EMMANUEL BABA can still muster a smile when he thinks back to the day in 1984 when he first met Uday Hussein, the man who destroyed his life and turned football from a popular sport into the regime’s favourite sadistic hobby.

Iraq’s most famous player-turned-manager survived his ordeal. But, at 69, he admits that he can never recover what Saddam’s eldest son took from him. The regime forced his wife into exile, drove out his son and turned his lifelong passion for football into a nightmare in which he and his players were imprisoned, tortured and robbed.

“I was coaching the army team when I was first summoned to see Uday,” said the veteran footballer, whose nickname, Ammo Baba, is known throughout the Arab world as that of one of the region’s great players. “The day I met him, my problems began. He ruined my life.”

Although rumours of Uday’s abuses have leaked out before, only now, after the regime’s fall, are people ready to talk.

Yesterday, footballers said that they were regularly imprisoned for losing matches. Players had their heads shaved as a humiliation. Also, contracts with foreign clubs would have to be approved by Uday, who took a hefty slice of any deal.

Mr Baba, who coached teams that won 18 championships and went to three Olympic Games, said that he was hired and fired 19 times by Uday, who did not want to share the glory of victory but needed the veteran footballer’s skills to build teams and win matches.

One of his worst ordeals was in Seoul in South Korea in 1988, when Iraq lost 3-0 to Italy in the Olympics. The team was terrified as their aircraft taxied to the end of the runway and stopped a mile short of the airport terminal in Baghdad.

“They did this to make us walk to the terminal. But the whole team just ran away as fast as they could,” Mr Baba said. “My son and I walked back to the terminal and when we got there we were greeted by the secret police, who put guns to my head and stomach and dragged me away.”

After that, Mr Baba said that he received regular calls from Uday swearing at him, threatening to kill him and hurt his family. The last time he was imprisoned was four years ago, when he was 65 and suffering from diabetes.

He said that Uday’s punishments varied. Sometimes he would give the players a concrete or lead ball and order them to play barefoot. At other times, he simply threw them into jail. In 1999, when Iraq lost to Japan and South Korea, all the players were told that they would be shot. Instead, they were taken to a farm, where they lived with the animals for 25 days.

Laith Hussein, the captain of the national team, said that Uday also stole from the players. When he was offered a good contract with a team in the Gulf, Uday threatened to jail him unless he signed a less tempting offer to play in Lebanon with a club owned by a friend of his. “Not only did he make me take that contract, but then he took 40 per cent of my salary for the next eight years,” Mr Hussein said.

In spite of the national team’s ordeal, in some respects their fame granted them a degree of protection. Others in the sporting world were less lucky.

Yesterday, Tariq Abdul Wahab, a well-known broadcast journalist for Uday’s Shabab sports television station, recounted how he was kidnapped by the secret police in 2000 and held and tortured for a month. He apparently came to the notice of Uday’s own intelligence service when a telephone call with an exiled Iraqi footballer was bugged and he was heard to make a mild complaint about the running of sport in Iraq.

After being kept in a tiny cell and beaten repeatedly, he was told he would be freed after a fitting punishment. His right arm, which held the telephone that transmitted his words of dissent, was smashed in four places with a sledgehammer, a punishment carried out twice after X-rays showed that the arm had failed to break at the first attempt.

His right ear, which he used to make the call, was then pierced by a barbecue skewer. His right leg was broken with such force that his toes bent backwards and touched his knee.

All the men who recounted their grisly tales knew that in some respects they were fortunate. Many other Iraqis who crossed Uday simply disappeared. Often, they were last seen being taken to the basement of Iraq’s Olympic Committee building.

There looters discovered medieval-looking human cages in a torture chamber, where Uday’s victims would be suspended from the ceiling and subjected to electric shocks before they were disposed of for ever.

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