Where is Saddam Hussein? Nearly four weeks after coalition forces launched their war to unseat him, no one seems to know if the president of Iraq is dead or alive, and, if alive, where he has fled to.

On the streets of Baghdad there is speculation that he may be hiding in Moscow, or Paris, and that his three wives, two sons, three daughters, two of them widowed on his orders, and several grandchildren have all been sent to a secret location until such time as they can be reunited.

Initial American optimism that the feared 66-year-old dictator had been killed along with his two sons during a 'decapitation strike' on a Baghdad restaurant earlier this month has been replaced by more cautious assessments from military officers.

Their bottom line is that the 'monster' has been 'defanged' and his reign of terror has been ended.

Those statues of his that remain standing on Baghdad's public squares bear an amazing likeness to Josef Stalin and, like Stalin's memorials, convey a sense of ruthlessness, paranoia and an obsession with the need for absolute control.

When he was born on April 28, 1937, in the village of Al Awja near Tikrit, Britain was still a world power and the master of Iraq. Saddam Hussein's father, a peasant and odd-jobs man combined, beat both his wife Sabah and his son when the mood took him.

Desperate to escape her husband's violent mood swings, Sabah eventually left for Baghdad, taking young Saddam with her, where she found a job as a maid in a downmarket hotel frequented by lorry drivers who worked the run between the capital and Tikrit.

Embarrassed by his humble origins, Saddam Hussein was incensed in later years when a popular Iraqi singer innocently composed a popular song entitled 'Sabah, clear the dishes'. From then on the song was banned.

Saddam Hussein was still a teenager in 1957 when he joined the fledgling Baath (Renaissance) Party founded by a Syrian Christian called Michel Aflaq.

One year later he played an active role in the attempted assassination of Iraq's then ruler, General Abdul Karim Kassem.

When the attempt failed, he fled to Cairo in Egypt and only returned when the Baath Party came to power in the early 1960s.

It was Hussein's kinsman Hasan Al-Bakr who headed the government until 1979 when the former swept him aside in an internal party coup. From then on there was no stopping him.

Encouraged and abetted by the Americans, he waged an inconclusive but destructive eight-year war against Iran after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini led an Islamic revolution in the neighbouring country.

Two years after the end of the war, he invaded Kuwait, but was forced into an ignominious retreat by the first United States-led international coalition.

In the decade since the first Gulf War, he used more fear and intimidation to entrench himself, increasing his already deeply entrenched siege mentality.

Moving daily between his two dozen palaces to avoid being attacked by his enemies, he also built up a complex system of underground bunkers and used a series of lookalikes to confuse would-be assassins.

Iraqis say he slept only four or five hours a night, waking up to swim in one of his palace pools to help his bad back.

He married Sajida, his cousin and the mother of his five children, nearly 40 years ago. But more recently he took on two other wives as permitted by Islamic custom.

Like his older son Uday, Hussein enjoys watching Western films involving intrigue, assassination and conspiracy. These include The Day of the Jackal, The Conversation, and Enemy of the State.

A recently published autobiography, Men and a City, tells of his life up to the age of 22 and details such heroic episodes as when he surmounted the injury of a broken hand to become a master horseman.

rediff.com Senior Editor Shyam Bhatia is the co-author of Saddam's Bomb, on Iraq's search for nuclear weapons.