Saddam : His Rise and Fall

by Con Coughlin

  By April 1 American forces had reached the outskirts of Baghdad and begun to make their preparations for an assault on the city. There were many issues that first needed to be resolved before commanders could plan their advance. Uppermost in their thoughts were the high-grade intelligence reports that they had received that Saddam’s forces were equipped with battlefield WMD, and that the most likely moment for these weapons to be deployed was at the point where Allied forces began to threaten Baghdad. Saddam was believed to have a drawn a “red line” around the city and given orders that if Allied troops succeeded in crossing the line, then WMD were to be used in defense of the city. The Iraqis were known to have prepared a number of sabotage operations to impede the Americans’ progress, such as blowing up the Hadithah dam, which would have flooded the key crossing points of the Euphrates and turned the area into a quagmire of bogs.6 Commanders had to contend with the cunning tactics of some of the Republican Guard divisions deployed at the approaches to the city. The Medina Division, for example, which was regarded as the largest and most capable of the Republican Guard formations, had skillfully dispersed its fighting elements within the suburbs and villages lying to the west of Baghdad. Much of its weaponry and support structure lay in or next to mosques, schools, and hospitals, as well as in public and private buildings, making it almost impossible for U.S. high-performance aircraft to attack their positions without incurring large numbers of civilian deaths. The Allies were particularly sensitive about civilian casualties after a huge explosion had claimed more than fifty lives in central Baghdad at the end of March. It was unclear whether the deaths were caused by the Allied or the Iraqi weaponry, but the loss of innocent life led to renewed calls by the antiwar lobby to halt the hostilities.

  With an estimated two hundred thousand U.S. troops moving into position for an assault on Baghdad, Saddam made two public appearances in quick succession in an attempt to rally support. With statues and portraits of the Iraqi dictator being destroyed and defaced in areas of the country that had been conquered by the Allies, it was imperative that Saddam broke cover to demonstrate that he was still in control. First he made what the Iraqi authorities insisted was a live television appearance in which he urged his people to put the invaders into “the fire of hell.” Soon afterward a portly, genial figure bearing an uncanny resemblance to the Iraqi dictator was filmed making an impromptu visit to a Baghdad suburb, where he was filmed holding a young Iraqi girl in his arms and receiving the acclaim of a group of delighted civilian onlookers. By making these appearances Saddam laid to rest any suggestion that he had been killed or severely incapacitated during the decapitation strike. Allied intelligence reports claimed that the Iraqi war effort was being run on a day-to-day basis by Qusay and, to a lesser extent, Uday. Saddam’s public appearances, however, confirmed that he was still running the country and was well aware of how the war was progressing. In the television broadcast, Saddam made specific reference to a U.S. Apache helicopter that had been shot down—so it was claimed—by an Iraqi farmer. This was classic Saddam propaganda. If an illiterate, elderly, toothless peasant could shoot down a highly sophisticated American war machine, there was no reason why the great and ancient nation of Iraq should not prevail over the American invaders. If the Iraqis summoned the courage and the will to fight, David would defeat Goliath.

  The big breakthrough for the Americans came on the morning of April 2 when the Third Infantry Division finally succeeded in winning control of the river crossings at Karbala, about seventy miles south of Baghdad, after encountering and eventually overcoming fierce resistance from Republican Guard units. When they realized that they could not defend their positions any longer, Iraqi engineers attempted to blow up the main bridge across the Euphrates, but although the charges caused significant damage, they were not sufficient to destroy the bridge, and by late afternoon American troops had crossed the bridge and secured the crossing. With Karbala under American control, the road to Baghdad was clear. As Lieutenant General William Wallace, the task force commander, commented later that day, “At that point I was pretty confident that we had Saddam by the balls…I knew we were essentially home free.”7

