EVERY day Nadia Sabbagh sends her two children off to school, does a little cleaning, considers life and then watches videos to remind her of her former glory.

For the past two years she was voted Iraq’s most popular television presenter and last year was even named by colleagues as the “presenters’ presenter”.

Now Saddam Hussein has gone and so has her job as the public face of his regime.

“I loved my presenter’s job. They all know me, all the people of Iraq know me. But now I am just cleaning the house, washing dishes — I live a villager’s life. I am a prisoner in my own house,” she said, sitting in her home in a middle-class suburb of Baghdad, sipping orange squash, her face fully made up.

Ms Sabbagh used to present the evening news on the main state-owned television channel, reporting a half-hour round-up of the activities of Saddam and other leading officials. She also presented a range of other magazine programmes about the “joy of life in Iraq”. “They were happy programmes for families with songs and meeting important people,” she said.

During the national elections last November, she anchored the day-long coverage. She did not have to host a studio debate about how to interpret the results: Saddam won 100 per cent of the vote.

Did she believe the results as she presented them to the public? “That is the kind of reality we had. We lived in Saddam time. All the people who were voting were frightened and panicked — what else could they do?”

Ms Sabbagh did not, however, present the news of the invasion of Iraq, as women were banned from the television station for their safety.

Surrounded by plastic Father Christmases, she was keen to emphasise that as a Christian she was an outsider to the regime. Despite presenting the glories of Saddam to the people every day, she insists, like most high-profile people in Iraq, that she was never a Baath party member and never met Saddam.

Ms Sabbagh presented her leader’s propaganda for many years, but insists that she was just the puppet, not the puppet master. “They gave me the lines to read, and I read them, and that’s it. I had orders to say the news. I didn’t add anything to them. I didn’t have the freedom to produce programmes. I just did my job,” she said.

Since the fall of the regime, she has repeatedly cut her hair short, as if to distance herself from her old image. Her publicity shots of just a year ago portray her as a glamorous superstar, but now she looks drawn and distracted — “a shadow of her former self”, according to one admirer.

But Ms Sabbagh insists that she is not concerned about her career ending because she was tarnished by Saddam’s regime. “I am not worried about being seen as the face of the regime — the people know me for who I am. The new government can open all the files on the presenters and see who supported the regime and who didn’t.”

Iraq’s television stations were part of Saddam’s Ministry of Information, and when Muhammad Said al-Sahhaf — made world-famous during the war as the propaganda chief Comical Ali — became her boss, things just got worse. “He only cared about making a new building to make himself look glorious, but there was no new equipment, no facilities and he didn’t look after the staff,” she said.

Last week the US administration formally abolished the Ministry of Information and, with it, the four old Iraqi television channels.

Now there are two coalition channels and a Kurdish station. Many Iraqi broadcast journalists have found work either working directly for the new administration as interpreters, or working with the large number of Western stations that have set up bureaus in Baghdad.

Ms Sabbagh, however, is biding her time, hoping to land a job with one of the many Arab satellite stations. But she is too famous to seek work actively. “They all know who I am, they will come and ask for me. I want to work for Arabic TV because I will be free there,” she said, before touching up her make-up and adding: “I am not looking for fame and limelight. I am a simple person working in TV, and I just want my job back.”

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