(AFP) - In southern Iraq, twenty years after its fall as a result of the American invasion, Saddam Hussein's two yachts are still the perfect witness to the former Iraqi president's paranoia. One of them floats rusty in the middle of the river, while the second is open to visitors.

In the city of Basra in the far south of Iraq, only about 500 meters separates "Al-Mansour", Saddam's yacht that was hit by raids by US planes in 2003, and the "Basra Breeze" yacht, which was placed at the disposal of the Maritime Studies Center.

The Basra Breeze, which Saddam never sailed, is anchored on one of the docks of the Shatt al-Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

The yacht has been open to visitors since January, three days a week.

"Everyone who visited the presidential yacht was stunned by the lavishness of the previous regime," said Sajjad Kazem, a professor at the Center for Marine Sciences at Basra University.

Time has stopped on this boat. In a small room, old telephones still lay on a large desk. In the Presidential Suite, a king-size canopy bed, elegant bedside lamps, old-fashioned sofas, and a large dressing table. As for the bathrooms, they are equipped with gold washbasins.

This is not surprising since Saddam Hussein, who ruled Iraq between 1979 and 2003, was known for his outrageous extravagance.

The 82-meter-long yacht, made in Denmark and delivered to Saddam in 1981, can accommodate 30 passengers and a crew of 35.

The yacht has 13 rooms, three meeting rooms, and a helipad. It also has a secret passage leading to a submarine, allowing escape in the event of danger, as recorded on an information board.

"At a time when the Iraqi people were living the scourge of wars because of Saddam and the suffocating economic blockade, Saddam owned such a yacht," says Kazem, 48 years old.

Fearing reprisals during the Iran-Iraq war in the eighties, Saddam, who did not use the yacht, handed it over to the royal family in Saudi Arabia, before the yacht ended up in Jordan, as Kazem mentions.

In 2008, the boat, which was anchored in Nice, became the center of a legal battle, as the Iraqi authorities claimed its ownership after it was offered for sale for $ 35 million by a company based in the Cayman Islands.

University professor Abbas Al-Maliki, who came to visit the yacht, says, "What I liked are the old things, such as faxes and old telephones. They brought me back in memory, to before the Internet."

And the man added, "I wish the former regime had cared about these matters in order to serve the people and not for the sake of serving its personal interests."

As for Mansour's yacht, it is still half submerged with its rusty hull in the Shatt al-Arab River in central Basra.

The yacht, which is 120 meters long and weighs more than 7,000 tons, was made in Finland and delivered to Iraq in 1983, according to the website of its Danish designer, Knud E Hansen. It can accommodate 32 passengers and a crew of 65.

The yacht was moored in the waters of the Gulf, and before the US invasion, Saddam moved the yacht to the waters of the Shatt al-Arab "in order to protect it from the strikes of US aircraft," but the plan "failed," as the marine engineer Ali Muhammad, who works on the "Basra Breeze" yacht, explains.

In March 2003, international coalition planes bombed Mansour's yacht.

The director of the Basra Governorate Antiquities and Heritage Inspectorate, Qahtan Al-Obaid, told AFP that the yacht "was bombed more than once over more than one day... It was subjected to several raids, I think it was bombed three times at different times, but it did not sink."

In photos taken by AFP in 2003, al-Mansur is still floating on the water, with the upper floors burned by air strikes. In June 2003, the yacht began to tilt to one side.

Al-Obaid says that the yacht began to overturn "because of the theft of the pumps in the engine rooms. There were openings through which water entered. Water leaked into the engine rooms, which led to its overturning."

In a country ravaged by war for years, the authorities in recent years launched a campaign to salvage the wreckage of small boats sunk in the Shatt al-Arab.

But getting rid of Mansour's yacht is a big challenge.

Al-Abeed explains that "recovering it is very expensive and difficult. The yacht is big and needs to be cut into parts and then lifted."