Victory Over America Palace

On Sundays at Camp Slayer, they offer tours of the palaces and buildings spaced around the lakes. Camp Slayer was originally part of the Abu Ghurayb Presidential Grounds and was home to the Republican Guard and the Iraqi Military Academy. The largest Palace on Slayer, never finished, is the Victory Over America Palace. In fact, the construction cranes still stand right beside it. The palace is so big, it was built to wrap around the already completed Victory over Iran Palace. You might wonder why Saddam named these palaces for victories that he didn't actually win. The popular story is that Saddam believed any war that he survived was a victory.

The palace itself is gigantic and the first picture shows the entrance. The second picture shows the main ballroom on the top floor that is football field sized and roughly 4 stories tall with multiple balconies, galleries, and attached "apartments". Though this palace was never completed or occupied, at some point in the early war, we targeted and struck this main ballroom area with 2 JDAM bombs. Maybe this was our answer to the palace's inaccurate name. All of the debris you see in the picture is a combination of leftover construction materials and bomb damage.

The third picture shows the ornate and unfinished stairways...no railings! It was a long way down. After seeing the remains of the fine Iraqi construction throughout the base, I always kept an eye open for something to grab on to quickly, just in case. As an example of the interesting Iraqi construction techniques, the floors all over the palace look like very roughly poured concrete - not a good base layer to put a nice floor on top of. It turns out that the Iraqis built the ornate marble tiled floors first, before the palace was even close to done, then to protect them from the construction, poured the rough concrete over the top. When the palace was completed, the workers would have had to chip off every single bit of the concrete protective layer to expose the marble floors. I guess no one ever explained that it is probably easiest to do the floors last. Or they didn't care.

The palace is also the tallest building around, with great views towards downtown Baghdad and around the rest of the base. This last picture from the roof is a view toward Uday Hussein's house, the Ba'ath Party Convention Center (more on that later), and in the distance, the Al Faw Palace which I mentioned in previous posts.