  American commanders wasted no time pressing home the advantage. Within hours the Third Infantry Division was moving through the decimated ranks of the Medina Division, which had been subjected to several days of intensive bombardment by American bombers. In the three days preceding the fall of Karbala it was estimated that three thousand precision-guided bombs were dropped on Republican Guard positions, most of them aimed at the Medina. Consequently as the American soldiers moved through the Medina’s destroyed defensive positions toward Baghdad, they encountered scenes of unimaginable carnage. A sergeant who had served in the Gulf War said, “I hope I won’t experience anything like that again…. When I see that many bodies, I just don’t want to be here anymore.”8 It was a testament to the resilience of Saddam’s propaganda infrastructure that, in the face of these catastrophic setbacks, officials at the Iraqi Information Ministry were still making outlandish claims to the effect that the Iraqi defenders were killing scores of American and British soldiers, destroying their tanks, and shooting down their aircraft in large numbers, whereas in reality total Allied casualties were minimal compared with the devastation that had been inflicted on the Iraqi armed forces.

  Within two days of the breakthrough at Karbala, U.S. troops had reached the outskirts of Baghdad and stormed the international airport on the western approaches to the city. The aerial bombardment of the Republican Guards had been so effective that by the time U.S. troops reached Baghdad, intelligence reports suggested that Saddam possessed only two Republican Guard brigades and approximately fifteen thousand Fedayeen defenders. On the morning of April 5 the entire airport complex was under American control, and later that day U.S. forces began the first of their “thunder runs”—heavily armed reconnaissance missions—into the heart of Baghdad to test the strength of the Iraqi resistance. At this point Saddam and his two sons were still inside Baghdad, desperately trying to coordinate some form of counterattack. But after the devastating losses that the Iraqis had suffered on the battlefield, most of the survivors from the regular armed forces realized that they were fighting a lost cause and simply took off their uniforms and went home. Saddam was left with undisciplined bands of Fedayeen, which were no match for the Americans’ vastly superior firepower. For the next three days American troops, backed by Apache helicopters and A-10 ground-attack aircraft, fought a series of running skirmishes with Fedayeen, who would rush at the U.S. armored columns, wildly firing machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, before being killed by the Americans’ overwhelming firepower. While hundreds—if not thousands—of Iraqis and other foreign fighters, who had come to Baghdad to join the jihad against the United States, were slaughtered by the dozen by the superior American firepower, Saddam’s fighters only managed to inflict damage on a single Abrams tank. As Saddam’s Fedayeen were being decimated throughout the city, the Information Ministry was still trying to convince an increasingly skeptical international press that the Americans had suffered defeat and taken massive casualties.

  At 2 P.M. local time on Monday, April 7, while U.S. forces were fighting their way into the city, Allied commanders received an urgent intelligence report claiming that Saddam, together with his two sons and some senior members of the regime, had entered a restaurant in the city’s upper-class Mansour district. The agent providing the information may well have been the same person who tipped off the Americans about Saddam’s whereabouts on the opening night of the war. At this stage Allied intelligence specialists were still uncertain whether Saddam had survived the initial decapitation attack, as many were still convinced that the “Saddam” making the television appearances was in fact one of his body doubles. If Saddam was still alive, the commanders believed, the new intelligence was so strong that they felt they had no alternative other than to act. The whole purpose of the conflict, after all, was to get rid of Saddam. For
ty-eight minutes after receiving the intelligence, the pilot of a B-1 bomber circling above Baghdad was given the order to attack. Ten minutes later the restaurant was hit by four 2,000-pound bunker-busting bombs. Initially the CIA was confident that Saddam and his inner circle had been killed in the blast, but it soon emerged that, even though Saddam had been in the building at the time the Allies received the initial intelligence report, he and his entourage had left the premises soon afterward and made good their escape. The only people killed in the bombing raid were a family—including several children—who were in the process of preparing a late lunch. It was later suggested that Saddam, suspecting he had a spy in his midst, had deliberately set a trap by letting it be known to only a few of his inner circle that he planned to visit the restaurant at a specific time. When the bombs struck the restaurant, Saddam was able to identify one of his senior bodyguards as the spy. He was immediately executed by a single shot to the head.9

