Saddam : His Rise and Fall

by Con Coughlin

  At 3:38 A.M. local time in Baghdad, two F-117 Stealth bombers of the Eighth “Black Sheep” Fighter Squadron took off from their base in Kuwait. Each aircraft was loaded with two EGBU-27 bunker-buster bombs, each of which weighed two thousand pounds. The pilots of the aircraft had been informed of the identity of their targets. Stealth fighters operate best under cover of darkness, and the pilots’ main concern was to conduct their mission before the sun began to rise over Baghdad. Nearly two hours later, at 5:36 A.M., just before sunrise, the two bombers homed in on the building complex south of Baghdad, and dropped all four bombs on the target before returning safely to their base in Kuwait.1

  The bombs devastated the complex, and the initial intelligence reports were highly encouraging. Agents working on the ground reported that the complex had been so badly damaged that it was unlikely that anyone inside at the moment the bombs hit their target could have survived. Satellite reconnaissance showed fleets of ambulances making their way to the scene, and analysts used to monitoring how the Iraqi emergency services reacted to various incidents concluded from the high priority being given to the bombing that senior members of the regime must be inside. British intelligence received conflicting reports: one said that Saddam had been killed outright, another that Saddam had been injured so badly that he required a number of blood transfusions, and that one or more of his sons had been killed.2 It was even claimed that a message had been intercepted from one of Saddam’s commanders to Moscow pleading with the Russians to send one of their top surgeons to Baghdad to treat Saddam’s life-threatening abdominal injuries.3

  It is difficult to imagine a more dramatic opening to the military campaign known as Operation Iraqi Freedom than the direct assassination attempt that was made against the Iraqi dictator in his bunker. By launching what President Bush later termed a “decapitation strike” against Saddam and his inner circle, the White House issued a clear signal that the war was being fought for the sole purpose of removing Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime from power. America’s quarrel was not with the Iraqi people, but with the regime that had dominated the country for nearly thirty-five years. Throughout the military campaign U.S. and British commanders were under strict orders to keep civilian casualties to a minimum, and to concentrate their firepower on targets clearly associated with the regime, such as presidential palaces, command and control centers, Baath Party buildings, and military bases.

  Any hope that Saddam had been taken out of the military equation quickly receded later that day when a videotape of the Iraqi leader was broadcast on television in Baghdad. Looking disheveled and wearing thick-rimmed reading glasses, Saddam delivered a defiant message to the outside world, but made only a passing reference to the attack on his headquarters the previous night. “They will face bitter defeat,” he said in a heavy guttural accent. “The criminal little Bush [Saddam used this description to draw an unflattering comparison between the U.S. president and his father] has committed a crime against humanity. We pledge to you in our name and in the name of our leadership and in the name of our heroic army, in the name of Iraq, its civilization and its history, that we will fight the invaders.” Reading from his notes slowly and deliberately, he made a further appeal to the Iraqi people to confront the invading forces. “Draw your sword and be not afraid. Long live Jihad and long live Palestine.”

  Saddam’s unkempt appearance and rambling manner gave rise to all manner of speculative theories. It was suggested that the tape had been made prior to the attack as a precaution in case anything happened to him, and that the man in the camouflage fatigues and the black beret reading the statement was actually one of Saddam’s many doubles. But after careful analysis by a team of CIA experts it was accepted that the tape was genuine, mainly because Saddam looked in such obvious discomfort as he read the script. One U.S. official said Saddam’s bloated face was the result of the injuries he had received in the attack on his bunker. Given the great care Saddam normally took in his appearance, it was generally agreed that he would only have allowed himself to be filmed in his reading glasses if his circumstances permitted no other option.

