Man in the know

Dr Bashir extols his memoir as a salutary study of the corrosiveness of absolute power, rather than the story of a single despot.

As a barometer of Saddam Hussain's declining grip on reality, we need look no further than the state of his feet.

With bombs raining down on Baghdad, his people poisoned by the water supply, his enemies being routinely tortured, the dictator's main pre-occupation was getting relief from the corns under his right foot.

More revealing still, he would never have had corns in the first place if he had not, out of sheer vanity, worn shoes that were two sizes too small and much too narrow.

Oblivious to impending disaster, his female relatives behaved with just the same petty self-obsession.

In the countdown to war in 2003, three of them — including his 16-year-old granddaughter — were queuing up, like competitors in a beauty contest, to have plastic surgery to straighten or reduce their noses.

No one is better placed than a personal physician to shatter a tyrant's self-image with a few well-chosen details, and Dr Ala Bashir, former head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Baghdad University, is able to expose the full megalomaniac absurdity of Saddam and his family because he saw them, corns and all, at their dysfunctional worst.

Dr Bashir was at the mercy of the Hussain 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."

Bashir, formerly Iraq's most highly decorated doctor, left his country three months after the outbreak of war and, from the safe suburb of Nottingham, England, where he now lives with his wife and daughter, he has written a book called The Insider.

Based on diaries he kept clandestinely and gave to friends in plain envelopes for safe-keeping, it is a stomach-churning chronicle of brutality, corruption, casual violence and intrigue — as well as endless nose jobs.

Bashir extols his memoir as a salutary study of the corrosiveness of absolute power, rather than the story of a single despot.

He must be unique among authors in actually trying to make his book sound less interesting that it is. In fact, Bashir is a unique witness from Saddam's inner sanctum, and the devil is in the detail.

He recalls Uday's hundreds of expensive cars being torched by his father as a punishment for killing his valet, and Saddam puffing on a Havana cigar while watching them burn.

The women who came to his clinic for treatment after being knifed or disfigured by cigarette burns in Uday's vodka-fuelled bedtime frolics.

Saddam's superstition about black cats and plastic bags — encountered on the road, either would cause him to divert his motorcade.

The municipal redirection of sewage from one neighbourhood to another, according to who was paying for a less foetid life.

Among the sharks

Being an artist was another plus. He was required to celebrate the leader's heroic deeds in paint and monuments as well as operate on his feet and look after his blood pressure.

Not surprisingly, Bashir's position made him unpopular with Saddam's conniving inner circle. It was like "swimming among sharks", he says.

Bashir's account of atrocities in Baghdad and the death-throes of a disintegrating regime is almost devoid of personal commentary — although he does allow himself some spleen over Uday's grisly career.

"Saddam's greatest mistake," says Bashir, "was to let his crazy son do what he did. He played a very bad role in the destruction of Iraqi society".

Bashir demolishes the widely held western belief that Saddam had many doubles. As a plastic surgeon, he says, he would have known.

"Neither I nor any of my fellow plastic surgeons in Iraq had anything to do with altering someone's face to look like the President. I certainly saw no one like him."

Bashir, 64, and his wife, Amel, have three grown-up sons and a daughter. The two eldest sons, Sumer, 32, and Tahsin, 30, are engineers, both born in England where their father worked as a surgeon after gaining his degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh.

They all now live in Nottingham. Amel left Iraq 18 months before the war but Bashir remained until after Saddam was toppled ("my love for my country was greater than my hatred of the regime"), finally leaving in July 2003 when his house was plundered, down to the last teaspoon, in the general mayhem, and his doctor friends were being killed.

"There was a total loss of law and order and security. Criminals were free to move and steal and kill."

He doesn't expect to practise as a doctor again, preferring to concentrate on his art. He still has a share in a private hospital in Baghdad and a small income from a rented house.

"I taught myself to go forward. Looking back is a waste of time. You lose the future."

As for Saddam, vain to the end, Bashir expects the prisoner to spend the rest of his days trying to "reshape himself in history" and obliterate the image of a confused, dishevelled old man being dragged from a hole in the ground by American soldiers.

"He is finished," he says. "What does it matter whether he is executed?"

–The Telegraph Group Limited

The Insider: Trapped in Saddam's Brutal Regime by Ala Bashir is published in Britain by Abacus.