by Con Coughlin
Among the contingency plans Saddam made before the war were the arrangements for his own safekeeping if the need arose for him to go into hiding. Saddam had paid an estimated $1.3 billion to loyalists and tribal leaders in protection money that he hoped would buy their allegiance in the event of his defeat.14 Apart from having a number of safe houses in Baghdad, Saddam had hundreds more scattered around the country, with many of them being located in the area around Tikrit, his tribal homeland, where he could rely on the unqualified support of his fellow tribesmen.
Soon after his appearance at the Adhimya mosque on April 9, Saddam ordered members of his immediate family to go into hiding and activate the insurgency campaign that he had planned, with Qusay’s help, before hostilities commenced. Obsessed with secrecy about his own plans, Saddam told no one—not even his own sons—what he intended to do once he had fled Baghdad, and senior Baath Party officials, who had not been included in Saddam’s personal survival plan, were left to fend for themselves.
Saddam was really only interested in looking after himself and his immediate family. Before the war he had already taken the precaution of sending his wives and daughters out of the country for safekeeping. Sajida and his two estranged daughters-in-law were sent to the Syrian capital Damascus, while Samira, his second wife, and their son Ali were sent to Beirut. Following the collapse of Saddam’s regime, dozens of family members and senior Baathists fled to both Syria and Jordan. An Iraqi businessman who worked closely with Saddam’s regime claimed that he had helped to transfer “tens of millions of dollars” from a bank account run by Saddam’s family in Jordan to the Iraqi embassy in Damascus shortly before hostilities commenced. “The money was mainly for Saddam’s wife Sajida and the immediate family,” said the businessman. In all, more than one hundred members of Saddam’s family relocated to Damascus for the duration of the war.15
After the war many of Saddam’s family took advantage of Iraq’s porous borders with Syria to commute on an almost weekly basis between northern Iraq and Syria. The ancient smuggling routes between the two countries, which were controlled by the local tribes, meant that members of Saddam’s entourage could move freely across the borders. Among those who fled to Syria after the war was Qusay’s elder daughter Mouj, who arrived in the Syrian capital in the middle of May with her husband Ali Adnan Khairallah, the son of Adnan Khairallah, Saddam’s cousin and childhood friend whom he had murdered in 1989 (see pages 235–237). Saddam had arranged the marriage between his granddaughter and Adnan’s son in September 2002 to end the blood feud that had existed between the two families since Saddam had had his former defense minister killed in a helicopter crash in 1989. Contacted in Damascus in late May 2003, Ali Khairallah claimed that he had last spoken to Saddam in Baghdad on April 5, when the Iraqi leader told him, “Don’t worry, everything is going to work out fine. Have faith.”16
Saddam showed little interest in the fate of those who were not close family members or members of the inner ruling circle, even if they had served him loyally over many years. Men like Tariq Aziz, Saddam’s former foreign minister and deputy prime minister, who had been one of the Iraqi dictator’s most effective apologists since the mid-1970s, were left to make their own arrangements, and were given no intimation of Saddam’s intentions. As a consequence within days of Baghdad being liberated from Saddam’s rule, a number of prominent former Baathists found that they had no alternative other than to surrender. To facilitate the task of tracking down the most important members of the regime, the Pentagon issued a pack of playing cards, each one of which contained the picture of one of Iraq’s fifty-five most wanted officials: Saddam’s picture was the ace of spades.