  Saddam’s survival owed much to the network of heavily fortified bunkers that had been constructed by teams of German and Iraqi engineers during the war with Iran in the 1980s. Some of Saddam’s bunkers had been designed by Karl Esser, whose grandmother Anna had helped design the bunker in which Adolf Hitler ended his life in Berlin in 1945. Esser, whose company was based in Munich, revealed that the walls of the main bunker in Baghdad had been built to a thickness of nine feet to withstand an atomic bomb of the size that destroyed Hiroshima during the Second World War. According to Esser, it would take the equivalent of sixteen Tomahawk cruise missiles landing one after the other at exactly the same spot to penetrate the steel-and-concrete protective wall. The electronics in the compound were protected by special insulation to prevent them from being destroyed or interrupted by graphite bombs. There was also an escape tunnel protected by steel doors weighing three tons each that led under the Tigris River.

  Saddam had escaped the Allies’ initial decapitation strike, but the attack nevertheless had a profound impact on Saddam’s ability to maintain control over Iraq’s defensive operations. Saddam had gone into the conflict believing that, ultimately, he would prevail, as he had done during the many other crises that he had faced during the twenty-three years of his presidency. From his point of view, he had won the diplomatic contest against the Americans and the British. The unanimity of the UN Security Council when it passed Resolution 1441 the previous November had been severely fractured. Of the fifteen states that supported the new weapons inspection regime, only three—the United States, Britain, and Spain—supported military action, and of those only America and Britain were prepared to commit themselves fully to the military campaign. In Britain Tony Blair had to endure the indignity of a massive antiwar rebellion by 139 Labour backbenchers during his attempts to win parliamentary approval for military action. Saddam was well aware that the war by no means enjoyed universal popularity, and hoped that he would be able to exploit the international divisions as the war progressed. The big difference between the previous wars that he had fought and this one was that this time his enemies’ main objective was to secure his removal from office.

  In the opening salvoes of the war, apart from targeting Saddam himself, the Allies fired forty-four cruise missiles at key regime targets in Baghdad, inflicting severe damage on Saddam’s command and control infrastructure. The “shock and awe” tactics, as they became known, were designed to use the Allies’ overwhelming air superiority to devastating effect. At the outset of the war General Tommy Franks, the jug-eared Texan in overall command at U.S. Central Command (Centcom), promised that Operation Iraqi Freedom would be “characterized by shock, by surprise, by flexibility, by the employment of precise munitions on a scale never seen before, and by the application of overwhelming force.” Certainly, so far as Saddam was concerned, these tactics had an immediate effect on his ability to mastermind the war effort. Soon after the initial attack on Saddam’s bunker, staff at Centcom headquarters, having strained, through every sophisticated eavesdropping device at their disposal, to monitor the Iraqi dictator’s movements and behavior, came to the conclusion that Saddam had simply disappeared from view. Whatever else Saddam did after that night, he was no longer able to issue orders through Iraq’s established communications networks. So far as Centcom commanders were concerned, Saddam ceased to be militarily relevant after the first night of hostilities.4

  Operation Iraqi Freedom imitated a pattern similar to that established at the start of Operation Desert Storm twelve years previously, the key difference being that the devastating aerial bombardment was accompanied by a simultaneous ground invasion from the south. Vital Iraqi targets were subjected to a massive aerial bombardment, including army units that had been deployed at key strategic locations throughout the country to tackle the invaders. Compared with the firepower available to the Americans
and British, the ill-equipped Iraqi troops were in no position to put up any serious resistance, and as the Allies launched their main ground offensive from Kuwait across Iraq’s southern border, they were quickly able to overcome the Iraqi defenses, even though there were areas where some Iraqi units made a heroic effort to withstand the enemy advance. By the second day British Royal Marines had managed to capture the strategically important port of Umm Qasr, at the head of the Shatt al-Arab River, leaving the way open for a direct assault on Basra, Iraq’s second largest city. To facilitate the Allies’ operational effectiveness, military officials had agreed that the British should be given responsibility for capturing and securing Basra and the surrounding area while the Americans, with their vastly superior strength and firepower, would battle to take control of the rest of the country, including the capital Baghdad. As the British fought to establish control over the main approaches to Basra, the Americans swept north toward Nasiriyah. In fact the American advance was so rapid that by the end of the first week U.S. forces had reached the outskirts of Baghdad. The speed of the advance obliged U.S. commanders to order a temporary halt to allow reinforcements and supplies to catch up.

