Last June, Kai Kobold, a German antiques dealer whose wares date back to the Neolithic era, bought a fourteen-year-old object with more history, he believed, than any other piece in his collection. He said it was the left leg of a statue of the deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. The statue had stood in Baghdad’s Firdos Square, and was famously toppled during the American invasion, in 2003. Thirteen years later, Kobold enlisted five friends to help him carry what appeared to be the statue’s gam into his home, near the city of Hamburg. “You see this and it’s boring,” he told me a few months ago, as we ogled the leg together. It looked like someone had bronzed a giant’s hip wader as though it were a baby shoe. “But when you know what it is—it’s something like the experience when you come into a church.”

Kobold is thirty-four years old and sports short blond hair and a boyish beard. He lives in a converted brick water tower, where he also keeps a canvas from Picasso’s Blue Period, a sheet of a handwritten Mozart score, a thousand-year-old German cabinet, and a stone basin that the Mayans used to pool the blood of human sacrifices and that Kobold uses to hold his mail and keys. Kobold had placed the leg near a shiny white piano in his tower’s ground-floor music room. “I love the leg very much,” he told me. But, even as we spoke, the leg was no longer his. He had just resold it, through eBay. “For one hundred thousand euros, I can buy a lot more things,” he explained.

Kobold was a college student with a side business in antique fireplaces when he watched footage of the statue’s toppling on television, on April 9, 2003. Images of the event were broadcast around the world, and many immediately hailed it as an iconic moment, evidence of the U.S. military’s triumph and the Iraqi people’s gratitude. “One cannot help but think of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain,” Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, said at a news conference in the Pentagon. The footage “transcends anything I have ever seen,” Fox News’ Brit Hume declared. In the nine hours after the event, Hume's network replayed video of it, on average, every 4.4 minutes, according to an analysis from George Washington University. But as the years passed and Iraq spiralled into sectarian violence, the statue’s toppling morphed into a symbol of journalists’ naïve enthusiasm for the Bush Administration’s reckless invasion.

Some people, though, were more interested in the statue as a physical object. Its dismemberment began quickly: the day of the toppling, a man was seen strapping Saddam’s head to a cart and wheeling it away. In 2011, after a British soldier returned home to Herefordshire with what he said was a segment of Saddam’s buttock, he tried, unsuccessfully, to sell it for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. In 2010, while researching a book about statues of Saddam, the writer Florian Göttke received an e-mail from a U.S. marine who said he and two friends had made off with one of Saddam’s hands but had later lost it in the mail.

As for the left leg, three men were photographed removing it from Firdos Square in May, 2003. The next year, a man in the German city of Duisburg claimed to have it in his garage. The man, who spoke to various German media outlets but insisted on remaining anonymous (“I live in a city with a large Muslim population,” he said by way of explanation), told the magazine Stern that he had found the leg in a junk yard in Bremen, where he had been searching for classic-car parts. He said the junk-yard owner had purchased the leg from British contractors returning from Iraq, without realizing what it really was. At the junk yard, the Duisburg man paid a few thousand euros for the bronze leg, believing “one hundred per cent” it had come from Firdos Square. He was confident he could flip it for a profit. “There are crazier people than me,” he told Stern.

In Duisburg, the man stood the leg atop a concrete base, to which he affixed a plaque that read, “Saddam Hussein Statue. Firdos Square. April 9, 2003.” The leg became a media sensation after he put it up for sale on an auction Web site called Azubo—but the bidding ended when a hacker crashed the server. The news coverage also drew the attention of the Duisburg city prosecutor, who received a complaint questioning the leg’s authenticity. Authorities opened an investigation, but the result was inconclusive, and they let the matter drop. Soon after, the owner quietly sold the leg to a wealthy industrialist whom Kobold knew through his work.

In 2004, the industrialist invited Kobold to come see the leg. “It was important to see it one time and touch it one time,” Kobold told me. He had loved touching historical objects since he was a child, when his uncle, a history professor, would let him hold old manuscripts and ceramic pieces. The leg was nothing much to look at, but it mesmerized Kobold all the same. “I love most the pieces that look like nothing but are very, very important,” he said. The years passed, and Kobold’s thoughts would occasionally return to the leg. Then in June, the industrialist contacted Kobold again. His wife was sick of the leg, the industrialist told him, and his business partner didn’t want it in their office. Did Kobold want it? Kobold quickly agreed to buy it—for a price, he told me, of less than ten thousand euros.

Kobold had no doubts about the leg’s authenticity, despite its spotted past. He told me that the leg had arrived in Europe on a ship that unloaded it in Rotterdam. When I mentioned that media reports in 2004 said that it had come through Bremen, he was surprised. “It was never in Bremen,” he said. He speculated that newspapers had changed the location to protect the junk-yard owner’s identity. In any case, the discrepancy did not worry him. Kobold had looked closely at the images from Firdos Square. He was confident that the leg in his music room was authentic. “I’ve known this business for twenty years,” he said. “I think I’m able to see in most art things whether they’re original or not.”

I’d also looked at the images from Firdos Square. After seeing Kobold’s leg up close, I had some doubts. The clearest photograph of the toppling shows that the statue’s left leg broke at the knee, while Kobold’s leg rose up to midthigh. The statue’s shoe in Firdos Square also appeared much larger than the shoe in Kobold’s music room. And, if the statue fragments were the same, why had Kobold needed six people to carry the leg into his house, when a photograph showed only three people carrying away the leg in Firdos Square? When I later sent Kobold the photograph, he questioned the authenticity not of the leg but of the image. “It looks a bit distorted,” he replied in an e-mail. “Also, the Iraqi people look a bit too small and fat, like they are normally not.” (Göttke, who wrote the book about Saddam statues, had also noticed differences between recent photographs of Kobold’s leg and the one in Firdos Square. In an e-mail, Göttke offered an alternative theory: Kobold’s leg may have come from another, less iconic statue of Saddam, which had stood in the dictator’s Presidential palace.)