Within days of the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces had detained two of Saddam’s half brothers, Watban and Barzan, while they were trying to flee the country to Syria. A few days later former prime minister Hamza al-Zubaydi was arrested by Iraqi opposition forces in the town of Hillah, south of Baghdad. In addition a number of high-ranking Iraqi scientists, military officers and government officials were taken into custody. The Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas, who was accused of masterminding the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro in which one American was killed, was captured. Some officials felt so helpless without Saddam’s protective mantle that they almost begged the Allies to detain them. Muhammad Said al-Sahaf, Saddam’s last information minister, pleaded with the Americans to let him surrender because he feared for his life because he had misled the Iraqi people over how well they were doing in the war. Eventually U.S. officials agreed to take him into custody, but released him a few hours later because he had little of interest to tell them. As a middle-ranking bureaucrat in the Baath Party’s secrecy-obsessed infrastructure, Sahaf was told only what Saddam wanted him to know. The Allies were far more interested when Tariq Aziz negotiated his surrender in late April. They believed that he would be in a position to shed light on Saddam’s whereabouts, but they were disappointed because Aziz, though he was more than happy to talk, knew little about what Saddam had been up to, or where he might be hiding. Paranoia was so deeply entrenched in Saddam’s regime that even senior officials like Aziz were kept in the dark about the regime’s innermost secrets.
The state of confusion that prevailed during the final weeks of Saddam’s ruling elite became apparent as Allied forces searched their way through the homes and palaces of the inner circle, which consisted of Saddam’s immediate family—his sons Uday and Qusay—and long-serving Baath Party apparatchiks such as Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri and Taha Yassin Ramadan. In Tariq Aziz’s palace in the affluent al-Jadariyah district of the city, an aging copy of The Times newspaper provided a clue as to the last time the dwelling had been inhabited. Dated March 8, the main headline read “Iraq Has Ten Days to Avert War.” An altogether more sinister insight into the mind-set of the Hussein clan was revealed when the Allies searched Uday’s palace. Apart from finding nearly $2 million worth of liquor, cigars, and heroin, they found pinned to the wall of his gym, among photographs of naked women, pictures of President Bush’s twenty-one-year-old twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara, in evening wear.
The interrogation of senior Baathists by Allied officers after the war revealed just how far removed Saddam and his ruling circle had become during the buildup to the conflict. Saddam himself was so convinced that war would be averted, or that America would mount only a limited bombing campaign, that he deployed the Iraqi military to crush domestic uprisings rather than defend against a ground invasion. Saddam still retained the same belief that he had expressed to April Glaspie thirteen years previously about Washington being “casualty averse.” He believed that even if Bush declared war, it would take the form of a bombing campaign that Iraq could withstand. The Iraqi Defense Ministry, in a grand miscalculation, believed that any ground offensive would come across the Jordanian border. The interrogations also revealed that members of Saddam’s inner circle routinely lied to him and each other about the true extent of Iraq’s military capabilities.17
With Saddam gone, the Americans assumed overall control for running the country. After all the difficulties that the Bush administration had encountered at the United Nations prior to the war, President Bush was determined to keep the UN’s postwar involvement in Iraq to a minimum. The president was actively encouraged in this view by the group of neoconservative ideologues working within the civilian administration at the Pentagon under Donald Rumsfeld, who believed that Iraq provided a golden opportunity to export American-style democracy to the Middle East. According to their vision, if Iraq could be transformed into a modern, democratic nation that was based on free enterprise, then it would serve as a model to the rest of the region that would bring peace, prosperity, and stability.
In what amounted to a victory speech delivered on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln on May 1, President Bush said the military phase of the battle to topple Saddam Hussein was “one victory in a war on terror that began on September 11, 2001, and still goes on.” Bush arg
ued that by overthrowing Saddam’s government, he had removed “an ally of al-Qaeda,” and vowed to continue the hunt for Saddam’s banned WMD arsenal. Even though no clear evidence linking Saddam to the September 11 attacks had been uncovered, Bush continued to link the war on terror with the war on Iraq. “We have not forgotten the victims of September 11, the last phone calls, the cold-blooded murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got…. The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror. We have removed an ally of al-Qaeda, and cut off a source of terrorist funding. And this much is certain: no terrorist network will gain weapons of mass destruction from the Iraqi regime, because that regime is no more.”
