This is one of the rare occations when a story evolves by itself. When I published the text below back in mid December I did it to mock Uday Hussein, who claimed his Yahoo! mail account had been withdrawn by Yahoo!. I also did it to have a good place for linking to Human Rights Watch’ and Amnesty’s pages about his crimes against humanity. Of course, the links to Babil and iraq2000 doesn’t work anymore (what does in Iraq these days?), but I thought the story was dead and gone (just as is probably Uday himself).
Then, some joker calling him-/herself snowpups2003 posts a link to a Yahoo! News message board claiming Uday’s account is active and that his password is ”babil”, adding a link to this page. That, my friends, is just bogus, a prank and a mini hoax. I even tried it, it didn’t work.
So why is somebody making up a hoax and linking it here? I don’t quite know. It could be to discredit me/my site/the original article or it might just be that snowpups2003 misunderstood the text below. I don’t quite understand it, but a couple of hundred of surfers has clicked on the link from Yahoo! today, and I just felt I wanted to try to give you some kind of explanation.
Update It seems as snowpups2003 has left this link in as many boards as possible on Yahoo!, thus providing us with another explanation of his/her behaviour. To discredit Yahoo!
Here is my original article from December 15, 2002:
2002-12-15 Oh isn’t this stupid? So, Saddam Husseins son Uday has a Yahoo! e-mail account. Big deal! So has millions of Indians, thousands of Swedes and quite a few kurds as well. Still I care enough about the news that he has been kicked out of Yahoo to right this text…
So who is Uday Saddam Hussein, besides being the eldest sone of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein? Both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both, over the years, reported him responsible for mass murder, mass rape, torture. They hol him partly responsible for the attac against Halabja in 1988 where 5000 kurds died from a gas attac. Read more about this in amnesty.org and hrw.org
His address, udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com, was published in Wired News on November 11, and I guess he has received his fair amount of spam to that address by now. No wonder his very own, very pro Iraqi, newspaper Babil published the news that Uday Hussein now couldn’t be reached by his Yahoo! e-mail address anymore. Babil strangely enough reports that the account was closed by orders of U.S. officials allthough it was a payed account. Now, I wouldn’t go pay for a Yahoo! account…
The mailto link at the bottom right of the Babil site (both the Arabic and English versions) still points to udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com. There is also a static html-page that might contain e-mail addresses, but the English version is missing and the Arabic version is … right, in Arabic, a language I haven’t got the handle on yet. I do, however read html, and in the code I found the following three addresses: babil@uruklink.net, inoc@uruklink.net (I think that is the webmaster at the Iraqi National Olympic Committe, who officially owns the site) and contact-us@uruklink.net. There are also a few links still pointing to udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com.
Well, I tried the udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com address, and it has been discontinued for sure.
This is the bounce I received half a second after I send a query:
This is the Postfix program at host nw-smtp.wineasy.se.
I’m sorry to have to inform you that the message returned
below could not be delivered to one or more destinations.
For further assistance, please send mail to
If you do so, please include this problem report. You can The Postfix program udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com: host mx2.mail.yahoo.com[64.156.215.5] said: 554 Final-Recipient: rfc822; udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com
delete your own text from the message returned below.
delivery error: dd This user doesn’t have a yahoo.com account
(udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com) – mta129.mail.scd.yahoo.com
Reporting-MTA: dns; nw-smtp.wineasy.se
Arrival-Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2002 01:01:16 +0100 (CET)
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; host mx2.mail.yahoo.com[64.156.215.5] said: 554
delivery error: dd This user doesn’t have a yahoo.com account
(udaysaddamhussein@yahoo.com) – mta129.mail.scd.yahoo.com
So who has the edge on this story? It could be Uday, the poor guy who was policed by the US officials out of his e-mail account. But I don’t think so. After just a few searches over the web, I for one found enough about this guy to want him tucked away for good in a very cold cellar, as far away from humanity as possible. Besides, as mentioned in the Wired News article, US intelligence probably were really happy about him having a known e-mail account they could intercept.
Other related links:
Uday Hussein Biography
For those of you reading a language where Uday is transcribed Oday. here’s a little something so that you will catch this page. The above article is about Oday Saddam Hussein.
