The men who shot Uday Hussein

Abu Sadeq leaned into the team's car and pulled out the sports bag in which he had concealed two AK-47s, two spare magazines, and six grenades. Abu Zahrar jumped into the car and drove it a few yards into the shadows. Sharif, armed with a hidden pistol, accompanied the two shooters to the spot he had chosen.

As Uday drove by slowly they were shocked to realize he was alone: his bodyguard must have got out to search for women up the street. Abu Sadeq and Abu Sajad pulled their weapons from the bag and opened up from just a few yards away.

The windshield and passenger window shattered. Uday slumped to his right.

The gunmen emptied their magazines, dropped their weapons, and ran for their getaway car. Sharif followed. The three men leaped in, roared off, and disappeared. The whole incident had taken less than a minute. Nobody had shot back at them. Nobody followed them.

Elated, they reached their safe house, where they slept the night. The next morning they took the bus to Nasariyah, and a connecting bus to Suq-ash-Shuyukh, on the edge of the marshes. By nightfall they were back in the safety of their base. Sharif did not leave the marshes until the US-led invasion last March.

"We never imagined it would be so easy," Sharif says with a smile. "We thought we had been sent to our deaths."

In the marshes over the next few days, Hamza, the leader of 15 Shaaban, listened to Voice of America radio and other international stations and chuckled as Iraq pundits speculated about an attempted coup. "Lots of other parties claimed the attack, but we didn't," he recalls. "We wanted the regime to think it came from its own ranks."

Eventually, however, Saddam found out the truth. A member of 15 Shaaban who knew about the plot was arrested in Jordan in connection with another affair and handed over to the Iraqi secret police, Hamza says. Under torture, he broke. By August 1998, 18 months after the assassination attempt, Saddam's security men had arrested Abu Sajad and published details of the other members of the team.

The government's revenge was vicious. Sharif's seven brothers and his father were rounded up: his mother was told later to collect their bodies from the Baghdad morgue. Abu Sadeq's father and three of his brothers were executed. Abu Sajad and his father suffered the same fate. Security men bulldozed all of the families' houses and confiscated all their property.

Last December, an Iraqi hit-squad tracked down Abu Sadeq, in exile in Iran, and killed him.

Hamza's wife was arrested: she gave birth to a son in jail, and it was six years before the two were released to house arrest. None of the families evicted from their houses have been given new homes, none have yet been offered any compensation by the new authorities, Sharif says bitterly.

Still, he insists, the operation was worth the price his comrades and their families paid. "When you weigh up the pros and cons, the advantages are bigger," he argues. "It is not easy for a man to sacrifice his family: nobody would do it unless it was for a noble cause. But I think my family was ready for that sacrifice. I inherited my sense of sacrifice from them. It was the way I was brought up."

Hamza agrees. "The sacrifices we made and the blood our members spilled made people demand the end of the regime," he says. "Maybe it will be because of those sacrifices that in future people will demand that our Governing Council stays on the right path. It's because we made sacrifices that we can demand elections." Hamza adds that he is bitter about what he says is an over-representation of former exiles on the Governing Council.

Sharif says he was satisfied when he heard the news that US troops had killed Uday, along with his younger brother Qusay, in a July 22 shootout in Mosul.

"Anyone would prefer to finish a job if it is the right job to do," he reflects. "I wish it had been me who had done it. But no matter who killed him, such a vicious man did not deserve to live."

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