4 June 2003 (Unpublished)
INSIDE A BAGHDAD hospital guarded from looters by American tanks, Dr Osama Saleh had just completed his twentieth operation of the week. It was complicated, reconstructing the shattered foot of a farmer called Ismael injured during the American bombing. He had to reuse wire previously used in other patients because of the shortages of supplies left by thirteen years of sanctions. But the doctor’s pained expression as he peeled off his gloves had nothing to do with the tricky surgery.
‘Look at my hands,’ he said angrily. ‘They are skilled hands with twenty-five years’ experience of healing people but apparently that doesn’t matter any more.’ Although Dr Saleh is one of only 200 orthopaedic surgeons in Iraq, a decree by the country’s American and British occupiers means he is about to lose his job.
Dr Saleh has been a member of the Ba’ath Party since 1972 when he joined as a 17-year-old student before Saddam became president, rising through its ranks over the years. The party which Saddam turned into his own personal tool has now been outlawed by L. Paul Bremer, the US administrator of Iraq brought in last month to replace the retired General Jay Garner. All senior Ba’ath members are banned from holding state jobs.
Under this so-called deba’athification programme, an estimated 30,000 people will be sacked. Many are doctors, professors, school principals, engineers and architects. Aid agencies say they are desperately needed for the reconstruction of Iraq, which, two months after the collapse of the regime, is proving much harder than anticipated with many areas still without power and water. At the same time the entire 450,000-strong army has been disbanded, leaving thousands of families with no income as its planned replacement will have only 40,000 members. Many blame disgruntled former military for the growing lawlessness and carjackings in Baghdad.
‘Mr Bremer is not taking into account that, just like the communist parties of Russia and Eastern Europe fifteen years ago, you had to be a member of the Ba’ath Party to get a job or do anything,’ said Veronique Taveau, spokeswoman for the United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq. ‘It didn’t necessarily mean you were steeped in blood.’
Dr Saleh says he was astonished when he heard the news that as a result of liberation he would lose his beloved post as head of the orthopaedic department at Al Kindy hospital in one of Baghdad’s poor eastern suburbs.
‘They are not differentiating between the Ba’ath Party and the Saddam regime which is something completely different,’ he complained. ‘If I am to be sacked I should be investigated, then if they find something wrong excluded. In the last Gulf War I even treated a British soldier from Middlesex who had been shot in the foot. Is treating the sick for twenty years an act of terrorism?’
Officials say they do not have the time for such investigations. ‘Of course there is a risk that some people will be denounced unfairly,’ said Charles Heatley, spokesman for the US-led administration, the Coalition Provisional Authority. ‘But the risks of doing this are less than the risks of not doing this. The Ba’ath Party was the structure and basis for the terrible crimes and oppression of the Saddam regime and no Iraqi wants it to continue to exist.’
Such explanations cut little ice with Dr Saleh. ‘We were told this war was about freedom,’ he said. ‘I understood that the Americans were liberal, democratic, that they believed in human rights and freedom of speech and thought. Yet now I am being punished because of what I think.’
His views are echoed by Major Haider Ali Said Khusan, 39, who is furious at the disbanding of the army, which he joined in 1985. After fighting in three wars, he now finds himself jobless. Two months ago he was manning air defences south of Baghdad, promised huge rewards for shooting down an American plane, something he says they knew was hopeless; today he mans a roadside stall selling cigarettes and cold drinks to earn a few dinars to support his wife and three pretty young daughters.
‘Saddam was a bad man and he betrayed us but now the Americans have betrayed us too,’ he complained. ‘We are the Iraqi Army, not Saddam’s army. Like armies all over the world we followed the orders of our commander. I joined during the Iran-Iraq War when the British and Americans were our friends. And once inside it, it was impossible to get out.’
Dr Saleh has a private clinic apart from his hospital work so is unlikely to end up hawking nicotine to support his four children, but he has no intention of meekly walking away from his job. The director of Al Kindy has pleaded his case to the Bremer administration and Dr Saleh has gathered a petition signed by 461 of the hospital’s 700 employees which states: ‘Dr Osama is loved by his patients…He has been appointed to posts in hospitals he has worked in due to his efficiency, keenness in carrying out his duties and good personality …We never felt he was part of the previous regime.’
Although he admits that he chaired weekly Ba’ath Party meetings at the medical faculty of Baghdad University, he insists he received no benefits. Pointing out that the Ba’ath or Resurrection Party was originally based on principles of pan-Arab secular socialism, he said, ‘I joined a party thirty years ago whose aims were freedom, unity and socialism. These are not bad aims. Yes, it was hijacked by Saddam but you must understand that once inside it was very hard to leave. I would have been sacked or jailed. I am a surgeon, not a war criminal.’
President Bush had officially declared the war over on 1 May 2003. But there was still no sign of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) which had supposedly posed such an imminent threat to the West that it had been necessary to go to war.
Tony Blair insisted in Parliament that they would be found. A 1,400-member team called the Iraq Survey Group had been sent out to look for them. When I met some of them I discovered they were reduced to revisiting sites already checked out by UN weapons inspectors or sitting around in bombed-out palaces watching DVDs. Satellite pictures showing suspect sites had led them to a cupboard of butane cylinders for cooking. Once they burst into a locked room only to find a store of vacuum cleaners. Sensitive documents they seized turned out to be someone’s high-school biology project. I took to teasing them: ‘Found any WMD today?’
