Of the countless stories about his life as a barber in Iraq, Qays al-Shara most likes to tell about April 9, 2003, when he watched Iraqis and U.S. Marines tear down a statue of Saddam Hussein outside his salon in Baghdad's Firdos Square.
The 12-meter-tall statue of the Iraqi dictator extending his right hand was erected just a year earlier to celebrate his 65th birthday.
The demolition of that monument was a symbolic moment of the US-led invasion; A TV broadcast of Marines tying the statue to a vehicle to bring it down turned it into a symbol of the end of a quarter century of Saddam's rule. But in fact, the statue in Firdos Square was a fraction of the vast number of monuments and palaces that Saddam erected to demonstrate his power.
All his statues and paintings have long since disappeared. Many of his palaces and buildings were given new uses in the new Iraq. But much of the hope that came with the erasure of Saddam's oppressive visual presence has also vanished, burned first by years of brutal violence and then destroyed by a shattered economy and the rampant corruption of a new political elite of sect-based factions.
Firdos Square was renovated and became a small park, financed by private banks. On the building that rises above the square is a large mural of Iranian General Qasem Suleimani - killed in a US drone attack in 2020, and Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Such Shia images are spreading in Baghdad due to the dominance of Shia parties supported by Iran in power.
Al-Shara said that while he doesn't miss Saddam's rule, he does miss the "rule of law."
"Families are too scared to come to the park because the drug dealers are there," he said of the square.
It is not known what happened to that Saddam statue, but souvenir hunters have been taking parts.
In 2003, a group of young U.S. Marines from Utah said they cut off the statue's right arm and intended to sell it on eBay. But she disappeared from their cargo while they were trying to smuggle it to the US.
A German antiques dealer said in 2016 that he bought the left leg of the Hussein statue and then resold it on eBay for more than $100.000.
British journalist Nigel Ely wrote a book in 2017 about a piece of the left buttock of the Saddam statue that he tore off the statue. He tried to auction it off for charity, but didn't get a high enough bid.
Saddam's policy of filling Baghdad and other cities with palaces and statues and portraits of himself "created an image of a divine leader," Chatham House senior research fellow Renad Mansur told the AP. Saddam "should have projected power in different ways to remind people who was in charge."
Some of Saddam's monuments remain, mostly because they had a nationalist meaning that went beyond him. For example, the "Victory Arch" of two giant hands holding crossed sabers, and two large turquoise half-domes called the Monument to al-Shahid - Monument to the Martyrs, still rises above the Tigris River. They were opened in 1983 and 1989 in memory of those who died in the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s.
Al-Fau Palace was built by Saddam in the 1990s on an island in the middle of an artificial lake to mark the recapture of the peninsula of the same name during the war. It was used for the first time after 2003 as the military headquarters of the American coalition under the name "Camp Victory". It was later transformed into the American University in Baghdad, thanks to the financing of the influential Iraqi businessman Sadi Saihud.
Saddam's presence is still on campus: His initials are carved into walls and ceilings. The man-made lake is still stocked with a race of giant carp taken away by Saddam.
But anything that directly reflected Saddam was erased.
A day after the statue was toppled from Firdos Square, Kurds toppled a statue of Saddam in the northern city of Kirkuk. They threw shoes in her face and celebrated the fall of a man who brutally suppressed their population, including a dangerous campaign in the 1980s that Human Rights Watch called genocide. Those and other statues have been replaced with images of Kurdish leaders, especially Massoud Barzani, who led the Kurdish autonomous region in the north from 2005 to 2017.
In Baghdad, the largest Shiite neighborhood was long called "Saddam City." Saddam, who brutally crushed any dissent among Iraq's Shiites, deliberately installed a giant, colorful mural of himself in the main part of the district.
In June 2003, Shiites gathered for a ceremony to rename the district "Sadr City," after the family of prominent Shiite clerics. A replacement mural has been unveiled depicting Mohammed-Baqir al-Sadr and Mohammed-Sadiq al-Sadr - two clerics killed under Saddam's regime for opposing his rule.
They are relatives of Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiery cleric whose militia fought the US occupation after the fall of Saddam. Today, he is one of Iraq's most powerful factional leaders, pitted against rival Iran-backed Shiite parties that dominate government positions. "Sadr City", home to millions of mostly impoverished Shiites, is his main stronghold.
"Words cannot describe how I felt at that moment. It was like I had passed from darkness to light," Talal Musa said of the renaming ceremony, which he attended as a teenager. Now 37 years old and a contractor for the state electricity agency, he has seen his then expectations of a better future disappear.
"Now, unfortunately, we have this corrupt junta that has been controlling the country for the last 20 years," he said.
Bonus video:
