Hunting Down Saddam

by Robin Moore

  An important question had to be asked: since these were all Saddam’s generals at one time or another, at what point did they fall out of favor with Saddam? This was key, with regard to their loyalty.

  As soon as they saw an Iraqi face as head of their council, the people of Mosul began to take charge of their own destinies, control of their lives, and the rebuilding of their city. “They have a lot of initiative,” MG Petraeus explained. “The governor has already traveled to the UAE [United Arab Emirates]. He’d been to Syria twice, and he helped broker a resumption of trade with Syria that was critically important to northern Iraq’s recovery and reconstruction.”

  Major General Petraeus

  [ROBIN MOORE—INTERVIEW WITH MG DAVID PETRAEUS]

  “Well, fire away!” MG Petraeus, the commander of the 101st Airborne Division exclaimed as the author sat down and pushed the “record” button on his microcassette recorder.

  “It’s a fascinating place … I’m not the one to tell how Mosul fell, or the north fell, 10th (Special Forces) Group can tell that far better than I could. The Peshmerga are indigenous to the area above the ‘green line,’ to the east, and northeast of [Mosul]. The Pesh did come down here initially, all around Mosul and all around the Syrian border … cities like Sinjar, and they did in fact secure the huge hydroelectric dam that is to the northwest of Mosul, on the lake.

  “There were thousands and thousands of Peshmerga in Ninevah Province when we got here. One of the tasks was to get them back into the Iraqi Kurdish area. In many cases they were, at the very least, an intimidating force to the non-Kurdish population in the areas they were occupying. The Kurdish leaders smoothly coordinated that with the 101st; it took us probably about a month to coordinate the withdrawal of the Peshmerga when we got here.

  “The Screaming Eagles had a horrible week in July. Ironically, it was also the time of one of their greatest successes,” MG Petraeus said.

  The same week in July that Uday and Qusay Hussein were killed, the 101st lost six soldiers in ambushes planned and financed by former regime leaders. A week or so before the interview, three MPs bearing the Screaming Eagle patch, but detached from the unit and working in the Karbala region, were also killed—supposedly by Shi’ia militia.

  The money for ambushes on Coalition troops was abundant in Iraq. An estimated $1.3 million in Iraqi dinars, U.S. dollars, and valuables was found with the bodies of Uday and Qusay. Two nights later, soldiers picked up a Fedayeen Saddam colonel with $350,000 on his person. A massive amount of money was stolen from the Iraqi people, according to MG Petraeus; it is this money that keeps the RPG attacks, bombings, shootings, and improvised explosives used against Coalition troops so prevalent, even now. The one-hundred-dollar reward to shoot an RPG round at some U.S. troops was a month’s pay to most Iraqis, so the offers are tempting, especially for the criminals. Saddam had emptied all of his jails before the war started; the criminals were freed and the prisons were looted. Rebuilding and repairing the prisons of Iraq was another task the Coalition had to master. Moreover, all of the police stations had been burned or completely looted, so the Coalition had to repair or rebuild the stations themselves, in addition to issuing new uniforms, vehicles, weapons, radios, and all of the other equipment a modern police force needs.

  In September 2003, a well-armed gang of looters tried to break into a grain warehouse, guarded by Iraqi Security Protection Forces and supplemented by a squad of 101st paratroopers. One of the Americans was killed.

  Regardless, MG Petraeus was confident that the Coalition’s mission in Iraq would succeed. “The most important factor is money,” he said.

  As of November 2003, there were over twelve thousand Iraqis on the payroll, and the momentum had to be kept up on the reconstruction projects as well. There had been more than thirty-eight hundred different reconstruction projects in the 101st’s sector of Iraq, with costs totaling $29 million through fall of 2003. “Those [projects] are enormously important in the winning of the hearts and minds [of Iraqis],” MG Petraeus said.

  Coalition forces anticipate that the various Iraqi Ministries will soon take over part of the financing and payroll, which will alleviate some of the strain on Coalition budgets and help to build Iraqi independence.

