Sadaam Hussein became President of Iraq on July 16, 1979. Six days later, he ordered the execution of twenty one Iraqi government officials (including five ministers) who were accused of being “traitors.”
What Hussein did value was loyalty and political support. So, when Reverend Jacob Yasso of the Chaldean Sacred Heart in Detroit, Michigan publicly congratulated Hussein on his rise to power, the compliment didn’t go unnoticed. Jacob Yasso was born in Telkaif, Iraq and after high school, was recruited to Rome where he completed his masters degree in Philosophy and Theology.
In 1960, he was ordained a priest in the Chaldean Catholic Church. Chaldean Catholics are Catholics whose ethnicity stems from the ancient area of Mesopotamia, more specifically northern Iraq, southeast Turkey, Syria, and northwest Iran. In 1964, he was appointed to serve the growing Chaldean community in Detroit.
In response to Yasso’s congratulations, Saddam sent the church $250,000.
Saddam Hussein was making donations to Chaldean churches across the world at that time, so giving money to his church wasn’t necessarily out of the ordinary for Iraq’s president. Plus, Detroit had the largest Chaldean population in the United States, who predominately supported the rise of Hussein in Iraq.
Yasso and Hussein kept in touch, and about a year later, in 1980, along with about twenty five people from the Detroit Chaldean community, he was a guest of the Iraqi government and arrived in Baghdad. Then, he was led into Saddam’s palace. In the same interview, Yasso states “We were received on the red carpet.” At some point during the celebration, Yasso presented Saddam Hussein a gift from then-mayor of Detroit, Coleman Young, a key to the city.
In the late 70s, the United States employed the well-known philosophy, “an enemy of our enemy is our friend.” Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was engaged in a war against Iran. Considering the US’s own issues with Iran, the State Department very much supported Iraq in the war. In fact, there is some evidence that the State Department actually encouraged Detroit mayor Coleman Young to ask Rev. Yasso to present a key to the city of Detroit to Hussein.
International politics makes for strange bedfellows.