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ONE look at Latif Yahia and the physical scars are easy to see. Now his story has been turned into a film, The Devil's Double. It is a vicious, unrelenting look at the cruel world of Uday Hussein, a man considered even more sadistic than his mass-murdering father, with Captain America and Mamma Mia! star Dominic Cooper putting in a remarkable performance as both Latif and Uday. Latif, 47, now a writer and human rights lawyer, says: "I'd been shot because they thought I was Uday. A lot of people in Iraq hated him. The army tried to assassinate him. Anyone whose wife or sister had been raped by Uday would want revenge." Uday kept Latif so close that he was regularly exposed to his criminal acts. He says: "What is in the movie is only 20 per cent of the reality. It is a scary movie but there was worse. "He would take a drill and drill into the head. He would take out the eyes with a spoon. The rape was very bad for me to see, especially if the woman was pregnant." Being so close to the tyrant, Latif himself could have turned assassin.He says: "I was carrying a gun and he was just a metre away and I could shoot him in the head. "But what was coming into my head was my father and my family. If I killed him they would kill my father and my sisters."I know what would have happened to them because I was in the middle of torture and rape. "When I saw these things I was seeing the picture of my family and this is why I didn't do it." The Iraqi has survived a dozen assassination attempts and his body has the marks left by 26 bullet wounds.Latif first met Uday at the privileged Baghdad College For Boys when they were in the same class. He took an immediate dislike to the dictator's son and later even switched his university course from engineering to law to avoid him. But during his compulsory service in the Iraqi army, Latif was called to the Palace. He recalls: "When he first asked me to be his double it was like somebody had hit me with a hammer. "He told me it was my choice and it was a free country. I soon learned it wasn't like that. When I said no I ended up in a cell painted red. After a week of that he threatened to rape my sisters if I didn't do it." So Latif agreed to Uday's demands - but soon reached desperation point. He says: "OK, I lived in the palaces, I had the best clothes, the best of everything, but I couldn't get out and couldn't have a life. "I tried to slit my wrists after Uday asked me to shoot somebody - the father of a schoolgirl he had raped. I wouldn't do it." Talking to Latif, it becomes clear how twisted Iraq was under the control of the Hussein family. He was not shot because of who he was but because the people of his homeland believed he was Saddam Hussein's son Uday. Latif had the misfortune to look like the psychotic son of the brutal dictator and so he was forced to be his body double, acting as a distraction from the would-be assassins' real target. Once, after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Latif was sent to the front line to give a speech so the Iraqis would think it was Uday being brave. But on the way, the car was ambushed and Latif was shot. Today an occasional flicker of fear in his eyes reveals the deeper mental scars that still give him nightmares 20 years after he escaped from Iraq. For those eyes have witnessed horrors that no human being should see. Working as Uday's doppelganger between 1988 and late 1991, Latif saw rape, torture and murder on an unimaginable scale.