TIME Magazineのインスタグラム(time) - 3月20日 20時55分

On March 20, 2003—exactly 15 years ago on Tuesday—U.S. aircraft pummeled Baghdad, marking the first moments of the #Iraq War. Within weeks, Saddam Hussein’s 24-year dictatorship collapsed, and the U.S. military occupied the country. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and nearly 4,500 Americans have died there in the years since. Something else was lost, writes Vivienne Walt: The countless statues, murals, paintings, mosaics and artifacts that featured Saddam, whose image had for years peered down from every office wall, building and town square across Iraq, reminding citizens not to dare challenge his rule. Within days of the invasion, Iraqis had smashed and sliced those statues and paintings. Today, one of the few Saddam busts in #Baghdad sits in the living room of politician Mowaffak al-Rubaie, who claims he was charged with pulling the lever on Dec. 30, 2006, effectively killing Saddam. Other accounts have a guard pulling the lever. Al-Rubaie, a doctor who had been tortured three times under Saddam’s rule before fleeing to London, began his collection when a high-ranking U.S. military officer called him from Kuwait with news that a bust from a statue was being loaded onto a C-130 transport plane bound for the states. It had been smuggled out by an American soldier. "He asked me, 'would you clear it?'" al-Rubaie says. "I said 'no, we want it back. It belongs to Iraq.'" The bust was flown back to Baghdad, where it was stored in the fortified Green Zone for two years, before al-Rubaie brought it home. After Saddam’s execution, al-Rubaie added the rope—a stark reminder of a night in which he says he played a key role. It is difficult to verify whether the rope is the one used to hang Saddam that night; he says he had asked for a length of it to be brought to him after the event. "One of my missions is to establish a museum of everything from that era," he says, adding that he believes it is necessary to preserve the history of Saddam for future generations as a lesson in how the Iraqis lived under dictatorship. "I want to keep all things relating to Saddam," he says. "They are all over." Photograph by @emanuelesatolli for TIME

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