For Brutality, Hussein's Sons Exceeded Even Their Father

Though very different from each other yet equally despised and feared by Iraqis, Uday and Qusay Hussein — Saddam's two eldest sons — personified the terror of their father's rule.

Their deaths, therefore, are the clearest indication to date that Mr. Hussein's era is over and power has passed to the Americans and their Iraqi and foreign allies.

Individually and together, Uday, 39, and Qusay, 37, represented the future of the Hussein government. As a result, they were intensively hunted by American military forces in Iraq, appearing respectively as No. 3 and No. 2 on the allies' list of most-wanted people from the former government. On July 3, the United States military put a reward of $15 million each on their heads, and offered $25 million for their father.

"They were the classic `sons of,' " said Danielle Pletka, of the American Enterprise Institute, in Washington. "Whereas their father shot and clawed his way to the top, they knew nothing except the vicious dictatorship he had created, which meant they were even more ruthless than their father."

Qusay Hussein, who was believed to be his father's chosen successor, headed Iraq's intelligence and security services, including the Republican Guard and its elite units that were responsible for protecting the leadership. Former United Nations weapons inspectors said he was also responsible for overseeing Iraq's unconventional weapons.

Stephen Black, a former inspector and chemical weapons expert, said that by virtue of his control of the security services, Qusay would have known, for instance, "whether they had chemical weapons, how many they had, and where they were deployed." He said Qusay would also have known whether, as several defectors and other sources have alleged, Iraq had abandoned an active nuclear program to focus on chemical and biological weapons.

Finally, he said, Qusay would have known not the exact hiding places but the "broad brushes of the concealment policy and practices — whether Saddam had destroyed or hidden weapons or the capability for just-in-time production, and what the goals of this concealment were."

Characterized by Iraqi defectors as quiet and sly, but very brutal, Qusay Hussein stayed out of the public eye, in sharp contrast to his older brother, whose greed and violent rampages were the stuff of many legends — often based in fact — circulating through Saddam Hussein's Baghdad.

Human Rights Watch, the New York-based group, and other experts have said that Qusay implemented the revenge killings and terror after the uprising that followed the Persian Gulf war in 1991. The same sources say he also engineered the draining of the southern marshes after the 1991 attack on Iraq, to eliminate the reeds in which insurgents had taken refuge. The draining of the marshes ended a centuries-old way of life for marsh Arabs.

The rights group also accused him of supervising the "cleansing" of overcrowded prisons by killing several thousand prisoners by shooting or torture.

In 2000, Saddam Hussein gave Qusay effective control of the army, and just before the American invasion this year, charged him with defending Baghdad.

The brothers were intense rivals, said Kenneth M. Pollack, the author of a book about Iraq, "The Threatening Storm," and the director of research at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, in Washington. Uday's resentment of his younger brother grew as his own power waned following an assassination attempt in 1996 that left him with a bullet in his spine and partly crippled.

Iraqi exiles agreed that Uday Hussein, the eldest of five children, personified the government's random brutality. Human rights groups and Iraqi exiles accused him of routinely kidnapping women off the streets, raping and sometimes torturing them, and personally supervising the torture and humiliation of hundreds of prisoners. Such conduct earned him the title "Abu Sarhan," the Arabic term for "father of the wolf."

In October 1988, at a party given in honor of the wife of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Uday bludgeoned to death Kamal Hana Gegeo, a valet to his father. Mr. Mubarak subsequently called the young man a "psychopath."

Soon after that, Uday's violent, erratic behavior led his father to banish him to Switzerland for a time, but Uday returned and gradually reclaimed some power. For a time, he owned Babel, Iraq's most widely circulated daily newspaper, and Youth TV.

But he was most infamous for his stewardship of his country's National Olympic Committee. Since Mr. Hussein's government collapsed in April, former Iraqi sportsmen have come forward to tell journalists of Uday's cruelty, and his routine torturing and jailing of athletes, particularly those who lost important matches, or games that he attended.

A New York Times reporter who visited the National Olympic Committee building after the Hussein government fell saw torture contraptions that included a sarcophagus, with long nails pointing inward from every surface, including the lid, so victims could be punctured and suffocated.

Uday was also known for his collection of luxury cars at his mini-palace in Baghdad, where American troops were also said to have found a personal preserve of rare animals and a veritable trove of cigars and alcohol.

Uday gradually won a vote of confidence from his father by creating the fedayeen, paramilitary units that attacked American and coalition forces fighting their way north toward Baghdad.