IRAQ: By the time he was overthrown, Saddam Hussein had come to rely on his two sons more than anyone else in his regime, writes Michael Jansen.
When Saddam Hussein came to power in Iraq in 1968 he did so as the country's vice president and the Baath party's strongman. He arrived on the coat-tails of Gen Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, a cousin of his uncle and foster father, Khairallah Talfah.
Although he achieved office by means of his membership of the Baath Party, Saddam Hussein always relied on family and clan to do his bidding and keep him in power.
His relatives were known as "al-Tikriti," the men from Tikrit, a modest town north of Baghdad, which was not, in fact, Saddam Hussein's home town. He was from a tiny village nearby. After his nephew became a fixture in the ruling party, Khairallah Talfah became mayor of Baghdad, a post he exploited to the full to become a very wealthy man.
Among other familial appointments were a cousin Gen Ali Hassan al-Majid (Chemical Ali) who was given the defence portfolio and used poison gas against the Iranians during the war with Iraq and in 1988 against the Kurds. Saddam also drafted his half brothers, Watban Hassan al-Takriti, who became interior minister, Sabbawi Hassan al-Takriti, who was intially director of general security, and Barzan al-Takriti, who served as political adviser and Iraq's representative in Geneva.
Other relatives took over almost every aspect of government.
But it was during the 1990s when Saddam Hussein became suspicions of some of his familial appointees that he began to rely increasingly on his two sons, Uday and Qusay, as mainstays of his regime.
Uday, born in 1964, was the eldest of five children of the president and his first wife Sajida. From an early age Uday had a reputation for wild and violent behaviour. He was known to have tried to commit suicide at least three times. As the regime's rake he was said to have raped a number of young women and teenage girls.
Middle class Baghdadis hesitated to take their daughters out to meals in restaurants or to parties for fear that they might encounter Uday.
In 1988, he beat to death his father's personal bodyguard and food taster, Kamil Hanna Jajo, during a drunken party on an island in the Tigris. Mr Jajo was reported to be the go-between between Saddam Hussein and a mistress, Samira, who became his second wife.
Closer to his mother than his father, Uday was furious about this connection. He was imprisoned for a week and then sent abroad to Switzerland for a brief period of exile in the household of Barzan al-Takriti.
On Uday's return to Baghdad, he built his power base on Iraq's Olympic Committee, expanding into the media and business worlds. He established the daily newspaper, Babil, a weekly paper called Rafidayn and al-Shabab (Youth) television.
He interfered in the daily operations of the Iraqi Ministry of Culture and Information which authorised foreign and local journalists to work in the country. After sanctions were imposed on Iraq in 1990, he became one of the main smugglers of prohibited luxury goods, particularly after Iraq was permitted to export oil under the United Nations oil-for-food programme launched in the spring of 1997.
Until the war, Uday lived the life of a wealthy reprobate in marble palaces supplied with every modern luxury. In the garden of one he had his own zoo which contained two lions.
In 1996 Uday was personally involved in the killing of his two sisters' husbands, Hussein Kamel and Saddam Kamel. In December of that year he survived an assassination attempt which left him partially paralysed.
It was believed at the time that family members were involved in the plot which was mounted in revenge for the murders of the two defectors. Although Uday recovered to a certain extent, he could not walk without assistance. One of the men who died with him may have been his aide and bodyguard. Following his semi-recovery, Uday, who had been wed to Barzan al-Takriti's daughter, was reportedly married off to the 16-year old daughter of Ali Hassan al-Majid.
The shifting fortunes of Saddam's relatives were often revealed in the alliances of their progeny with his sons and daughters. Uday was elected to parliament in 2000 in what analysts believed was a bid to unseat his younger brother, Qusay, who had become his father's favourite and unanointed successor.
While head of Iraq's Olympic Committee, Uday was responsible for beatings and torture meted out to members of the country's team whom he believed to have performed below expectations. Sportsmen who fled their country testified that members of Iraq's various teams were humiliated and imprisoned.
Considering his record, it was surprising that in the 1990s Uday established a hospital for Olympic athletes, one of the best and most up to date medical facilities in the Iraqi capital, which was later expanded to accept civilian patients. (It is now the Shaikh Zayed hospital, named for the president of the United Arab Emirates, which reconstructed, staffed and funded the looted facility after the war).
Qusay Hussein (37), the second son of Saddam Hussein, was chosen as his heir apparent in 2000 after his elder brother was bypassed as unstable and unreliable. A law graduate and private man who shunned the spotlight, Qusay began his covert ascent to the seat of power when he was put in charge of the Republican Guard, Iraq's elite military formation which ensured the survival of the regime during the Iran-Iraq conflict and after the 1991 Gulf War.
Thereafter he took command of the Special Republican Guard, the body tasked with the president's personal security, the Special Security Organisation and other intelligence agencies. He established the 40,000 strong black-clad Fedayeen Saddam, Saddam's irregulars, which held Iraq's cities against the US and British attacking forces during last spring's military campaign. He was seen by the US and Britain as the key figure after his father.
Qusay's role in the regime was formally revealed in mid-May 2001 when he was elected to the 18-member Iraqi Regional Command, the executive leadership body of the ruling Baath Party. In 2001, he was named Deputy of Baath Party's Military Bureau.
He was accused of employing cruel tools of oppression to blackmail opponents, force confessions and destroy dissenters. He was also held responsible for a bloody purge against the influential Dulaymi tribe in 1995, and a local Shia uprising in 1997 and the execution of several thousand prison inmates during 1988-99.
Without his sons, Saddam Hussein would almost certainly have had great difficulty maintaining his grip on power following the war waged on Iraq by the first Bush administration.
But when the regime collapsed after the occupation of the country by the second Bush administration, these powerful figures - and, perhaps, their father - were left to fend for themselves, without the substance or trappings of power which they had enjoyed for all but the last months of their lives.