shot.

And so nobody's willing to do it. Eventually they only have like three guys on the team who are willing to actually take penalty shots. And these are brave men. One of them was Abbas Rahim Zaire. He told the Guardian, many of the footballers refused to even touch the ball. But then we realized that if no one accepted, we would all be punished. So Zaire basically agrees to be one of the guys who will make penalty shots so that they don't all get tortured. It's the only way to deal with that.

In one game, Zaire attempts a penalty shot and misses. Two days later, when the team returned home to Baghdad, he was ordered to show up at the Olympic Committee headquarters, which had become Uday's lair, complete with a basement, torture chamber. Per the Guardian, he was blindfolded and taken away to a prison camp for three weeks. He shrugged. End of story. That's him, like, talking to the reporter there. That he doesn't want to talk about having the prison camp.

I do have some details from other people what happens at the prison camps. So getting a penalty was just as bad, if not worse, than failing at a penalty shot, right? If you fail at a shot, you're going to get tortured because you didn't make a point when you could have. If you do a penalty and the other team gets to make a penalty shot, you're going to be punished for giving them, you know, that point, basically, right? Being the goalie has got to be a bad, just the worst position on the team. On the team under Udei's sake. Goali is one of the only positions on the team where, again, like, it's like the penalty shot where, It's on you.

It's all on you. You let the ball with. There's a lot of opportunities for you to be the guy who gets the blame. That's obviously not fair, but like that's how it's going to be looked at by fucking Uday. I wouldn't want to be, I wouldn't want to be Uday's goalie. I would not want to be the goalie under Ude Hussain. So that piece in the Guardian describes what happened to Yasser Abdul Latif, former team captain in 2000,

after he was accused of hitting the referee during a club match in Baghdad. Quote, he was taken to the Radwanya prison camp on the edges of the capital and confined to a cell two meters square with a tiny window high in the wall. His head and eyebrows were shaved and he was stripped to the waist. He was in order to perform press-ups for two hours. Three guards flogged him with links of electric cables

spelling off when their arms grew tired. The torture continued in two-hour sets with an hour's break in between and the beatings grew more savage as Lateef tired. The only relief, if it could be called that, came when he was let outdoors into the winter cold and doused in freezing water. I don't know that that's...

I mean, you shouldn't put your hands. hands on the ref. Is that help with their football? You shouldn't put your hands on the ref. But I don't think that's a fair punishment. I think, obviously, it's bad to put your hands on the ref. That seems outside of the... It wants a red card, for sure. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. A red card, maybe. Perhaps not... Maybe a five-match ban, depending on what you did to the refpped for days in a cell. That's, I think it's extreme. Did he rejoin the team after this, or was that kind of it for him? No, no, he stays back on the team. It is, it takes more... He notes in his interview.

First off, he's in that prison camp for two weeks. He goes through this for two straight weeks. And it's more than it takes. Well, first, it takes a month before he can even sleep on his back again. But yes, after he recovers, he goes back to play for the team. And this is what he said, because the guardian asks him basically what you did. They're like, you went back. And he says, I guess he didn't have a choice.

Yeah, that's what he says. I never had any choice. They threatened me. If I didn't participate in the team, they said they would beat me again and again. and consider me an enemy of the regime, and that would mean death. Again, he doesn't have. I guess he was really good at soccer, unfortunately for him. Yeah, I mean, it's also probably hard to find, like, after a while, you would stop wanting

other people to know you were good at soccer in Iraq. You would not put your kids in youth soccer for sure. Yeah, I might avoid that for my kids. You're not playing pickup games. Yeah. So the power and money Uday got from his position and from being able to torture people were far more of his passion than, you know, football. Most people who knew him will note that he wasn't a big sports guy and hadn't cared about the national team until Saddam told him, hey, you can win my approval if you avoid fucking that up.

The Guardian's reporting notes that in order to burnish his team's performance, he quote, kept a private torture scorecard with written instructions on how many times each player should be beaten on the souls of his feet after a particularly poor showing. And you'll find allegations like that repeated by numerous sources, where some differ is in whether or not Ude participated in the torture himself or what. was just a fastidious manager. Now, the team coach for most of this time was Emmanuel Baba Dabud, better known as Amo Baba. He's a fucking cool guy, Ammo Baba, like Ammo, like Bullets, Baba. Cool nickname. Yeah, very cool nickname. Amo was a former footballer himself.

He'd been a star in the 1950s during the Iraqi team's early days of glory. And he became the team coach in 1978. Again, when I said probably the reason why the team performed so well Uday's first couple years in charge is because a better, a really good coach had started a couple years earlier. Because he's letting a professional do it. Right. Baba Amo starts working there in 1978. By the time Uday comes in four to five years later or whatever, he's gotten the team like into a really good position, right? So because Amo is so clearly good at his job, he is beloved by Iraqis. And that means he's one of the few people with some clout. He's able to resist Uday on occasion without getting murdered, right? Because Uday

can't quite murder him. in public, right? You can't mess with a good thing. Yeah, and they do argue a lot. Uday doesn't know shit about football. So the two have like screaming fights with some regularity. Sophie's going to show you a picture of Ammo Baba, by the way. This guy looks fucking awesome.

Yeah, look at him in his fucking Puma. He's so cool. He's wearing his fucking Puma track suit. He's clearly, yeah, Puma track suit, fucking like black, dark Einstein almost styled hair. Like, he's so cool looking. I can't believe he's not smoking. He looks like he should. should be smoking.

What a fantastic... That's Grandpa Munster. What a fantastic nose this man has. He's getting an amazing nose. He's so cool looking. I love him. I love him so much. I'm so sad that he had to deal with Ude.

