“We saw the hole for the bunker but it hard to believe someone live in that hole. It was really small,” Samir remembers. “They shot in there and he started yelling, ”Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, don’t kill me.’“ So I had to talk to him. I was the translator. I said, ‘Just come out.’ He kept saying, ‘Don’t shoot. Don’t kill me.’”

In Arabic Samir said he continued to pursuade Saddam to come out. He was about to come face to face with the tyrant who killed his loved ones.
Saddam was the reason he fled Iraq in 1991 and eventually moved to St. Louis.

Samir says, “I was like, ‘I got him.’ We all reached him and pulled him out. And we say Saddam Hussein he looks really old. He looks disgusting.” There was also anger. “You want to beat the crap out of him. He destroyed millions in Iraq. I’m one. I left my family 13 years ago because of him.”

Saddam couldn’t fight back, but he did speak out. “He called me a spy. He called me a traitor. I had to punch him in face. They had to hold me back. I got so angry I almost lost my mind. I didn’t know what to do. Choke him to death. That’s really not good enough.”

For Samir, this was sweet justice. One of Iraq’s own, now a U.S. citizen, helping arrest one of the world’s most wanted fugitives. “I said ‘Who are you? What’s your name?’ He replied, ‘I’m Saddam.’ Saddam what, I asked. He said, ‘Don’t yell. I’m Saddam Hussein.”