The Allies had secured a swift and comprehensive victory on the battlefield, but winning the peace would prove to be far more problematic. To start with, even though the majority of Iraqis were grateful to see the back of the Baathists, they had no desire to be occupied by a foreign military force. As the British had discovered in the 1920s, the Iraqis are a fiercely nationalistic people, and the presence of large numbers of American troops on the streets of Baghdad and the other big cities was not universally welcomed. The other important factor that weighed heavily against a smooth transition of power from the Baathists to a military occupation was the inexperience of American troops in carrying out peacekeeping duties. America’s historic aversion to imperialist-seeming military operations overseas meant that, while her armed forces constituted a formidable fighting machine, American soldiers had little practical experience of governing a civilian population and undertaking peacekeeping operations.
This handicap had disastrous consequences in Iraq in the weeks immediately following the war as the country, and Baghdad in particular, descended into an anarchic state of lawlessness that U.S. forces seemed unable—or unwilling—to control. Within days of the military campaign ending, thousands of looters—many of them common criminals whom Saddam had released from prison shortly before the war—took to the streets and ransacked every government building they could find. Schools, hospitals, and other public buildings were stripped of their entire contents. The looters set fire to Baghdad’s central telephone exchange and stripped the main power station of vital equipment. Every government ministry was ransacked, and crowds of looters paraded with impunity through the streets of Baghdad with trucks and donkey carts piled high with office chairs and air-conditioning units. One of the highest-profile victims of the looters was the Baghdad Museum, where priceless, ancient artifacts were stolen. Nor did the new occupying powers seem unduly concerned. Donald Rumsfeld, the U.S. defense secretary, almost appeared to condone the activities of the looters. When asked about the looting at a press briefing on April 11, he said, “While no one condones looting, on the other hand, one can understand the pent-up feelings that may result from decades of repression and people who have had their family members killed by that regime, for them to be taking their feelings out on that regime.” The Iraqis might have been more prepared to take Rumsfeld at his word were it not for the fact that the only government building in Baghdad that was protected against the attentions of the looters was the Ministry of Oil, which remained in pristine condition with two Arbams tanks parked outside. The suspicion that Washington actively condoned the looting intensified among the well-educated Iraqi middle classes when several American companies, such as Halliburton and Bechtel, which enjoyed close affiliations with the Republican Party, were granted lucrative contracts to repair the damage.
During the military campaign great care had been taken to use precision bombing to minimize civilian casualties and to leave much of Iraq’s infrastructure intact. The looting destroyed what remained of the Iraqi infrastructure, leaving the country without electricity, communications, and a proper water supply. As a consequence many Iraqis who privately supported the overthrow of Saddam came to resent the incompetence of the American occupiers. This antagonism deepened in May when Paul Bremer, the State Department official appointed to run the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), announced that he was disbanding the four-hundred-thousand-strong Iraqi army as part of its debaathification program. Slogans began to appear on walls close to U.S. bases such as, “You have done your job U.S., please go home.” Others just declared bluntly, “U.S. army, you will die.” By early May U.S. troops were no longer being seen as liberators, but as occupiers, and incompetent ones at that.
Saddam might no longer be running the country, but the fact that he remained at large meant that he was a rallying point for the growing number of Iraqis who did not like the American administration. In early May a handwritten letter said to be from Saddam Hussein was faxed to a London-based Arabic newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi, urging the Iraqis to rise up against the occupying U.S. and British forces. Dated April 28—Saddam’s official birthday—the letter blamed traitors for the regime’s overthrow. “They did not conquer you…except through betrayal,” it read. “Sons of our great people rise up against the occupier and do not trust any one…. There are no priorities other than kicking out the infidel, criminal, cowardly occupier.”
