Through an act of fate, Latif Yahia's bizarre life was shaped from the moment he was conceived, but he was not to know it until he was sitting in an excrement-filled bright-red torture chamber at the age of 23. Life as he knew it had come to an end. He would never be the same again.
Yahia was a young Iraqi Army officer in 1987 when he was plucked from the front line of the Iran-Iraq War to serve his country in a 'special' capacity. At first he turned down his assignment, but he reconsidered after a week in the red-walled cell no larger than a shower cubicle.
Due to his uncanny resemblance to the sadistic eldest son of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, he was to become Uday Saddam Hussein's fidai : his double. He forgot his old life to become someone else, someone he had despised since childhood when they attended the same school.
I Was Saddam's Son is the remarkable story of how the murderous Iraqi regime trained and shaped Yahia into a carbon copy of the feared Uday, a man so chillingly cruel he once cut out the tongue of a girl while raping her because he believed she had claimed to be his girlfriend.
So, with this role model upon which to base his new life, and under the threat of death, should he again refuse, Yahia 'became' Uday.
With journalist Karl Wendl acting as his ghost, Yahia describes how he was given eight months of intensive training, complete with cosmetic surgery and dental treatment, and how he was cut off from his family and friends in the process.
By the summer of 1988, Yahia no longer existed, but there were two Udays: one who would continue to murder, rape and torture his father's subjects, and the other who would pretend to be his master at official functions and, later, put his life on the line visiting troops in Kuwait and hence allow Uday to take the credit while he was in fact gambling millions of dollars away at a Swiss casino.