You're going to love Ammo more because Ammo Baba's fucking cool. Here's how Justin Sherman describes Ammo for these football times. Quote, Baba's outspoken nature against Uday would garner admiration and cult-like devotion for many Iraqis, effectively shielding him from being killed because of the unrest it would unleash through the story. streets. Still, his lofty status could not always protect him, as Ude once personally beat him in front of 50,000 spectators at the Al-Shab International Stadium. He talked nonsense, Baba recalled about Ude. I told him to go to hell. I said he knew nothing about football. How did I survive?

Because the people loved me. So cool. So, you know, I've been watching the World Cup and I keep telling my husband, you know, like, because one of the first matches we watched, there were like an insane number of red cards, like a record number of red cards. And I was saying like, it's kind of, it's kind of more fun. It's a little bit more fun when it gets a little testy. People are pushing the show a little bit. I take it back. I take it back. I don't want to see that. I don't want to see the manager of the team flog the coach on the field. Log the coach in front of 50,000 people. And Ammo basically just stands there. And I was like, all right, if you're going to beat me, just beat me, you know? Like, he's so fucking cool. You're the one who

looks stupid. This guy is so cool. I cannot exaggerate how chill Ammo Baba seems. At least how chilly he comes across. That's the right attitude to bring to the beating. Like, you're the one who looks foolish here, bud. Yeah, you're the one who's losing control and being an asshole in public, you know? So, by the way, I also figure, since we just saw M.O. Baba, I should show you a picture at this point of the big guy, Saddam Hussein, and his oldest son Uday together. This is from around the time we're talking about. This would be like the 80s somewhere around then.

Yeah, they're handsome guys. Look at them. Look at them. Look at them. They've got matching mustaches. He looks so happy. Honestly, Uday's is a little whiter than his dad's. You know, it's a little exaggerated.

It's kind of like out. It's a little much. I think he's trying to make his dad proud. You know, you can definitely tell Saddam's the novelist of the two, you know. He has that novelist's eyes. I like that shirt, though. Oh, yeah, Saddam's. It looks great.

Yeah. He always looked good. God, he's handsome. I just want to go on record that I do not think Stambeckin's handsome. It's just a bit, it's just. a joke. So there's this, yeah, no, I won't tell that Saddam Hussein's story yet. One day, one day. So that same year, Uday made what many regime watchers would argue was his biggest mistake. This is 1988. So Kamal Hana Zajajou was Saddam Hussein's official food taster and valet. This is basically his body man, you know? Jajos is the guy Saddam always once in the room with him, right? And if when you're Saddam, that means something, right? This guy's in a dude who has like a high official rank, but he gets a lot of time with the boss, and the boss genuinely cares about him. So, Zajou is about as close to Saddam as anyone can be, and arguably closer to him than his

fuck-up fail son Uday, because Saddam doesn't want Uday around him all day, right? He wants Joshua in the room. This is the Iraqi equivalent of that young woman who prints off articles from the Internet for Trump. That's exactly right. And just as Trump clearly likes her more than all, both of his sons put together, both of his older sons put together. Saddam clearly likes Joshua a lot more than Ude, which may have been why Ude hated him. So the following story that I'm about to relate took place during a party at an island

resort after a dinner to honor the wife of Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's president at the time. So there's this big diplomatic event between Iraq and Egypt and they're having a party at this island resort, and that's when this all happens. And I'm going to quote now from 2003, nothing good happens on an island. Nothing good happens in an island party. Resort party, no. With the, president of Egypt and Iraq? No. It's not going to be. Something weird's going on already. Something bad. It's going to happen. So this is from a 2003 LA Times article.

According to the most widely accepted account, a large group of Hussein's bodyguards had gathered for their own party on the island while the state dinner was taking place. They were firing weapons in the air in celebration, and Zajo reportedly refused Uday's order to stop. So Uday killed him. Furious, Hussein jailed his eldest son and vowed to prosecute him to the fullest extent of the law. It was only after a letter, purportedly written by Zajo's father and published in the state media,

asked that Uday be forgiven that Hussein freed him and sent him to Switzerland, less than 60 days after his imprisonment. So this is when a lot of people will say Uday stops being the heir apparent. Because he killed his dad's favorite friend. He killed his dad's best buddy, yeah. Kind of his dad's surrogate son. That'll do it. That will mess it up for you. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of psychology there, right?

Like, he just wants his dad to love him and he can't. Yep, yep, yeah. He wants to follow his dad's footsteps. This sort of this equivalent of the Secret Service, right? Like, they're getting drunk and using their weapons improperly. It's just like, shooting off guns, absolutely. You know, we're all the same all the world over. It sounds just like the American Secret Service.

If I was the elite guard or hell, if I was like the president at a fucking big political event like this, I would want to shoot off guns. afterwards just to blow off some steam. They can't stop. It's just nice to know that people are the same everywhere. Yeah. That is something we haven't had happen yet as a country is like at a diplomatic event, the president just going to a secret service guy being like, give me a machine gun.

I just want to fire off a few rounds into the dirt. We don't know that doesn't happen at Camp David. Yeah, I, yeah, yeah, I'd love to see it. Why not? America's not doing so so hot. We could use something lighter, something fun, the president firing a machine gun blindly at a diplomatic dinner in Switzerland, you know? Why not? I guess the Swiss probably don't want that to happen.

Speaking of the Swiss, as punishments go, being forced to live in Switzerland with millions of dollars isn't that bad, right? Today is not in a terrible situation. I would love that punishment. Yes. I think we'll all take exile in Switzerland with millions of dollars as a punishment if it's on the table. But take me. One of the downsides is, Swiss law doesn't really care if you're some two-bit dictator's son, right? Maybe if you're like a high-grade dictator's son, you can get away with a lot in Switzerland.

I mean, how many millions? You got to have a lot more than a few million, right? If you want to get that kind of preferential treatment, you know, you're not as Uday. You're not going to walk around breaking Swiss laws without consequences unless you pay some pretty hefty bribes at a high level. And shortly after. You can't be serial raping. No. And in Uday's case, it's even, I mean, thankfully it's not that bad, although who knows. But like, not long after he moves to Geneva, he gets into a fist fight with a cop at a bar. And his dad makes him jump home and marry the daughter of one of his friends. Fist fight with a cop and a bar. I mean, you're just making him sound relatable.