  Even though Saddam had managed to survive another decapitation strike, his thirty-five-year reign of terror was rapidly drawing to a close. The following day, April 8, British troops finally achieved their objective of capturing Basra. As British paratroopers walked into the historic center of the city, they were swamped by men, women, and children who rushed to greet them as liberators. Saad Ahmed, a fifty-four-year-old English teacher, was one of many joining the throng to express his thanks to the liberators. “We have been waiting for you for a long time,” he said. “You are victorious as far as the war is concerned, but we are victorious in life. We have not been living as human beings for more than 30 years.”10 In Baghdad U.S. forces continued to force their way into the city center and managed to occupy Saddam’s main Presidential Palace in the center of the city. The only resistance they encountered was in the form of groups of Fedayeen fighters in pickup trucks carrying Kalashnikov rifles and RPG7 rocket launchers, who were reduced to launching suicide attacks against American units. Despite the presence of U.S. soldiers in Saddam’s main palace, Iraqi officials at the Information Ministry continued to insist that they were winning the war. “No American tank is in Baghdad,” insisted Sahaf, the information minister at an impromptu press conference later that day. “They tried to get back into the city last night…but most were forced to retreat and the rest massacred. We are inflicting heavy losses on them and hundreds of their soldiers have begun to kill themselves.” As he spoke his voice was almost drowned out by the sound of gunfire and U.S. planes sweeping low overhead.

  From Saddam’s point of view, confirmation that his reign was finally over came the following day when a group of American soldiers pulled down a large bronze statue of Saddam located just outside the Palestine Hotel, the home of the world’s media. There was a brief diplomatic incident when an overenthusiastic American Marine placed the Stars and Stripes over Saddam’s head, until being politely informed that it would be more appropriate to use the Iraqi flag. In retrospect, the attack on the restaurant in Mansour had been the “tip” moment Allied commanders had been waiting for, the moment when a monolithic dictatorship suddenly implodes. Within forty-eight hours of the attack on the restaurant, the remains of the Iraqi leadership had simply melted away. Not even the indefatigable information minister Sahaf turned up for work on the morning of April 9. For the first time in thirty-five years Saddam Hussein was no longer master of Iraq’s destiny.

  Saddam Hussein spent the final days of his rule desperately hoping that his bands of Fedayeen irregular fighters would be able to draw American forces into a messy, urban conflict in which they sustained heavy casualties and were forced to withdraw. Handwritten memos sent by Saddam to senior Baathists—copies of which are in the author’s possession—reveal that Saddam was still trying to oversee the defense of Baghdad as late as April 8. The memos are typical of the mundane bureaucracy that characterized the Baath regime, and mainly consist of notes authorizing the payment of large sums of Iraqi dinars to officers in the Special Republican Guard and tribal leaders to guarantee their loyalty.11 It was only when Saddam realized that the Fedayeen, for all their suicidal displays of courage, were never going to impede the progress of U.S. forces into the city, that he gave the order to his entourage to disperse. Key ministers were ordered to activate their plans, made before the war, to go into hiding and prepare to wage a military insurgency campaign against the occupying forces, while less senior officials, such as Sahaf, the information minister, were abandoned to their fate.

  Until this point Saddam had been living in a number of safe houses in the city, moving from one to another every night with a handful of bodyguards, sometimes accompanied by one or other of his sons. For the obvious security reasons Saddam tried to avoid a situation where the three leading members of the regime were at the same location for any length of time. Saddam’s itinerant lifestyle certainly confused the Americans, which was demonstrated when U.S. troops first reached the sprawling Presidential Palace complex on the banks of the Tigris and were disappointed not to find any signs of inhabitation. There were gilt-edged chairs and gold-plated bathroom fittings in abundance, but no actual evidence that anyone had lived there anytime recently. This was explained by the fact that, almost since the 1980s, Saddam had not had a regular domicile, but had always been on the move, relocating from one palace to another. Even at the height of his power Saddam hid from his own people, and in time of war it was no great hardship for him to go into hiding in the backstreets of Baghdad, a way of life that had become almost second nature to him since he first became involved with the Baath Party in the late 1950s.

