BAGHDAD, Iraq — A new novel just published in Iraq, combining romance and Iraqi politics after the Gulf War, is widely believed to be the second book written by President Saddam Hussein.
"Al-Qala'ah al-Hasinah" ("The Fortified Castle") appeared this week in bookshops and all public libraries in Baghdad and was hailed on state-run television and by the newspaper al-Jumhouriya as a "great artistic work."
The cover gives no clue to the writer's identity, saying cryptically that it is a "novel by its author," while a note inside explains that the writer "did not wish to put his name on it out of humility and modesty."
But the official press has been heavily promoting the 713-page paperback, which sells at 4,000 Iraqi dinars ($2), and rave reviews in the Iraqi media, which called it an "innovation which nobody has managed to achieve during the past century," leave little doubt as to its authorship.
An opening paragraph that reads: "The novel is a trip in the world of struggle and virtue and a fight against injustice," makes it reasonably certain that the style is Saddam's.
In the story, the hero is a militant who takes part in the 1980-88 Iraq-Iran war and the Gulf War. He is wounded in the war with Iran and is captured by the Iranian forces, but he manages to escape from his jail and return to Baghdad.
He rejoins his university studies in Baghdad, where he falls in love with a Kurdish girl from northern Iraq, which her family fled after the Gulf War because of unrest.
His marriage cannot be completed for lack of some legal papers that she cannot obtain from her northern hometown of Sulaimaniya, where she cannot go because of death threats as her family opposes the political system there.
Northern Iraq has been outside the control of Saddam's government since soon after the Gulf War.
Saddam last month urged opposition Kurdish parties to open dialogue with his government.
The novel also describes the "extraordinary" situation in northern Iraq and how the U.S. and British warplanes bomb targets and Iraq's military concentrations.
U.S. and British jets patrol no-fly zones set up in 1991 to protect a Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq and Shiite Muslims in the south from possible attacks by Iraqi forces.
The novel also has a sub-plot about a servant who betrays his master by trying to kill him and escapes with his sister whom he loves and his animals.
The master recovers from his wounds and searches Iraq's desert until he finds the servant and his sister in a place near the gulf and takes his revenge by killing them both.
This is seen as an allegory of Iraq's claim to have been betrayed by Kuwait, which it regards as its 19th province and accused of stealing its oil, and Baghdad's invasion of it in 1990.
The occupation lasted until a U.S.-led multinational alliance drove Iraqi forces out in February 1991.
If the novel is Saddam's, it is his second after "Zabibah wal Malik" ("Zabibah and the King") which was published late last year to equally rapturous reviews.