This does sound cool. And you know who else got into a fist fight with a cop at a bar recently? Certainly not me. Nope, but the sponsors of our podcast did. Each and every one of them. Whoever comes up to advertise next on this show just staggered out of a bar with the blood of a police lieutenant on their hands. And it might be the next ad, the Portland Police Bureau or the Washington State Highway Patrol. We don't know. Whoever it is, they just assaulted an officer.

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Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered, sentences and paragraphs about enlightenment ideas, deals does also have this darker history to it. Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence in the American Revolution? Why is it important that Americans know about it?

Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself. I'm Rebecca Nagel. Gohyn, Tao a don't jaleike y'etliqa. citizen of Cherokee Nation. Are you guys big Chiefs fans? Hell yeah. This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be,

and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So Uday's forced home. His dad makes him marry, the daughter of one of his buddies. And this is not a love match, to say the least. Uday's wife leaves him after just a few months complaining that he'd started beating her. So when Saddam invaded Kuwait in night, yeah, yeah, oh, shocking.

Yeah, I don't have any trouble believing that. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, Uday was not in a great position within the regime. He's not super high up. And some sources I've read will say that Uday's body double at the time was made to, like, pose at the front in and around combat positions to make it look like Uday was participating in stuff. But that said, most of those accounts come from the body double that we heard from earlier, Latif Yahya. The guy making things up. The guy making things up a lot, right? Now, I don't, Uday doesn't, I don't have any evidence that he did anything meaningful during the invasion either.

I'm not saying that. Just like Latif exaggerates and lies constantly. Now, if you, as I mentioned earlier, grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, you know that Saddam Hussein was infamous for his use of body doubles. This was a cause of much hilarity in popular media. the time and contributed somewhat, I think, to the sheer glee with which Hollywood movies post-desert Storm love to feature characters dressed like Saddam Hussein. You know, think of fucking the Big Lebowski, right? Fucking a Saddam impersonator shows up in that.

There's like a weird number of like Saddam's that you run into in like 90s movies and some early 2000s movies. Very much a part of our consciousness. Yeah, and some of it's just, you know, Saddam Hussein Desert Storm had happened. He was like a major bad guy in the American public consciousness. but somebody I think is all these gleeful stories of Saddam lookalikes. Definitely, I think, fueled some of that. Now, I want to do something, a dedicated thing on Saddam and his body doubles,

because there's shockingly little real evidence behind a lot of the claims about his body doubles. Again, I don't doubt that he had people impersonate him for security purposes, but yeah. Is this really sort of seeded into our consciousness, this idea that all of these world leaders have all these bodies? It's like a big Qadon psychosis, right? that all these people have body doubles. Is that where this comes from? That those body doubles are people living like whole lives as this person and like they have all these restrictions in place and they're constantly watched.

As opposed to like, well, whenever we're traveling with the president, we make sure there's a couple guys who kind of look like him from behind if you like drape like a coat over him. So if we think there might be a shooter, we can like run this guy out who looks like the president and maybe they take a shot at him, but it's just guards, you know, and then we can deal. Like I think that happens a lot. stuff like that probably, but the crazy stories you hear about these like harems of body doubles of Saddam, these like gangs of them, I think are mostly fantasies. Just like a Love Island mansion full of Saddam's.

Right. Yeah, too many Saddam's. Now, Uday is also famously alleged to have had a body double. And by that, I mean, he is alleged to have had several, but the guy everybody knows is Latif Yahya. And Latif's claim is that he knew Uday in grade schools we talked about, and people had commented how much they looked alike. And then, you know, years go by.

And in 1987, Yaya has been drafted and he's fighting in the Arana Iraq War. And he's somewhere near the front in 1987 when he gets recalled to Baghdad and he finds himself sitting in a palace. In Yaya's book, The Devil's Double, here's how he described a meeting with Ude Hussein that, again, probably didn't happen. He tells his old school buddy that he wants to take him away from the front and make him his fidet, which is a word that means double. although per Yahya's book, a Fadé is more than a mere double. A Faday is everything. In Arab culture,

Faday means disciple, a fighter and a partisan, a serf who must always be prepared to give his life up for his master. I have seen so many different news articles, quote him, saying this. I don't think that, I haven't found any other writing

about a Fidé, at least not under the way it's spelled in this. I've never heard of this concept. I think he's kind of making it up that this is like a prominent concept in Arabic culture? I haven't found that. If he knows he's speaking to an audience that doesn't speak any Arabic language and

before it was easy to Google things. He could just be making it up and assuming you'll never know. I'm not going to say I've asked anybody who would be a comprehensive, but no one I've talked to was familiar with this concept. And I couldn't just Google around, searching around, find anyone. But, yeah, yeah, talking about this apparently universal Arabic social role of the Faday, which he's like, every, all of our great kingdoms had this. And I was like, I don't know, man.

Really? Because I, you're the only one talking about it that I'm finding. Maybe I'm missing a bunch of shit because it's just not written in English. But like, I did try to account for that. And I didn't run into fucking anything. So, whatever. When he was released, Yahya says, he was given a choice, serve Uday as doppelganger or have his family murdered and his sisters raped.

Per an article in the independent. Yeah, to give you an idea on how this, this. this story that's fanciful is reported on by credible seeming papers. Here's how the independent in an article by Jerome Taylor reported on all this. After rounds of plastic surgery, the transformation was complete. Mr. Yaya said that between 1987 and 1991, he was witnessed to some of Uday's worst excesses, his prowls through Baghdad at night looking for women to rape, his drug abuse, violent outbursts, and penchant for torture.

He also claims to have survived, 12 attempted assassinations. Mr. Yaya thought of escaping only after Ude, angry that a girlfriend. had started to openly flirt with the doppelganger, tried to shoot him. Mr. Yaya claims he fled to Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq and later to Austria with the help of the CIA. Again, I don't have any like outside evidence other than this guy's claims of any of that, any of that shit. I would need a second source on some of that. I would need a second source and there just isn't. And there are a couple of journalists who like looked into this and tried to.

And like everyone who's investigated this has been like I have found. no evidence to corroborate any aspect of his story. That said, his story was eventually... And it's like, you don't need to embell. It's like we know he's torturing. We know he's raping. Right. You know he's a bad guy.

You don't need to spice it up. But this guy, I mean, there was money in it for Yaya, I think. But I don't know fully why he did what he did, although that's my guess, because he was eventually portrayed in a film adaptation of his book, also called The Devil's Double. Dominique Cooper played Ude Hussain and Latif Yaya. Yeah. Oh, wow. Yeah, we only need one actor. Of course. Yeah. Dominant. Right. Of course. That makes it efficient. Foreign press loved talking to Latif in the years between the Gulf War and the 2003 invasion. And he always wove a good yarn. But he was also obviously lying about a ton of it. And again, I will say for his part, he always says, I was actually against the Iraq war. He would say, I'd ever wanted the U.S. to invade because I knew that would make things worse. He just, I think, was trying to monetize off the fact that Saddam Hussein was like the famous bad guy. in Western society for a while, right?

And the network news loves to have a guy on that will always say yes and will always say something crazy. Exactly, exactly. So British journalist Ed Caesar finally actually interrogated Yaya in the early 2000s after years of him making these claims, not with minimal pushback. And he found no evidence to support Yaya's claims to have worked as a body double for Uday. Again, there, yeah, there is some evidence that he was tied. some regime attempts to maybe, like, there's some sketchy stuff people have alleged he may have

been involved in. We'll talk about that all at a later day. What I want to talk about next is everyone's favorite U.S. military adventure, the Gulf War, right? So 1990, Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait and the subsequent international response led to the United States is a disaster for Saddam's military and regime. Uday had to endure the years of sanctions that followed, although he would ultimately profit mightily as a result of some of the different like programs that were put in place. I think oil for food is one of them. Like he's like everyone who's tight and high up in the regime going to take advantage of all of this to make money for himself. But this isn't like a great time for him or his dad or his brother, right?

The immediate years after the Gulf War. Things are very messy for the Hussein. It's not as bad they're going to be. Right. Now Uday's personal situation within the regime is worsened by the fact that. as the 90s went on, it's become increasingly clear to everyone that Coussay is going to be the era parent, right? That's got a hurt. Now, Saddam's, he's younger enough that Saddam learned from his mistakes.

He raised a somewhat jindler son. Gouzae still does some violent stuff, but not as, like, uncontrollably and not in a way that's, like, bad and dangerous for the regime. You know, he's able to like... And learning that he's been passed over is definitely going to improve his behavior, right? He's going to start behaving better. He's going to be a lot nicer guy now. Yeah. He's going to be normal now.

Yeah, Cousay is just kind of like a much steadier guy. And he's also like a planner, right? While Uday is torturing soccer players, Cousay is taking control of Iraq's intelligence apparatus and the Republican Guard. It's elite internal paramilitary force. And the fact that Saddam gives him – it gives you an idea of like how Saddam views his sons that he's like, yeah, you can keep running the football team that sucks now since you took over. But CUSA gets like the CIA, basically. Yeah. Basically.

Yeah. Oh, man. So he still got soccer, though, like through the 90s. He still got football soccer. So he's, maybe he's getting better at it, right? Like, I mean, he didn't start out knowing anything about soccer. But he's been in charge of soccer for 20 years. Did he ever learn?

Yeah, yeah. Is he getting better? There's not much evidence of that. There's not much evidence of that, right? Now, because I am not a rube, I'm always careful when trying to validate stories of horrors in Saddam's Iraq, not. not because it wasn't replete with them, but again, because of all the disinformation that's out there, in part by, like, angry dissidents who wanted to encourage U.S. intervention against Saddam. One reason that I feel comfortable saying all of the specific stuff with the football team actually happened is that

the sources on this are a ton of Iraqi pro-socker players, like a bunch of their best former football players have all talked about being tortured by Uday Hussein. So I assume this is all true, right? And I'm sure in some of these cases, they would really want to be doing that in this case. Yeah, and there's some people who had injuries and stuff. And torture equipment was found in a lot of the, like, we found physical evidence of this stuff. Right. So this isn't some unnamed teacher who allegedly died in an unnamed way at an unnamed time. Exactly. This is somebody saying, this happened to me and here is my scholar.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. We're going to hear from them now. So one of these players was Sharrar Haidar Mohamed al-Hadithi. He was a top-level player in Iraq who did well enough that he got to represent. represent the country international on several special teams, including during the 1988 Olympics. Per an article I found in an archive from the September 11th, 1999 edition of the mirror, quote, he says he was hit repeatedly. The 9-11 here is incidental. And this is also 1999. So this is really before the post-9-11 kind of like drive up for the war in Iraq, too, which is why I, one of the reasons I'm interested in this source.

So, quote, he says he was hit repeatedly on the souls of his feet. dragged on his bare back through a gravel pit and then made to jump into a tank of sewage so that the wounds would become infected. He was deprived of sleep and fed bread and water. So, yeah, that's fucking, again, that's a claim by a specific guy of a specific torture that was done to him. Yeah, and that's fucking nightmarish, right, because of the team not doing well in that year's Olympics. And again, that's not going to make you any better at soccer. Not going to help. Not going to help. Sewage in open wounds really makes football. I know that there are some. I mean, the Patriots famously get a lot of sewage in their open wounds.

