if the children are done bickering. 
Saddam ha a locator of al-Tikirit attached to his name on the end. This means he came from Tikrit. He doesn’t use it - no one in government did - because they preffered to keep the fact that many of the Baathists were from Tikrit out of the public’s vision as much as possible.
Maybe it’s because they’re not sure how to spell his last name?
Maybe “in current linguistics circles,” but “educated” circles is a bit much. It appears we’re talking about the letter ې (hope that shows up) which can and has been transliterated any number of ways into English. But “Hussein” is just the common/popular way. The English language press in the Gulf certainly prints “Hussein” for both the Iraqi and (did for) the Jordanian, and the handful of Husseins I met spelled their name that way in English as well.
Incidentally, you do run into a number of family names in the Gulf which are independent of the series-of-patronymic-first-names system. Given the political and social structures of these places that makes a lot of sense. In North Africa you may run into a lot of people who speak Arabic of other descent (Berber for example) who likewise have family names.
Never did meet a “Saddam.”