The Fate of a Leg of a Statue of Saddam Hussein

Last June, Kai Kobold, a German antiques dealer whose wares date back to the Neolithic era, bought a fourteen-year-old object with more history, he believed, than any other piece in his collection. He said it was the left leg of a statue of the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The statue had stood in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, and was famously toppled during the American invasion, in 2003. Thirteen years later, Kobold enlisted five friends to help him carry what appeared to be the statue’s gam into his home, near the city of Hamburg. “You see this and it’s boring,” he told me a few months ago, as we ogled the leg together. It looked like someone had bronzed a giant’s hip wader as though it were a baby shoe. “But when you know what it is—it’s something like the experience when you come into a church.”

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