But that's just because they're the Patriots, you know, that's not best practices for anyone else. I mean, Tom Brady thinks drinking water prevents sunburns. He might think that sewage in an open wound makes you run faster. You might be able to get Brady doing that. So in 1993, Iraq's premier team lost a friendly match against Jordan. If you know Uday at this point, you know the man absolutely did not believe in friendly matches. He had four players, including Shirar, who we've just heard,

from, forced into a van and driven to a prison camp. Here's how Shirar describes his time in soccer prison. Quote, Sharr's has a favorite trick of one sadistic prison guard was to tell them to catch a mosquito in their cells. When half anesthetized with fatigue from lack of sleep, they held the insect out for inspection, their captain would mock them, saying, but that's a male mosquito, you fools. I want a female one. Start looking again.

It went on day after day, night after night. One player had a nervous breakdown. Others were injured, and others like Sharr quit football and fled abroad. So yeah, that's pretty bad. That's, that's, you know, creative. I'll give that specific prison guard that. I haven't heard of that one yet, you know. We have to respect ingenuity here, don't we?

But you know, I just, probably not when it's torture. Oh, the course of managing this team all these years. He's not actually interested in getting better, is he? He just likes doing, because at this point, he knows that this is not. He's interested in torturing more. This is not improving the team. You would think, right? He just likes, I think he just likes doing the torture, to be honest.

I think he's just, I think he thinks, yeah, that may be it. Or maybe he just thinks there's like a certain thing. Yeah, he's got it at this point. Nobody else is doing it this way. You know, the top, they're not putting Ronaldo in a cell. No, and at this point, he's, he's kind of crashing out as a person. He knows he's not the heir apparent anymore. He's doing a lot of drugs.

He's, you know, having mood swings in part probably as a result of that. He's being violent and he's murdered, committed several times. There are several murders he's accused of. throughout this period too just at like parties so this is a guy who's kind of regularly spinning out of control and i think to your point molly i don't think he's focusing much on whether or not this is making the team better i think this has just become an outlet for his anger like he gets to go punish the team when he's pissed yeah yeah he just likes it now these are just his little toys it fears weird to say my favorite but my favorite soccer themed account of nightmarish crimes against humanity comes from an account given by ude's former press secretary a boss janabi after janabi fled Iraq, he told reporters about what had happened after the team failed to qualify for the 1994 World Cup. Udei presented them with a concrete ball and made them kick it for hours upon hours at a time. Just awful guy. Again, he does not care about the team at this point. This is just about lashing out, right? In 1995, Uday had another, we'll call it, incident. He was at yet

another party. He was drunk and probably on Molly or coked up. He was on Molly a lot in the 90s or, you know. Not me. So, no, no, no, no, no, MDMA, you know. Yeah, yeah. So when one of his Ken folks gave a toast and mocked Uday's speech impediment, Uday, as the story goes, just started blasting.

Yeah, he just starts shooting, right? This guy makes fun of him, and Ude just pulls a gun and opens fire with an automatic weapon. It doesn't stop shooting until. How kind of drugs was the other guy on that you would make fun of Ude's speech impediment? I know, right? You would have to think you'd stop at a certain point. He just shoots people periodically. Maybe you're just so fed up with the fucker, right, that you just can't hold it in anymore.

He must have been pretty annoying. The vibe at this party had to have been awful. Yeah, I don't think it was a good party, even though Uday's on fucking ecstasy. So as the story goes, he just starts firing. And he is six people. He kills six people. All of the dead are supposed to have been bodyguards, but his relative who had made fun of him was badly injured. So, yeah.

That's the kind of guy he is. Uday was also brutal to any other Iraqi team. Yeah, in a bad mood while fucking rolling. Now, Uday was also brutal to any other Iraqi team that had the misfortune to play Al Rashid. And I'm going to quote again from George Woodward's article in Tribune. Special punishments were reserved for those who committed offenses against al-Rashid. for example, injuring one of their players. For such an offense, Al-Zara, defender Abir-Gamal, was arrested.

He was taken to the stadium where the match had been played and in front of the Al-Rashid players, sentenced to 65 lashes. Such is the fate of anyone who defies football and does not respect the rules of fair play, said the local police chief. Wait, so his team would have to always win because you're going to let him win. Well, I think that doesn't happen a lot, which probably, again, doesn't help the team. Like they would win all their domestic. domestic matches, but then when they play somebody outside of Iraq, they're not going to let them up it.

I don't think they did win, they didn't win all their domestic matches, but I do think there was a lot of, a lot of people would get, especially if you ever foul his team, you're going to get fucked up. Yeah, but if they get beat, he's going to fuck them up, his team, you know? Yeah. So Abbas Talawe, the captain of an opposing Iraqi team, once annoyed Uday by complaining that the referee had been ruling unfairly against his team, quote, the referee, it seemed to me, was against us. He ignored fouls by the opposition and gave a penalty against us. As captain I protested and got a red card, that made me furious, and I spat at the referee. After the game, I was told I was banned from football for a year.

And to make me understand my offense better, I was sent for 33 days to Uday's private prison in Al-Radwania. There, every morning, his personal executioners beat me 50 to 70 times with an electric cable. Jesus. Again, when it comes to, like, truth and stuff, these are all very consistent, stories from a lot of different guys under their own names, you know? And it's all very similar kinds of torture. And this to me is more believable than some of those stories about sort of specific, like very detailed accounts of him, his own personal actions, whereas this is delegating

this violence to a state apparatus that we do know it did exist. We know the prison existed. We know the prisons existed. And like, you know, periodically he probably did lash out personally with violence, like against that coach. to start beating people, but generally he's delegating that, because he's got goons. That's the benefit of being the

dictator's son. But you could just point to a guy and say, put him in the pit. Yeah. God, if I had goons, I would have fun. I would have fun with my goons. Don't don't you worry. That's where that, nope, not going to make that joke. Anyway, it will not surprise you that many other players and officials claim that while Uday Hussein ran Iraqi football,

it was basically a crime to beat Rashid sometimes. Sports journalist Salah Hassan explained A red card for an Al-Rashid player was forbidden. Many of their goals were scored from obvious offsides. Leaders of opposition teams would be suspended before facing Al-Rashid. And when the team was on a winning streak, life could occasionally be good. Players who performed well were lavished with Rolex watches and supercars

no normal Iraqi could ever afford. Not worth it. But not worth it. Now, when top players failed, they were punished like anyone else. Avedradi was one of Iraq's greatest stars of all time. guy who scores their only goal in the 1986 World Cup. Here's an account he gave reporters later. Once I was unable to attend a team meeting with Ude, Ude sent a car for me in the

middle of the night. I was taken somewhere outside the city, beaten, and told I would no longer play football. I was punished five or six times, had my head shaved three times, was held in custody twice, including exile to a military camp where I was made to do hard labor. And that's their best guy. That's their best guy. That's like they're fucking messy. That's the legend.

