The shaky video, shot more than a decade ago when his youngest daughter Hala was still a child, shows Saddam in military fatigues, smiling stiffly as his elder wife Sajida and a crowd of children sing and dance beside a towering cake.
For Iraqis, it is an unprecedented glimpse of the domestic life of the man who brutalised the country for decades. Nobody knows how the footage was found -- vendors suspect it was looted from the home of somebody in Saddam's inner circle.