It is one of the last vestiges of Saddam Hussein left on public display in Iraq, and now it is to go.

The former dictator’s handwritten phrase Allahu akbar (God is Great) is to be removed from the national flag after a vote by the Iraqi Parliament yesterday. Saddam had it added during the 1991 Gulf War. The MPs also voted to remove the three green stars representing unity, freedom and socialism – the motto of Saddam’s widely reviled Baath Party.

The move all but completes the public exorcism of a man whose face was once inescapable in Iraq. The ubiquitous statues were torn down in the first days after the US invasion that toppled Saddam in April 2003. His likeness vanished from the currency when new banknotes were introduced. Streets, airports, stadiums and anything else that bore his name were given new monikers. Finally the man himself disappeared – executed in December 2006.

The Parliament voted 110 to 50 to change the flag at the request of Iraq’s Kurdish minority, who said that it served as a reminder of the cruelty of his regime. Saddam waged a genocidal campaign against the Kurds in the late 1980s which caused more than 100,000 deaths and included the use of chemical weapons against the town of Halabjah.

Masoud Barzani, the Kurdish president, wrote to the Parliament last year to urge it the change. “It is unacceptable that this flag, which reflects the acts of the former regime in spreading hatred and death inside Iraq and between people of the region, is still adopted,” he said.

The vote was precipitated by a meeting of the pan-Arab parliament in Irbil, capital of the semi-autonomous Kurdish north of Iraq, scheduled for March 10, with the Kurds refusing to fly the present Iraqi flag over their public buildings. The present flag was first flown after the Baath Party seized power in a coup in 1963. In those days the stars represented Arab unity between Iraq, Egypt and Syria.

The new flag will keep the horizontal red, white and black stripes, but have the inscription Allahu akbar in a script that is clearly not Saddam’s handwriting. A Kurdish demand that

it be written in yellow – the colour of the Kurdish people – was dropped. So was a suggestion that the three stars be retained.

The new flag will itself be replaced in a year’s time when the Parliament agrees on a permanent design.

“The new flag has no signs of Saddam’s regime and is a sign that change has been achieved in the country,” said Humam Hamoudi, a leading Shia politician. It will also be seen as further evidence that the Parliament is beginning to tackle difficult issues.

Emblem of change

— The Kingdom of Iraq, created by British mandate in 1921, used a horizontal black, white and green tricolour – the pan-Arab colours – with a red inset

— After the 1958 revolution, when the monarchy was overthrown by the military, the Republic of Iraq retained the tricolour, rotating it 90 degrees and adding an eight-pointed red star – the “Sun of Mesopotamia” representing Kurdish and Christian minorities

— In 2004 an attempt by the Iraqi Governing Council to impose a new flag with blue bands depicting the Tigris and Euphrates, a yellow band for the Kurds, and a blue crescent on a white ground was ditched in case insurgents used the old flag to rally round

Sources: Agencies, CRW Flags

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