It's crazy. Also, I'm very proud of you for knowing who messy is. Good job. Of course. I spent time in Iraq. I have to know who messy is. Like, fucking a quarter of the people I met had a messy jersey. Yeah.

It's interesting. I came across in one of the articles I was reading about that, there was this, like, paragraph. Because one of the things Ude would do was like, when he was pissed, he would have everyone's head shaved. He would have people's, like, like his player shaved. Is that like a humiliation thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And one article felt the need to go into like, in Muslim culture, you know, you're not supposed to shave your head. And so this was like directly demeaning.

And that's not at all what's going on. I'm sorry. You don't need to do this. Like, here, we have to explain why these Muslims would be hurt by having their head shaved. No, it's humiliation in any culture. No, no, no. You take, here's an experiment. Get some goons.

Go up to any random person. Restrain them violently and forcibly shave their head and see if they're traumatized. People don't like. Like doing that, you know, it doesn't matter that they're Muslim. I mean, it's what they do is French collaborators too. Like, it's, it's culturally legible. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it would be like if you were like,

and in French culture, being beaten while having your head shaved in the street is bad. It's like, this is bad everywhere, man. In the French culture, this is seen as particularly negative. Yeah. Yeah, nobody likes having that happen to them. And it's also this misunderstanding of Iraqi. Because, like, the picture it was painting is that, like, as Muslims, they need. never shaved there. And that's just not at all. Iraq, Iraq has a massive thing. Like,

barbers are a huge deal in Iraq. One of the coolest things that when I was in, like, Iraqi Kurdistan in the north during Ramadan one year, because like it's Ramadan, shit gets started in the middle of the night because it's too fucking hot during the day and you can't eat or drink anyway. So, like, everyone becomes nocturnal for a lot of things. And, like, I remember going out with a buddy because he wanted to get a haircut. It's like fucking midnight. And the barber's, like, using fire and stuff to, like, cut his hair in parts. It was really cool. It was a really elaborate, really good. And my buddy who's in Iraqi was like, no, Iraqis have the best barbers in the world.

He was very proud about this. Take that up in the Dominican. Where they were like, here's how this strange foreign culture feels about having their head shave. Like, that's just racism, guys. Like, if they were six, you would have to explain that this is particularly uniquely bad. Yeah. It's not. Nobody likes it when you forcibly shave their heads while beating them.

It's generally unpleasant for people. You know who else will forcibly shave you and beat you? No. Hopefully not the sponsors to this show. I would hope not. Good God. I just, let's just go on for a second here. Media and women are looking for more.

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The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered sentences and paragraphs about enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it. Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution? Why is it important that Americans know about it? Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself. I'm Rebecca Nagel. Gohin, Taoadol, Julykai, Etliqa, Leigh-Lan, citizen of Cherokee Nation.

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It's that and then there's everything else. He would just shout one line and it wouldn't murder. Marie Lunch. Bill Burr. Let's talk about the best moments. that we had on the road. I would love a cocktail. Dude, Joe could get last row, middle seat,

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Went in Rome. athletes, chefs, musicians, everybody. Listen to Paul's best podcast on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. I've made my apologies to the sponsors. Let's talk about Uday Hussein in 1996. Uday was the target that year of an assassination attempt on the street. It's of Baghdad.

About time. Yeah, fucking finally. A team of heavily armed men spotted him driving his red Porsche and opened fire. He was hit and wounded eight times and barely survived. Saddam pulled out all of the stops, though, flying in a French surgeon to fix his oldest boy. So you could tell Stambs do you care about him, you know? Yeah, he didn't want him to die. That's beautiful.

He loved his son. That's beautiful. Stalin wouldn't have done that for his boy. I'll say that much. Wow. So Uday survives but permanently injured. He would spend the rest of his life in wheelchairs or using a cane. This contributed to U.S.

Stahl. Yeah. Yeah, and this does not make him better or, like, calmer. The fact that he's now grievously injured and in pain all the time. He doesn't get nicer. He's not normal now? Yeah, the assassination attempt doesn't make him kinder. Not a turning point.

This contributes to his, yeah, kind of derangement. And it also, he gets, you know, starts taking this out on his players. By 1997, Uday Hussein had been the head of Iraqi football for more than a decade, which meant he was a fairly well-known figure with. in FIFA, right? This is a guy who is not at all a fringe figure in the world of professional football. He can't be. These are not crimes that are completely...

FIFA's not saying, like, you can't sit with us. No, no, they're not. No, they're not. Even though he's basically like a team owner and manager rolled into one a lot of the time. So in 1997, Uday's team failed to win a qualifying match with Kazakhstan and lost their chance to attend the 1998 World Cup. Ude lost his shit. and once again ordered players whipped and beaten. This time to such an extreme that he was reported repeatedly to FIFA.

They carried out an investigation, but Arak tonight, anything had happened. And after FIFA's experts examined 12 players, they found there was no evidence to support any of the allegations against Uday and the team management. Famously honest, ethical FIFA. Like, concerned with human rights. Yeah. So I, yeah, absolutely. I think FIFA definitely investigated. Yeah, they love that stuff, human rights.