  An emerging Iraqi independence is evident in the decrease of Coalition presence in some areas—a sign of trust in the new Iraq, and a feeling that Iraqis are able to rebuild and protect their cities and society without a Coalition military presence to back them up. By way of example, for every two ammo dumps still guarded by Coalition troops, there are three that are now guarded solely by the Iraqis. The ratio will only improve over time. “They [Iraqi guards] have been shot at a couple of times, and they shoot back; they do a good job,” MG Petraeus said.

  The Coalition presence in police stations has also lessened, from fourteen joint police stations, to just three in November 2003. The rest are Iraqi-run. Gradually the infrastructure is being built up for larger military base camps, so that many of the base camps around Mosul can be broken down and combined into a few larger ones. This will reduce the “footprint” of the Coalition presence on Iraqi soil, and may help ease the frustrations of the Iraqis. The consolidation of base camps also makes it easier for a relief force to take over.

  For the Iraqis, training the Iraqis will only become more refined as time goes on. There are two police academies: an interim academy that lasts three weeks and an advanced academy that runs eight to nine weeks. A Primary Leadership Development Course for Iraqi military and police NCOs (Noncommissioned Officers) will be starting up as well.

  In MG Petraeus’s opinion, most of the future work to be done will be “repairs,” i.e., the replacement of Iraqi officers, soldiers, guards, or policemen with qualified and properly trained personnel, when they are killed, fired, or injured.

  The Iraqi police force was long feared and reviled by the citizens of Iraq for its use of torture, its corruption, and manipulation by Saddam’s regime to do his bidding. The notions of honor, integrity, and selfless service, along with the American police motto, “To protect and serve,” are being indoctrinated in the new Iraqi police. The policemen are now paid a “decent” $120 per month salary when they complete the interim course.

  “Is there anything you’d like to ensure is in this book?” the author asked of MG Petraeus as the interview came to a close. “It’s a historical account, and we’d like to have everything in there…”

  “Well, just the fact that Screaming Eagle soldiers came in here with a rifle in one hand and a shovel in the other, if you will,” the general replied.

  “And I think they’ve maintained, achieved a good balance between killing or capturing bad guys and reconstruction. There’s been a tremendous sensitivity to the need to win hearts and minds. Every operation we do, for example, we test it by asking whether it will create more bad guys than it takes off the street by the way we conduct it. After we conduct an operation, we go back to the neighborhood the following morning, and explain what we did and why we did it, what the results were, ask them what their needs are, hand out Beanie Babies, which are given to our chaplain by the thousands by some supporters on the Internet. Or soccer balls with the Screaming Eagle patch on them, or water, or whatever.…

  “Our lawyers have done a phenomenal job, we have a fantastic legal team in everything we’ve ever done … helping to open an international border, or whatever … it’s always done in accordance with UN Security Council resolutions, and all the relevant legal documents out there at any given time. I think again, our commanders and our soldiers work very, very hard to be seen as an army of liberation rather than as an army of occupation. The latest thing that we’re doing right now is we’re conducting about forty-five of what we call ‘goat grabs.’

  “A goat grab is basically a local tradition of having a big long table where they put out platters of rice, vegetables, and literally hunks of sheep that have been on a spit, roasting and so forth. You just dig in, you grab sheep or lamb, o
r fish, or what have you. But we’re doing them, every battalion commander is doing at least one of them, some are doing more. Those are great events for maintaining the engagement with the locals.

  “This part of the world is all about personal relationships, and you have to invest in those. We’ve been fortunate to be in the same place for about six months to be able to build those relationships. So, when we have a crisis, we’re more going to meet the Imam for the first time, or the Muktar, the neighborhood clerk.

