Enlarge imageBy Dean Yates
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The strapping Iraqi shepherd hardly looks like someone whom people would dare to insult.
But Saddam Hussein Nasaar, 24, has been taunted and teased ever since American troops toppled the Iraqi dictator last year. Now he’s had enough, and plans to change his name.
"I’m finding it difficult to get a full-time job. I’ve been offered several but they won’t take me until I change my name," said Nasaar, as he watched over two dozen sheep owned by his brothers near the outskirts of Baghdad.
"People think I’m associated with him. They start swearing at me, they tease me. Before no one dared to insult me," he said, wearing a red and white head-dress and leaning against a tall cane.
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For many Iraqi men and boys, being called Saddam no longer carries respect and privilege, and increasing numbers are officially changing their names.
Too scared to criticise Saddam while he ruled, most Iraqis now express scorn or anger about their former president, whose regime killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.
Nasaar, who said he also gets occasional work as a security guard, was born in 1979, not long after Saddam formally assumed power.
His poverty-stricken parents named him after the new president, thinking it might bring economic rewards. Other Iraqi families did it to win advancement in Saddam’s Baath Party.
Nasaar said his parents never received any financial gain, although men and boys called Saddam and born on April 28, the former president’s birthday, would get cash gifts.
Sabah Nori Al-Azawi, manager of a dilapidated government office in Baghdad where Iraqis can change their names, said growing numbers of men and boys were shedding the Saddam tag now that government services had begun to function again.
Azawi said up to 25 men and boys had changed their name at his office in the past month.
"The majority are children. Other children make fun of them at school so their parents bring them here," said Azawi.
Sahar Khalil, head of records at the Al-Alwaiya maternity hospital in Baghdad, said up to five babies each month were named Saddam before the U.S.-led invasion last March.
"Since the fall of Baghdad, we have not had a single Saddam, and we have 300 births a month," she said.
The humiliation for Saddam’s namesakes has risen since U.S. dragged him from a hole near his hometown of Tikrit in December.
Photos of a bearded and ragged Saddam appear in newspapers across Baghdad almost every day, a far cry from the proud man who exhorted Iraqis to fight to the last before the invasion but who himself gave up without firing a shot.
There are no statistics on the number of Saddams in Iraq, although ordinary Iraqis say it would run into the thousands. It was used before the former president came on the scene, but its popularity soared when he took power.
