When Saddam Hussein was in power, Adil Kadhim would rise at 6 each morning in his cramped apartment, set a pot of water on the stove for tea, and begin writing.

His work, like that of all authors, had to pass regime censors. One of his television series was an allegory about power, and made it to the screen by being set in 1950s Baghdad rather than in the later Baathist era. A television movie sang the praises of the Iraqi army, and another script used Julius Caesar rather than Hussein to describe the life of a dictator. These innocuous and popular shows made Kadhim one of the best-known theatrical writers in Iraq.

But the work dearest to his heart he stuffed into drawers. Much of it drew together figures from East and West, a motif viewed with suspicion by the regime. In one play he put on trial several notorious figures, including Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden, who in the name of purifying humanity commit heinous acts. In another, an Iraqi woman who murdered her husband shares a prison cell with two heroines of Greek tragedy, Electra and Antigone, and the three discuss the men who led to their ruin.

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In one case, he was compelled to transform one of his antiwar short stories into a glorification of the Iraqi army.

"In the original story, I told of a little boy of 3 or 4 years old. His whole village, in a mountain valley, was killed in the Iraq-Iran war but he survived and … was raised by wolves.

"Both sides of the valley were planted with land mines, because both the Iraqis and the Iranians were trying to protect their territory. But this little boy knew the location of the land mines, so he destroyed them by throwing stones at them so that they wouldn't kill the wolves….

"All day long the Iraqi and Iranian helicopters were growling up and down the valley. And both … saw the child as their enemy because he was detonating the land mines they had set up to protect themselves.

"I wanted to concentrate on this symbolism — that even the wolves rejected the state of war. And the valley was the property of the wolves, it was their nation."

Hussein's regime had something else in mind. The government wanted a movie about a boy who becomes an orphan when the Iranian army raids his border village. He survives in the company of wild animals until an Iraqi army unit finds him and adopts him as a mascot.

Kadhim looked away as he spoke. "They made me adapt my story to … give the Iraqi army humane motivations. The Iraqi army was involved in producing the film, and they shot it somewhere near the Iraq-Iran border," he said, shrugging as if to disown the revised tale. He then added: "I was so relieved that it was never shown on television. It was only given a private screening. It was such a big dose of propaganda."

The story's original version was never published. It remains as relevant as ever, Kadhim believes, because it reaches across the East-West divide.

Versions of the story date to the 12th century in North Africa and Persia, he said, and "you in the West have this story too: In Roman mythology, the twins, Romulus and [Remus] are raised by wolves and then they found the city of Rome."

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Now, Kadhim has turned to inventing his own heroic figures. The play he has just finished writing, one that he started years ago and stuffed into a drawer, takes a classic story and reshapes it to illuminate Iraq's latest trauma: an American invasion that echoes so many others in this ancient land.

'Tragedy of War'

The play adapts the legend of Don Juan, bringing him together with three other characters from East and West, past and present: Abu Nuwas, a Muslim poet of the 8th and 9th century, known for his romantic writing; a present-day Iraqi soldier, who is an uneducated everyman; and the ancient Greek mythological figure Pygmalion, who fell in love with a statue he carved of a beautiful woman and wished it would come to life.

In Kadhim's play, the four men fall in love with the same woman. Each man sees her as the center of his life. In the second act, the beautiful woman is pregnant and about to deliver.

"She begins to scream in everyone's face … all the men try to help her deliver the infant. But to what does she give birth? She gives birth to soldiers' helmets: first a German soldier's helmet with a swastika; the second helmet is British with a British flag from the time that they ruled Iraq; and then the old helmet of the Roman Empire; and then another helmet, with an American flag; and then one with the Iraqi flag," Kadhim said.

"She is giving birth to helmets, which are symbols of war, as if this beautiful woman was not there for love but to create war.

"In all my recent stories, both the attacker and the people attacked are living the tragedy of war and are trapped. The American soldier is here for months; he dreams of going back to his family. And also the Iraqi people wish the Americans would leave them — so in a way they are dreaming the same dream," Kadhim said.