  “We actually brief all of the neighborhood clerks for Mosul, for example, there are a huge number. We do the left bank, and then the right bank, over the course of a two-day period every month. We have biweekly meetings with the Imams, and a biweekly meeting with the Christian bishops. We have a biweekly interfaith council; we have engagement at every level. There’s somebody responsible for everything. You name every function, and there’s somebody responsible for it. There’s medical: the Division Surgeon, and the combat support hospital. If it’s the Telecommunications Ministry, it’s the Signal Battalion … a university has one of our aviation brigades. The school system had … elementary and high schools, separate from the university, had the Corps’ Support Group commander. The Assistant Division Commander of Support does airfields, trains, and taxis and buses. Everybody is overlaid on something …

  “We have Civil Affairs battalions, too, and they overlay on these areas in the peace … [Take] a captain, or maybe a major, of a CA battalion, who is doing education—he might be a teacher back home, and now he’s interfacing with a fifty-five- or maybe sixty-five-year-old chancellor of a university of eighteen thousand. And now we take the old colonel, aviation brigade commander, and add him to that mix, and again now, he brings helicopters that can fly this guy to and from Baghdad, he can get him into the office with the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority] adviser to that ministry. There’s a lot more he can do, plus he has the assets of these command emergency reconstruction programs because he’s an O-6 commander. All of that makes a big, big difference.

  “The Division Support Commander does youth activities in most of Ninevah Province. Basically, every ministry activity, we have someone laid on top of, and … ideally, with expertise in it, but if you don’t, then you just put a good guy in and tell him to get after it.

  “Because the number one winner, in our slide of winners and losers in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, are flexible, adaptable leaders and troopers. I don’t know how we get that, but I think it’s partly the American culture. I think it’s partly our military institutions and school systems, and it’s partly just the experience that a lot of our soldiers have had. I mean, a lot of us have done this stuff before. I just came from Bosnia last summer; we were taking command of a division where I spent a year doing this kind of stuff, and also doing counter-terrorism, which is ideally suited for what we’re dealing with when we’re going after the bad guys. That’s really the way we’re doing this. This is not. These are all targeted, intelligence-driven, provided by interagency … fusion. Targeted raids—they’re not dragnet operations, they’re not street sweeps or search-and-destroy or anything like that. They are targeted, focused, and as precise as possible, operations.

  “And, by the way, we take the Iraqi police and the Muktars with us whenever we can. We don’t [search] mosques, the police will [search] a mosque for us … that was said in the slide briefing yesterday. We don’t [search] women; we have women soldiers who do that, or again, the police … it’s just an extraordinary team of people to have in the 101st, and all the additional assets given to us. And then, the great Iraqi partners, who have really stepped up to the plate, and so forth. And really, again, I just can’t say enough about the team that has been provided to us here, and how fortunate we are to have such talented people, at all levels.

  “But you’ve got to go after the bad guys at the same time, because they are trying to come in and take down what is, you know, arguably a success story for Iraq. Certainly the Iraqis here feel that they are leading the way for the rest of Iraq. They are ‘setting the standard,’ to use a military term.”

  HVT #2 and HVT #3

  The second and third most-wanted Iraqis, HVT (High-Value Target) #2 and HVT #3, were none other than Uday and Qusay, the two sons of Saddam Hussein. For months before the raid that killed the sons, U.S. forces, and in particular a super-secret Special Operations Task Force (SOTF), had been hunting high and low for the fugitives, chasing down false leads and keeping intelligence efforts at full force.

  Uday Saddam Hussein was, at one time, the infamous chief of the Fedayeen Saddam, the Iraqi Olympic chairman, and an Iraqi National Assembly member. His torture of Olympic athletes, documented in Sports Illustrated magazine, was especially cruel, and gave the world a glimpse into his realm of power and horror. Reports have described Uday as punishing athletes who lost a game, with severe jail sentences during which they were beaten and tortured. One particularly gruesome method of torture was to have athletes dragged across pavement or a rocky surface, then dipped in blood and sewage to ensure infection.

  During Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, Uday was known as “the Ace of Hearts,” and his picture was in the hands of every Coalition soldier with a deck of playing cards issued by United States Central Command.