  Although Saddam was no longer in a position to direct Iraqi resistance to the invasion, he was still able to follow developments on the battlefield and to keep in touch with his senior aides in Baghdad. After the opening night attack on his bunker Saddam had resumed his peripatetic existence of moving from one safe house to another, accompanied only by a few bodyguards and occasionally by either Uday or Qusay. Just as he had done during the Gulf War, Saddam traveled in ordinary civilian cars, and not even his closest advisers would know where he was staying from one night to the next. The devastating attack on his bunker had demonstrated the effectiveness of the Americans’ ability to track his movements. It also raised the question in his mind that there might be a spy operating in the senior ranks of the Baath Party who was providing the Allies with information about his movements and whereabouts.

  If Saddam’s own involvement in the conflict was impeded by the limits imposed on his movements, there were still a significant number of operational Baath Party loyalists to ensure that the plans drawn up by Saddam and Qusay for defending the regime were enforced. Once American and British troops had broken through Iraq’s southern defenses, they were overwhelmed by the huge numbers of Iraqi military personnel offering to surrender. Having fought in two disastrous wars on behalf of Saddam, it soon became apparent that the majority of ordinary Iraqi soldiers—most of them unwilling conscripts—had no desire to fight another hopeless war on behalf of Saddam’s morally bankrupt regime.

  Prior to the war American and British politicians had predicted that the Iraqi people would rise up and greet them as liberators once the military offensive commenced. In many respects this was more wishful thinking than a realistic expectation, particularly in southern Iraq where the predominant Shiite Muslim community had neither forgotten nor forgiven the shameful way that they were abandoned to Saddam’s henchmen at the end of the Gulf War. Even so, Baathist loyalists were eager to stop both Iraqi soldiers from deserting and local Shiite leaders from encouraging a revolt against Saddam’s rule. Before the war Saddam had taken the precaution of positioning trusted and well-armed Baathist officials at key Iraqi towns and cities. Apart from preventing civilians from surrendering, they were ordered to ensure that ordinary Iraqis were located close to potential military targets, such as Baath Party buildings and military compounds, so that in the event of Allied air strikes there would be high civilian casualties. If that were to happen, then Saddam believed that he could rely on the antiwar movement to mobilize an international outcry over the injustice of the war.

  Baath officials and the Fedayeen were under instructions to maintain the campaign of intimidation against Iraqi civilians. Just as Vichy troops succeeded in terrorizing the French during the last days of the Second World War, so Saddam’s execution squads were active throughout the country during the early stages of the Allied invasion, killing suspected traitors and deserters pour encourager les autres. In Basra seven Baath Party officials were executed in public for failing to set a good enough example in confronting the coalition forces, and a tribal leader was shot for suspected treachery. Baathist diehards opened fire with machine guns on hundreds of Iraqi civilians who had ventured outside the city walls in search of food. In the northern city of Kirkuk fifty-one Iraqis were reported to have been executed in the last week of March on suspicion of having links with Iraqi opposition groups based in nearby Kurdistan. Even as Saddam’s regime collapsed around him, there was no letup in the bloodletting.

  The Allies devised their own propaganda campaign to persuade the Iraqis not to fight, and while some of their measures were effective, the outcome did not always match the intention. Before the war, Arabic-speaking intelligence officers had contacted senior members of the Baath regime and the military on their private telephone numbers at home urging them not to support Saddam, but to help the coalition win a bloodless victory. This tactic was similar to the one that had been used by Saddam’s intelligence officers to intimidate opponents living abroad. Only in this case the level of paranoia that existed in the higher echelons of the regime was such that the Iraqi officials believed the calls were being made by Saddam’s intelligence service to test their loyalty. Afraid of arrest, incarceration, torture, and even death, they refused to cooperate. The initiative, however, did benefit the Allies because the Iraqi officers virtually stopped using their telephones altogether, which seriously impeded the regime’s communications in the critical days before the war. Another Allied propaganda initiative involved dropping millions of leaflets on Iraqi troop positions urging them not to fight. Although the leaflets did not attract the mass desertions that the Allies had hoped for, they nevertheless had a serious effect on the morale of Iraqi troops, who realized that American bombers could just as easily drop their payloads on their locations, despite Saddam’s claims about the resilience of the Iraqi air defenses.5

