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They were said to have been cast by the German company commissioned to construct them in the image of Saddam Hussein’s own fists and forearms.
The crossed swords they held were fabled to have been manufactured from guns from Iraqi soldiers melted down and recast into the 12-story-high statue rising over the parade grounds and park in central Baghdad.
It was the end of the Iran-Iraq war. From 1980 to 1988 a million soldiers on both sides were killed. The dead included Iranian child soldiers. Almost an entire Iraqi generation was lost. At the end, Saddam Hussein told his people they had won a great victory.
And he built a monument not just colossal in size but almost breathtaking in its portrayal of brute power and brutality.
Helmets of dead or captured Iranian soldiers spilled from the baskets swinging from his fingers. Others were pounded into the road to be used as speed bumps.
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So you might think that anyone would be happy to see the statue go. But it’s not that simple.
An Iraqi government committee of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds ordered the statue dismantled earlier this year. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki later suspended the work after protests. The hands though that held the swords are now bronze sheets curled on the ground.
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I asked an Iraqi Army officer this week what he thought of the statue being demolished. He didn’t think much of it. ‘How do we know they were Saddam’s hands? They were the Iraqi people’s hands,” he said.
The officer was Shiite. Like almost all Iraqi Shiites he wouldn’t have dreamed of identifying with neighboring Iran during the two countries' eight-year-war.
“The government says this is about Saddam but I think it’s really about not insulting Iran,” said another Iraqi officer.
Saddam himself now lies buried in a simple grave near his home town of Tikrit. The hands that tons of metal were modeled after – the hands that wrote the orders for the war against Iran and the destruction of Iraqi villages, the hands handcuffed behind his back as he went to trial and then was led to his execution are moldering under ground.
And the parade ground? I covered parades there in the late 1990s where we would wait for hours for Saddam to show up to review the troops. We were kept at a safe distance and when he did arrive we were never really sure whether it was him or a double. Like the statue, even from a distance he always seemed larger than life.
But more often it was used as a park, where Iraqis would stroll with their families and picnic on Fridays.
Now it’s part of ‘the international zone’ - home to the US embassy and the Iraqi government and off limits to ordinary Iraqis.
Crushed soft-drink cans and water bottles have been thrown among the helmets embedded in the concrete base of the sculpture. It’s not clear whether the metal hands can be repaired. Or whether it will be melted down and turned into something new. A metaphor as much as a statue.
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You have a question for Jane Arraf? She's in Iraq on a month-long assignment for IraqSlogger, embedded with US forces. She'll answer questions from readers in a IraqSlogger column every Tuesday this month. Submit your questions any time via the green "Tips, Questions, and Suggestions" tab in the left column of the IraqSlogger home page.