  Uday founded the Fedayeen Saddam, “men of sacrifice,” in 1994 or 1995 (reports vary) to support his father against domestic opponents and crush potential dissenters. The Fed-ayeen also performed anti-smuggling operations and patrols, and their ranks were filled with young, promising, idealistic soldiers from pro-Saddam regions of Iraq.

  According to intelligence reports, Uday was relieved of command in September 1996 when his father discovered that he had been transferring high-tech weapons from elite Republican Guard units to his Fedayeen militia. Control was passed to his brother Qusay. Not only were the Fedayeen Saddam royal guards, but the thirty thousand to forty thousand martyrs reported directly to the Presidential Palace instead of the army command, and were well trusted and politically reliable.

  Qusay Saddam Hussein was designated “the Ace of Clubs.” In 1996, he took the reins of the Fedayeen from his brother, which added to his power and control of Iraqi intelligence. Qusay was also the supervisor of Al Amn al-Khas, or Special Security Service (SSS), and the deputy chairman of the Ba’ath Party’s Military Bureau.

  The SSS (also called SSO—Special Security Organization, or the Presidential Affairs Department) was described as “the least known but most feared Ba’athist organ of repression.” Its official function was to protect the Ba’ath leadership, most importantly Saddam. Unofficially, according to reliable sources, including Jane’s Intelligence Review, the SSS secretly set up a network of front companies to acquire special equipment and materials used in the production of chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons during the 1980s.

  The SSS also conducted surveillance on members of the Iraqi military and intelligence officers with sensitive positions. They were the most trusted of Saddam’s elite, and held a special position with special rewards—especially the SSS members who survived and protected the leader during an assassination attempt. The only people that Saddam trusted enough to supervise these highly secret organizations were his own sons. That alone granted them status as Numbers Two and Three on the Coalition’s target list.

  * * *

  On June 29, 2003, Uday and Qusay Hussein arrived at the door of a huge stone and concrete home in the Falah district of Mosul. The two sons arrived with five others; they were all wearing traditional off-white Arab dress, called dishdashas. Uday had shaved his head and sported a curly “Quaker-style” beard without a moustache. Qusay sported longer hair and the early growth of a new beard. Also with them was a man named Summet, believed to be a bodyguard, and Qusay’s fourteen-year-old son, Mustafa.

  The party arrived in two separate vehicles: an extended-cab, four-door white Toyota pickup, and a black Mercedes-Benz. The next day, the Toyota’s Baghdad license plate was changed to a Tikrit one. Accordi
ng to the tipster who ratted on the infamous brothers, the license plates were swapped frequently.

  When the tipster came to the 101st, he provided quite a lot of information. Initially, the 101st didn’t believe all of it: it was just too good to be true. The informant told of Uday’s and Qusay’s requests for him to steal another car and get more weapons, and explained how the brothers were plotting to send a car packed with explosives into the Ninevah Hotel in Mosul. They also wanted the tipster to score them some phony Syrian passports.

  COL Joe Anderson, 2nd Brigade’s commander, immediately contacted Task Force 20, the secret operations group tasked with hunting down Saddam and his two sons. The brothers had already been holed up in the house for about three weeks longer than they originally told the source they had expected to be. Letters were brought back and forth between the sons and people on the outside, and the source claimed that he had heard conversations he believed were with Saddam Hussein himself.

  The sons of Saddam and their henchmen brought bags and pieces of luggage with them. One bag alone, about two-by-two feet in size, was stuffed full of American dollars and Iraqi dinars, totaling $500,000. Another bag full of jewelry was found under the bed that Qusay had been sleeping in. Additional bags contained five assault rifles and one RPK light machine gun.

  For three weeks, Uday and Qusay remained holed up in the house, and according to the tipster, sometimes stayed up all night long plotting attacks against U.S. forces. On July 19, Qusay’s son, Mustafa, left the house, walking from the hideout with another of the henchmen, a man named Munam. Munam was Summet the bodyguard’s brother, and the former manager of Saddam’s palace in Baghdad. Mustafa and Munam returned the next day with a white four-door Toyota, and two bags of clothing.