The Baghdad Lawyer: Fighting for Justice in Saddam's Iraq

The Baghdad Lawyer is a memoir like no other. Readers will experience for the first time the behind-the-scenes workings of the Iraqi criminal justice system from the perspective of one of the most respected trial lawyers in Iraq, in the years before and during the violent and chaotic rise and fall of Saddam Hussein. In a career spanning fifty years, Dr. Sabah Aris has been shot in the head, forced to brandish a revolver to prove a point in court, witnessed an act of cannibalism, defended Saddam Hussein’s notoriously unstable and violent son Uday, and more than once has found himself at odds with and at the mercy of Saddam’s all-powerful Secret Service, the Mukhabarat.
The Baghdad Lawyer depicts the challenges of trying to find justice in the shadow of constant political upheaval and the lawlessness this upheaval engendered. It also helps us understand where Iraq is as a country today—post-Saddam, post-Iraq War—and how the events we currently read about in the headlines were seeded years before the world had ever heard of Saddam Hussein. While this book is by and about one of Iraq’s most famous trial lawyers, it is also about the Iraqi people and the country itself.