The wacky world of Saddam and family

In the days before we invaded Iraq, Saddam was obsessed with the corns on his right foot, brought about by his habit of wearing shoes that were two sizes too small, says the former dictator's doctor, Ala Bashir.

Dr Bashir was at the mercy of the Hussein clan's trivial summonses for 20 years, often having to abandon more serious cases to attend to them. He was forced to operate repeatedly on Saddam's psychotic aunt ("Happiness for her was a general anaesthetic''), even though her ailments were entirely imaginary - this was a woman, after all, who had executed two servants she suspected of stealing. "We quite simply dared not stop the nonsense and say enough was enough,'' he admits.

Bashir pieced together Saddam's psychopathic eldest son, Uday, after a failed assassination attempt in 1996 left him disabled and brain-damaged. "It was more difficult to gauge the extent of any damage to the brain,'' he notes dryly. "He was already insane.'' At some risk to his own life (since Saddam demanded to be informed of any medical procedure on a member of his family), he performed a secret facelift on Samira Shabandar, the mistress who was to become the president's second wife, and passed it off as the removal of a small growth from behind her ear. This must have been demeaning for a man who treated the victims of atrocity and rose to prominence as a plastic surgeon during the Iran-Iraq war, when he and his team performed more than 22,000 operations on wounded soldiers from both sides.