Yeah. Sure. So earlier I told you about Sharar al-Hadithi, the famous player who was beaten on the soles of his feet, dragged across concrete and then made to jump into sewage. He was one of the players swept up in this. And he claims the team wasn't inspected by FIFA until weeks after they'd been beaten. He also claimed, per the mirror, team captain Radi Shannishal had been thrashed with an electric flex, but had refused to tell FIFA what happened, right? That another guy had been very recently beaten. And they saw injury, but he wouldn't say how he'd been injured. Now, it should be clear to – but that does show that the FIFA inspector saw injuries on at least one player, according to his account, right? That is important to note. It should be clear to everyone that these athletes were loath to tell FIFA what was really happening because their families were essentially hostages of the regime. That sucks. But FIFA definitely had evidence and should have known something was going on with the Iraqi team. I'm not saying FIFA should have saved the – like, FIFA's not an international humanitarian organization.

They're not going to help them. No, no. But they should have said, you guys can't play in FIFA games anymore. Like, you're out of FIFA. I'll even go so far to say, I'll hear a number of arguments about what they should have done, but what's undeniable is they did nothing. Right. Right. Right. Right. And I think that's the, I'm not going to say, I don't know what would have worked best, but they don't do fuck all, right? They just continue acting like everything is fine. And Uday is a normal, yeah. Yeah. Uday is a normal team, you know, owner or whatever.

It's just a coincidence that every guy in the team has these weird scars on his back. Yeah, yeah, just a weird little goinky dig. It's cultural. All these stories from former players who keep escaping the country. Yeah. In 1999, after Shirar escaped Iraq, he brought claims of abuse against Iraq's team back into the mainstream. FIFA was forced to address the situation again. And per the mere, quote, FIFA said last week had considered the matter as still closed unless

Sharrar was prepared to talk directly to it. Well, if he wants to report directly to us again, you know, maybe we'll reopen it. But he didn't come to us. You know, there's just a bunch of articles about him saying this stuff. So because playing for Iraq in Iraq was so darn miserable, many of the best players in the country tried to get hired for teams overseas. Anyone who managed this found themselves in the unhappy position of having to convince Uday Hussein that they should be allowed to leave the country rather than stay. He was often willing to agree for 60% or so of a new player's salary. That's what he would take from these guys who went to play for European teams.

Per an article in the mirror, Janabi confirms this. Once I collected for Uday a total sum of $350,000 from players for just six months, he says. So Ude is doing pretty good grift here, you know? I mean, that's good money if you can get it. It also, and it kind of, I wonder if, well, maybe it was part of his grift, if I just make it being a nightmare to play football in Iraq, the best players will get hired overseas and then I can take money from them. Like, I wonder how conscious a part of the griff that became for him. I mean, it probably wasn't intentional the first time. But once it started happening, once the first guy signed, once the first guy signed in Italy, he was like, you know what?

Yeah. This could be looking. This might be found money. Yeah. So Uday's grifts in the latter years of Saddam's regime were legendary, as the BBC reported, quote, Uday's criminal empire was involved in smuggling sanctioned goods such as oil and cigarettes and cocaine alongside running a fast food restaurant chain called Super Chicken and an ice cream company called The Wave. He also headed television in radio stations, was chairman of the board of seven newspapers, and was at the the helm of Iraq's most successful sports club.

Uday took particular pride in the fearsome image he cultivated and referred to himself as Abu Sarhan, the father of wolves. Because he's like, he's got his fedayeen too. He's got like his little militia at this point who wear like Darth Vader helmets, literally. They have like fake Darth Vader helmets that they wear. They never fight. They like they get there. They last like three seconds in combat.

These guys immediately run. And he ran a chain of ice cream stores. That for me is the line. He was a Renaissance man. You know, he runs a football team. He tortures a football team. He runs an ice cream company. He tortures ice cream and salesmen.

How many locations were there of super chicken? And was it good? I do want to eat at Ude Hussein super chicken. I want to eat Uday's forbidden chicken recipe. I need to track down a review of super chicken. Because was he as good at running a chicken restaurant as he was at running a soccer team. I'll guess he was as good. Oh, guess he was as good, Molly.

You know what? I think that's probably fair. Was he really involved in the chicken? From a food safety standpoint, I would hope he was delegating quite a lot. I hope there was less sewage. I don't trust him to, like, be good at that. Yeah, he has, there's a lot of sewage in the Uday Hussein story, so I don't feel great about that chicken. Uday also extended his control in Iraqi sports to the national volleyball team, which he had imprisoned in the basement of the Olympic National Committee building where he kept his torture dungeon in what he had.

described as a motivational exercise. I want to make sure the team really knows I mean business, so I'm going to imprison them in the basement for a while. I mean, they would be really motivated to get out of there. Yeah, I bet that would motivate your volleyball team. Maybe more volleyball teams should try this. Look, for you for too long, Uday Hussein's been ignored for his coaching wisdom. But maybe it's time we revisit him, you know?

Maybe this is what could make your own personal pee-wee volleyball team really, really cross the limits. Create a torture dungeon and lock them in it. Depending on the dimensions of the pit, it could really motivate them to get better at jumping and leaping. Sure, exactly, exactly. This could create a whole new generation of Olympic, whatever that sport is where you jump and there's a stick, the pole ball.

We can make kids better at that, you know? Maybe torture's not so bad an idea. Maybe we have, like, they just had the enhanced games where all of the athletes were on steroids, and actually they weren't particularly impressive. It kind of sucked. Yeah. What about the torture games?

