THEY were doing laps together in a pool at the palace, Saddam Hussein and Ibrahim al-Basri, his doctor. Bodyguards paced at the water’s edge, intently following the leader’s progress. Pausing for breath at the end of a lap, al-Basri told Saddam the guards looked a bit podgy.

The leader looked at his physician with interest. “I told him military officers in Europe had better posture,” the doctor recalled in his garden last week. “These fellows had paunches.”

Saddam climbed out of the pool and began haranguing the men. “Later that day he issued a decree that members of his entourage would be punished if they went above their optimum bodyweight,” said the doctor.

Al-Basri, 62, a sports medicine specialist, offered an unusual glimpse of life behind the palace walls as he reminisced about treating Saddam’s chronic back pain with anabolic steroids and helping to whip flabby security officers back into shape.

For 16 years he was the dictator’s personal trainer, enjoying, he readily admits, a heady atmosphere of privilege and ease. He got a new Mercedes car each year, along with the gold watches, guns and bundles of $100 bills that were more regularly handed out by the dictator to his friends.

He remembered meals around a table sunk in a giant aquarium — “You could watch through the glass as the sharks circled while you ate lunch,” al-Basri recalled — and shooting parties on palace lawns in which Saddam blasted away at cigarettes planted in the turf.

“He was an excellent shot,” said the doctor. “Nobody could compete with him. Of course nobody really dared to.”

Saddam’s courtiers knew only too well how the dictator’s fun and games could turn lethal in an instant and al-Basri watched Saddam commit unspeakable acts of cruelty, sometimes with a grin. “One minute he was all gentle, mild as a poet, and the next he was a beast,” he said.

Like so many others who found a precarious place in the rough and muscular world of Iraqi power, it ended abruptly for al-Basri when they came to take him away in 1990. He was imprisoned for “insulting” the regime: he had fallen for a woman whose family was perceived by Saddam as hostile to his rule and had ignored a command not to marry her.

He emerged from prison late last year. More than a decade in a dungeon does not leave the doctor feeling kindly disposed towards his former patient.

“If I meet him in the street I will kill him,” said al-Basri, brandishing a titanium-plated machinegun given to him by Saddam in the 1980s. He believes that Saddam is “hiding underground”.

A dead bird was wired to its perch in a cage on the terrace where al-Basri sat listening to American tanks rumbling past his gate. “I loved that bird,” he said. “It died while I was in jail. I have kept it to remind me of what happened.”

His second wife also died while he was imprisoned and a large photograph of her adorns his sitting room wall. “My life was ruined by that man.”

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• A doctor, a daughter and a man called Johnny
• Mona Lisa's smile may have belied ill health
• ‘Parasite economy’ lies behind Greek tragedy