Baath Party loyalists, aided by foreign fighters who had flooded into Iraq from Iran, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, implemented Saddam’s resistance plan with a deadly campaign of terror attacks against the occupying forces and anyone associated with the U.S.-led CPA, which had been given responsibility for running the country until power could be handed over to a new Iraqi government. Hardly a day passed without attacks being carried out against coalition targets, whether it was a mortar attack on a military position or a roadside bomb. Nor were the attacks being carried out only by disaffected Baathists. Donald Rumsfeld’s insistence that the United States would not allow an Iran-style religious government to be established in Iraq had alienated many Shiites, who formed the majority of the population and were eager to be properly represented in the new government. The U.S.-led coalition continued to insist that Saddam had probably died in the war, and that, even if he was still alive, he was “militarily insignificant.”18 Saddam and his supporters were determined to prove otherwise.
As the death toll of Allied soldiers killed by terror attacks continued to mount, the coalition intensified its efforts to discover the truth about Saddam’s fate. By the summer the number of attacks against the coalition forces was averaging thirteen a day. In mid-June U.S. intelligence agents said they had intercepted communications between fugitives from Saddam’s Fedayeen and former Iraqi intelligence officials that suggested the Iraqi dictator was still alive. As if to confirm their suspicion, with immaculate timing Saddam broke cover on July 4, America’s Independence Day, to taunt the coalition over its failure to find any weapons of mass destruction, the issue that both the American and British governments had given as their main cause for the war. In an audiotape that was broadcast on the Arabic al-Jazeera television station, Saddam said, “They aim to destroy Iraq, and what they called the weapons of mass destruction was nothing but a cover for their plans. I ask these invaders, where are these weapons of mass destruction?” Saddam’s jibe at the West showed that he was still in touch with the political discourse going on outside Iraq. The Allies’ failure to find significant stockpiles of WMD following Saddam’s defeat had resurrected the vocal antiwar lobby in both the United States and Britain that, like Saddam, was now arguing that the war had been fought on a false premise. In the tape Saddam also claimed that he was still in Iraq and vowed to lead more armed resistance against the coalition. “I am in Iraq and with a comrade,” he said. “I tell you that I miss you, miss you, oh beloved people…. The coming days will, God willing, be days of hardship and trouble for the infidel invaders.”
Although they refused to admit it in public, Saddam’s continued presence, and the constant taunting through faxed messages and audiotapes, was becoming a cause of deep embarrassment for the Bush administration. Up until this point, capturing Saddam had not been a to
p priority. But with the insurgency attacks continuing and the coalition death toll mounting, U.S. commanders were ordered to devote more resources to capturing the deposed Iraqi tyrant, dead or alive. Washington announced that it was offering a $25 million reward for information that led to Saddam’s capture, or proved that he was dead. A further $15 million was to be made available for information that led to the capture of either of his sons, Uday and Qusay.
Task Force 20, the secretive U.S. military unit responsible for tracking down former regime members, was ordered to concentrate its efforts on finding Saddam. Having finally reached the conclusion that Saddam had survived the war, coalition commanders believed that their quarry was most likely hiding somewhere in the vicinity of Tikrit, a belief that hardened when U.S. forces captured Abdul Hamoud, Saddam’s all-powerful private secretary, on the outskirts of Tikrit in mid-June. Hamoud confirmed to his captors that Saddam and both his sons had survived the war, and that they were probably hiding somewhere in Iraq. But he did not know the precise location of their hideouts.19 On July 17, the day that Tony Blair came to Washington to address Congress, Saddam, again displaying an exquisite sense of timing, surfaced to denounce the “lies” of Bush and Blair. Speaking on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the Baath Party’s rise to power, he repeated his claim that the war against Iraq had been fought on a false premise. “The lies were known to the President of the United States and to the Prime Minister of Britain when they decided to wage war on Iraq,” he said. Saddam also launched a scathing attack on the recently appointed twenty-five-member Iraqi Governing Council, a group of prominent Iraqis appointed by the coalition to help administer the country until a formal transition of power could be arranged. “Whoever is appointed by the foreign occupier cannot give his people and the country anything other than the will of the occupiers.”