  One of Saddam’s safe houses, which was discovered in the Arasat al-Hindi (“Indian Camp”) neighborhood of Baghdad shortly after hostilities ended, revealed the elaborate lengths to which Saddam’s entourage was prepared to go in order to protect the Iraqi dictator. From the outside the house looked much the same as any other suburban villa. It was only when the visitor closely scrutinized the construction of the bookcase that covered an entire wall of the main living room that a secret passageway was revealed that led to a complex of rooms where Saddam and his entourage had hidden during the closing stages of the war. The red-carpeted staircase led to a well-proportioned room, large enough to host a meeting of the Iraqi cabinet. The back window had been bricked up to protect the occupants from the prying eyes of neighbors. To one side there was a well-equipped kitchen and a bathroom fitted with a double-size bath. A side door led from the kitchen directly to the garage—for a quick exit—and this presidential garage, which itself was concealed by a false wall, was large enough for two cars. On the other side of this house there was another complex of several bedrooms that, according to the landlord, were occupied by Saddam and Uday. One of the rooms contained a collapsible hospital bed that had been used by Saddam when he was still suffering from the injuries he suffered in the opening decapitation strike.

  The landlord claimed Saddam had moved into the safe house only days before the end of the war. The neighbors related how Saddam had arrived with Uday in a gold-tinted four-wheel-drive SUV bearing the distinctive blue license plates of Iraq’s Ministry of Information. They were soon made aware of the presence of their distinguished visitor when a group of Saddam’s special security guards arrived at one of the houses and sealed it off. “They were very threatening,” recalled one of the neighbors. “One evening I had gone onto my roof to watch the bombing. The next morning one of the guards confronted me and asked me what I was doing on the roof. I explained that I was looking at the fighter aircraft. The guard told me, ‘Fuck the fighters. In future keep inside your house—or else.’”12

  Confirmation that Saddam had remained in Baghdad after U.S. troops had penetrated the city’s defenses emerged a few days later when Abu Dhabi television broadcast footage of Saddam touring Baghdad’s northern suburbs to the acclaim of cheering crowds on April 9, the same day that U.S. Marines pulled down Saddam’s statue in al-Fardus Square. Saddam was seen walking around a square outside the Adhamiya mosque with Uday, addressing cheering c
rowds from the top of a truck. According to Iraqi eyewitnesses, at one point Saddam declared, “I am fighting alongside you in the same trenches.” Soon afterward Saddam and his entourage got in their cars and drove off. Twelve hours later U.S. officials, having received intelligence reports about the sighting of Saddam, ordered Apache helicopters and U.S. warplanes to attack the area, and the area came under intense bombardment, and part of the cemetery behind the mosque was destroyed.

  This was the last official sighting of Saddam in Baghdad, and by the time film of his appearance was shown on Arabic television, the Iraqi dictator and most of his inner circle had already fled the city. Even so his appearance was deeply embarrassing for the Allies, who, in the days following the taking of Baghdad, insisted that Saddam and his immediate family had been killed during the hostilities. Having failed in their attempts to capture or kill the al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, during the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Bush administration was eager that Saddam did not become a figurehead for those opposed to America’s postwar occupation of Iraq. Speaking soon after military commanders declared on April 14 that the main military campaign had been concluded, President Bush claimed that he had “some evidence” that Saddam was dead. On May 1, when Bush declared officially that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended,” his officials gave a number of briefings during which they reiterated the view that Saddam was dead, and expressed their frustration that they could not prove it. Referring to the decapitation strikes that had been carried out against Saddam during the war, one senior Bush official remarked, “I think there is a good chance that we got him one of those times, but I don’t know for certain.” A senior military official was more frank about the problems the uncertainty over Saddam’s fate was causing the coalition. “It’s a problem,” he conceded. “There is a great desire to prove he is no longer among us.”13