All the teams worked the way Uday's did. Everybody has sepsis. Yeah. Everybody has sepsis. It's just a hospital award. That's the whole competition. So, Uday continued trying to impress his father, leaning towards, by this point, but kind of a later period of Saddam's regime,

Saddam doesn't really want to be dictator as much as he wants to be a novelist, an artist, and that's how he really wants to spend time during kind of. of the latter years of his reign. Uday knew that he'd failed to earn his father's respect as a future dictator candidate, but he could still do it as a writer. And so in the last years of the regime, Uday got his Ph.D.,

publishing a 400-page thesis titled The World After the Cold War, which was written by a guy Ude paid and printed en masse to be distributed around the country. For the BBC, quote, in it, Uday argues that American domination of the world stage will fade by the year 2015 and new superpowers such as Japan, China, and the European Union

will challenge the United States' moral and economic position. A couple of interesting things. 2015, not bad, honestly, on guessing the year, Uday. You could have done worse. Like, could have done worse? Close. But in terms of the new superpowers being Japan, China, and the European Union, I don't know, man.

That might not be the specific list I'd have gone with. Like, Japan, especially is kind of a weird one. No shade to Japan. I just wouldn't really call it the new superpower in the wake of the U.S. You know, fading. Nor the EU, really. Again, nothing against them. That's just a weird way to, anyway, it's not quite what happened.

Well, I mean, it's not Uday's fault. It's the guy he paid. It's fault. I do want a copy of Udade's thesis because the cover apparently has, like, a picture of Saddam Hussein as St. George slaying the dragon. Oh, I bet we could get a copy of that. Really suck it up to your kid, Uday. Yeah, hopefully. Somebody out there has found one.

Yeah, so in 2003, the United States invaded Iraq in April of 2003. How that go? Yeah, I mean, initially pretty good. The Saddam's regime did not last long, right? It was stuff afterwards that didn't go so well. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, like April of 2003, U.S. Army soldiers found at the Olympic headquarters in East Baghdad, Uday's old stomping grounds, a medieval torture chamber that was linked back to Uday.

Was that the one that had the um... Yeah, that's the Iron Maiden. Yeah, the Iron Maiden. Yeah. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah, it's very fun. They also found, you know, his personal zoo, which had lions, cheetahs, and a bear. They found he... Only one bear. His drug collections. Yeah, I think he had one bear.

He had a lot of drugs. He had a lot of liquor. He was noted by the U.S. soldiers who, like, found his home as having quote, the biggest collection of naked women I'd ever seen. He has a massive, like, born, printed out porn collection. Okay, well, to be fair, have those guys been to Clarence Thomas' house? No, no. Although Army Captain Ed Belonco of Montville, New Jersey, said, it looked like something out of the Playboy Mansion, which is very funny. That's from a Washington Post article by Nico Price, to quote from that article,

Among the photos were those of Jenna and Barbara Bush, President Bush's 21-year-old daughters, dressed up very nice and evening clothes, Belanco said, adding out the soldiers took them to protect the president. You know what? Actually. Furniest Iraq war era right I've ever seen. That's actually funny. So funny.

And just the, it is very America in 2003 that like these Americans, we're going to protect the president by getting the pictures of his daughters out of here. You know, the fact that that would wind up in a Washington Post article is extremely funny to me. Obviously, Uday and his brother are killed by U.S. forces at a compound that they were inhabiting.

I'm not going to go through, like, it's not worth really going to a ton of detail about that. He's killed, and obviously his days as a soccer, as a force of power within the world of professional soccer, come to an end tragically. Not really, tragically. Uday would have loved AI. He would, because he could have made those pictures of George Bush's daughters naked. Yeah. I got to say, the interview this guy.

He would have used grok, Dundrauss. He would have been grokin hard. He would have loved Grock. The interview with that Captain Belonco about what they found in Ude's house is endlessly entertaining. This is the captain. There were Dom Peringon, French wines, some 30 or 40 years old, a lot of very good brandy, a lot of good whiskey, Belanco said. There were boxes of Cuban cigars that said Ude, Saddam Hussein on them, hundreds of them.

My guys smoked them. He said there were also, this is the Washington Post. He said there were also six bags of heroin, but he didn't know how much they held. I'm going to guess not all that heroin made it its way back to their bosses. If I know soldiers. You know, I just don't know how much heroin was in there. Some of that heroin got done. I don't know.

Not very much, actually. It was a lot of bags, but they would, them were empty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm good at, yeah, it's one of those like, yep, they found eight bags of heroin and three bags were returned to custody at the base, and an entire bag of heroin was returned to the, you know. I'm imagining they're being shrinkage at several points here. Anyway, that's the Uday Hussain story.

Wow. This is not his, this is not the whole Uday Hussain story. This is Uday Hussain as a soccer team owner. Yeah. And it looks like the Iraqi team, so they are in the World Cup again this year for their second turn. Yep.

I think they got crushed earlier today. Yeah, but they made it back. That's what matters, right? And that's the thing. Getting to the World Cup at all. Big deal. It's a big deal. Even if you get out of fully spanked by Senegal at the group stage.

And it, you know, it says a lot. I think you can obviously, Uday Hussein isn't the only setback that Iraq has in terms of its football team. There's other things that go on in that country that those problems. They've had some other struggles. Some other struggles are non-football related struggles. Yeah. But that said, you know, it's really good. I'm really happy for the country that their team is now without Uday, made it back to the World Cup.

is there again that's great that's that's hopeful for the future you know i want good things for iraq um how you feeling molly you know that was fun not the torture parts not the sewage in the in the wounds parts that that sucked for everybody but uh i mean overall in terms of what you could have always thought of you one of my friends least likely to want sewage in an open wound you know thank you i think about that a lot i'm really opposed to it yeah i love a clean wound i can tell we all do that's why lightsabers are great in terms of things you could have presented to me today. I'm very pleased. Oh, good, good. Yeah, I thought you'd enjoy Uday Hussein's soccer team owner.

Uh, good stuff. Anyway, Molly, your podcast, weird little guys, people can and should, and also legally must listen to it. You're committing a felony. If you don't, right after this podcast, listen to Molly's, you know? You could be shot. You probably can. I'll put you in the secret room. I keep under my podcast. You're right. You're right. Molly's got a red room for people who don't listen to her podcast. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Anyway, well, goodbye.

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