  As the fighting entered its second week, the Iraqi tactics began to pay dividends. The Allies had dealt quickly and effectively with the regular Iraqi units as they made their rapid advance north toward Baghdad from southern Iraq, but they were not prepared for the often ferocious guerrilla raids launched on them by small bands of Fedayeen and remnants of the Iraqi army. The Iraqi irregulars conducted classic resistance operations, such as staging a number of hit-and-run attacks on Allied positions that had been made vulnerable by the speed of the advance on Baghdad. They also made a concerted effort to attack exposed supply lines, thereby disrupting the Allies’ effort to concentrate their forces around Baghdad for a major offensive. In the south they repeated the tactic first seen during the Gulf War of setting fire to the oil fields, to obscure the view of both the invading troops and enemy aircraft. The Iraqis’ defensive tactics played into the hands of critics of the war, who were not slow to point out that President Bush had promised to deliver a quick victory. Following a meeting with Blair at Camp David, Bush answered his critics by insisting that American forces would fight in Iraq “however long it takes to win.” Even if Saddam was in no position to take direct control of the Iraqi resistance, he could take some degree of satisfaction from the fact that everything appeared to be going to plan.

  On March 30 Saddam made his first television appearance since the bomb attack on his bunker on the opening night of the war. On this occasion he was joined by his sons Uday and Qusay and, in video footage that had been shot hours after Allied bombers had tried to knock state television off the air, the Iraqi leader could be seen giving money and medals to troops who had distinguished themselves in the fighting in southern Iraq. Although there was no way of knowing when or where the video had been made, its timing reminded Iraqis that Saddam, who was wearing military uniform and was chairing the meeting, was still running the country. A statement read at the same time by an Iraqi announcer said that Saddam had decorated commanders and troops of units in
Umm Qasr and Nasiriyah for their “heroic” defense. In a separate statement read on television the same evening, Saddam announced that any members of the Eleventh Division killed fighting the Americans would receive medals, and their families would immediately receive two million Iraqi dinars ($750). In terms of rallying support, Saddam’s appearance was certainly a boost to those involved in the fighting. However, rumors continued to circulate about his well-being after he failed to appear on television as promised the following day to deliver an address to the nation. Instead his speech was read by Muhammad Said al-Sahaf, the information minister; in it Saddam called on Iraqis to carry out suicide missions against the invading forces. “It is your chance for immortality,” read the statement. “Seize the opportunity, my brothers.”

  From the start of hostilities Saddam had made it clear that he wanted the decisive battle of the war to be fought in Baghdad itself, where he believed that he could depend on his elite, and relatively well-equipped units, to fight to the death to defend the regime. As the Allied forces continued to concentrate their energies on driving toward Baghdad, Sultan Hasim Ahmad, the Iraqi defense minister, confirmed that the regime would make its last stand in the capital. “We will not be surprised if the enemy surrounds Baghdad in five or ten days, but he will have to take the city. But Baghdad cannot be taken as long as the citizens in it are still alive.” Allied commanders had planned their campaign on the basis that the ultimate battle for control of Iraq would take place in the vicinity of Baghdad, and the twin-pronged attacks by the U.S. Third Infantry Division and First Marine Division were conceived with the intention that they would converge on the Iraqi capital, having first conquered the 350 miles of hostile terrain that lay between Kuwait and the Americans’ ultimate objective.