Sajida Talfah
Sajida Khairallah Talfah, born June 1937 in Tikrit Iraq, is most famously known for being one of Saddam Hussein’s wife from May 1963 until his death. Hussein, President of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until the 9th April 2003, was executed by hanging on 30th December 2006 aged 69. His government killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Sajida Talfah did not have to ‘meet’ Saddam Hussein; she was, in fact, his cousin. Her father, Khairallah Talfah, was the maternal uncle of Saddam Hussein. There are many rumours flying around about their marriage and nobody seems to know the precise answer. Some suggest they were married as a result of an arranged wedding at a very young age – he was five-years-old and she was seven. Other resources suggest the marriage may have occurred far later and that before marrying Saddam, she worked as a primary school teacher. These sources put the date of their marriage at either 1958 or 1963. Either way, the pair had five children together, the first born in 1964.
Now, although they never got divorced, her husband, Saddam Hussein, is thought to have married another woman named Samira Shahbandar in 1986. Rumour has it that in a fit of rage, the man who introduced and arranged meetings between Saddam to Samir, was murdered on the request of Sajida; but this has never been proven.
It is not known where exactly Sajida hid when the bombing began in Baghdad in 2003, but rumour has it she fled to Qatar with her daughter while her sons fled to Jordan. In 2004, Sajida hired a whole host of lawyers to defend her husband while he was on trial for war crimes. This was dramatically cut to only one Iraqi lawyer in 2005. Sajida herself was not innocent in the turmoil – in 2006, Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, Iraq’s national security advisor, announced that Sajida and her daughter were on the government’s most wanted list as a result of financing Sunni Muslim insurgents under Saddam’s regime. It is not known what eventually happened to Sajida. In 2015, her family denied rumours that she had died, but her whereabouts remain unknown; it is thought she is still hiding in Qatar.