Saddam, the shepherd boy - a tale of motherly love and donkeys

He was a shepherd boy who grew up in poverty, with his mother's protective love and his own fierce ambition to sustain him. He navigated his way through the murderous currents of clan and revolutionary politics, and learnt to use a gun. The rest is Iraqi history.

After cutting his literary teeth with two allegorical novels, Saddam Hussein has written his thinly disguised autobiography, Rijal wal Medina (Men and a City).

The subject of a number of highly unflattering biographies, President Saddam may have felt the time had come to present his version of the truth in a book that is very much in the Baghdad bestseller list.

Apart from changing his own name to Saleh and his wife Sajeda to Abeda in the book, Saddam uses little camouflage. His mother retains her name, Sabha, as does his uncle and surrogate father, Khairallah.

The clan the shepherd belongs to is the al-Bejat of the Albu Nasr tribe, Saddam's own, and the setting is Tikrit, in central Iraq, Saddam's birthplace and power base now awaiting an American blitzkrieg.

There are personal glimpses: "My mother used to hug me and tell me about my ancestors. She told me stories while her loving hands played with my hair."

Saleh/Saddam learns to swim in the waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates. He falls off a donkey when five years old and breaks his hand, but overcomes his fears to learn to ride.

There is a description of the action which has become a part of the Saddam lore in Iraq, the assassination attempt on the military ruler Abdel Karim Qassem in 1959. The attempt fails and Saddam, although shot in the leg, escapes, dressed as a Bedouin, riding for four days, before swimming across the Tigris.

There are some disappointments in his life, such as his failure to join other members of his clan in the military academy as he was underweight. He did, however, compensate himself on coming to power, by appointing himself field marshal.