Sajida Talfah
Template:Short description Template:BLP sources Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox person
Sajida Khairallah Talfah<ref>Iraq sculpture destroyed by fire. BBC. 4 April 2008</ref> (Template:Langx; born 1935)<ref name="Bride">Template:Cite news</ref> is the widow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> and mother of two sons (Uday and Qusay) and three daughters (Raghad, Rana, and Hala) with him.<ref>No UK asylum for Saddam's family. BBC. 5 June 2003</ref> She is the oldest daughter of Khairallah Talfah, her husband's maternal uncle.
Wife of Saddam Hussein
Sajida and Saddam had five children together. Their marriage was arranged when they were children. She was said to have been 2 years older than him. They met when Saddam was about 21 years old.<ref name="Bride"/>
In 1964, their first son Uday was born, followed by Qusay in 1966. Their first daughter Raghad was born in 1968. Followed by a second daughter, Rana in 1969, and finally, their youngest daughter Hala was born in 1972.<ref name="Bride"/>
In 1986, Saddam married another woman, Samira Shahbandar, while still married to Sajida. Sajida was enraged, and Uday was also angry over his father's new wife. Uday took it as an insult to his mother and also believed that his inheritance was endangered by Saddam taking a new wife. In October 1988, at a party thrown in honour of Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Uday beat and stabbed Kamel Hana Gegeo to death. Uday believed that it was Kamel who had introduced Saddam and Samira and that he had arranged their meetings. Although her husband married another woman, Sajida and Saddam never divorced.Template:Citation needed
Sajida hardly ever appeared in public with her husband, so for many years, her existence was little known to the Iraqi people. However, when rumours surfaced that Saddam had married another woman and that his family life was now strained, more pictures and videos appeared in the Iraqi media of Saddam and Sajida, as well as them with their children. These pictures and videos were intended to make it seem as if Saddam's family life was not strained.Template:Citation needed
Sajida, along with many members of her family, fled<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Iraq in 1990 because of the Persian Gulf War, leaving Iraq before the bombings began. There are many different reports on where the Hussein family settled, but a possible location is Mauritania.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The Hussein family returned to Iraq after the war was over.
In popular culture
She was played by Shohreh Aghdashloo in the BBC adaptation House of Saddam in 2008, in which her character played a major role.
See also
References
Further reading
- Mayada: Daughter of Iraq, a non-fiction book by Jean Sasson in which Sajida features as the accuser and torturer of one of the seventeen fellow prisoners of Mayada Al-Askari, whose stories the book tells.