By contrast, it was not hard to find weapons scientists. Every morning they gathered outside the looted offices of the National Monitoring Directorate, the agency set up by Saddam’s regime to work with the UN inspectors. They were hoping to be paid. Inside were teams of interrogators – the Americans led by ‘Mr John’ and the British by ‘Miss Rebecca’. One morning I went there with my friend Bob Drogin from the Los Angeles Times. Among those waiting we found one of the country’s top weapons scientists. He agreed to take us on a fascinating if macabre tour.
Iraq ‘destroyed weapons by 1994’
Sunday Times, 8 June 2003
HE ALMOST ENDED up as an estate agent in Brighton. Instead, as he explained last week amid the broken concrete slabs and twisted metal pipes of what was once Iraq’s production plant for lethal VX gas, Brigadier-General Ala Saeed became head of quality control for some of the deadliest nerve agents on the planet.
The bombed-out remains of Iraq’s main chemical-warfare complex are a gritty desolate place, eighty miles north-west of Baghdad. An acrid smell hangs in the air and only a handful of thin, lonely trees survive the 50°C heat. With one of Saddam’s top weapons scientists as a guide, the Al-Muthanna State Establishment bears testimony to evils that chill the blood, even in the furnace-like desert wind.
For it was this plant, ostensibly manufacturing pesticides, that produced the chemical agents Saddam Hussein used on the Iranians, then the Kurds – and which Tony Blair and President George Bush insist are hidden somewhere in Iraq, despite the inability of inspection teams to find any.
Although it was bombed in 1991 during the Gulf War and the remnants destroyed or sealed by United Nations weapons inspectors, it is still possible to pick out individual laboratories spread far apart in the vast complex.
‘Here is P7, the production plant for sarin and tabun, and on the right is P8, where we made mustard gas,’ s
aid Saeed. All three were used on the Kurds at Halabja in 1988, killing 5,000 people in a single March morning.
A small man in a neat short-sleeved shirt and belted rayon trousers, Saeed, 51, and a father of three, holds a doctorate in analytical chemistry from Sussex University and still has a bank account at NatWest in Brighton, although it has been frozen. As we drove around, he spoke with disconcerting matter-of-factness about agents that paralyse the nervous system and blister the skin. ‘It wasn’t our responsibility to think about how they might be used,’ he said. ‘We just produced it.’
He pointed out the building where animals were kept for testing – donkeys, rabbits, dogs and guinea pigs. ‘We tied them up in inhalation chambers and released the agents,’ he said. ‘Blood would run from their eyes, noses and mouths and they would convulse.’
The complex is dotted with earth mounds – dummy bunkers of the same dimensions as the six real chambers concealing the production facilities. Of all the agents brewed at Muthanna, the most horrible was VX. A nerve agent invented by British scientists at Porton Down, it is ten times stronger than sarin. Just a teaspoonful on the skin is enough to kill a person.
For several years after the Gulf War, Iraq insisted it had not made VX. ‘My boss, General Amin [General Hussam Mohammad Amin, head of Iraq’s National Monitoring Directorate, now in US custody], said there was no point admitting it as it was low-grade and not stable,’ said Saeed with what seemed like regret. ‘It deteriorated within a week. To be useful it should have a shelf life of two years.’
He said they had produced the last two batches in 1990 and insisted it was not weaponised, although UN inspectors found traces in warheads.
An intensive new hunt for weapons of mass destruction is currently under way amid allegations that Blair and Bush exaggerated the threat to justify going to war.
But Saeed has already told agents from MI6 and the US Defense Department, who grilled him last week, that they will find nothing. ‘Between 1991 and 1994 we destroyed everything – all the chemical weapons and bulk agents,’ he said.
As author of all three of Iraq’s reports on chemical weapons to the UN Security Council, including the chemical weapons section of a 12,000-page document handed over last December, Saeed might be expected to deny that the country retained any banned weapons. But he insists: ‘Why should I lie? We are free now.’
Yet Saeed does not look like a free man and admits he does not believe Saddam has gone. His right leg twitched nervously when we first met at a secret rendezvous and he told his story – of how he got caught up in one of the Iraqi dictator’s most deadly projects.
After finishing a chemistry degree at Baghdad University in 1972, he joined the army chemical corps, dealing with the protection and training of troops against chemical warfare. When the war with Iran started in 1980, he was selected as one of six officers to run Project 922, developing chemical weapons.
‘If any of us had said no, we would have been transferred to the front line of the war with Iran, which was certain death,’ he said.
As head of quality control at the Muthanna complex, he began producing sarin, VX and CS riot-control gas in different facilities.
After five years he was sent to Sussex for his doctorate. None of his fellow students had a clue that he was there to pick up as much information as possible on chemical warfare. ‘I told them I was from the Ministry of Higher Education,’ he said. ‘That’s what I’d been told to say.’
Saeed loved Brighton, where he lived with his family near the sea and his first son Ziad was born. He was winding up his doctorate in 1988 when he saw the news about Halabja.
‘We had already used the same mixture of tabun, sarin and mustard gas on Iranian troops to great effect, but that was different as we knew they had tried to use mustard gas on us. I didn’t like to think of it being used on our people.’
It was then he got the offer to become a Brighton estate agent. ‘There was another Iraqi living in the same block running an estate agency and he tried to persuade me to stay and said he would train me,’ he said. ‘I was very tempted but I have a big family – two sisters and six brothers – and they [the regime] told my parents if your son doesn’t come back we’ll kill you. I was trapped.’
So he returned to Muthanna, importing materials from the UK, Japan and Germany.
After the Gulf War, Iraq was forced to comply with UN weapons inspections and Saeed was made liaison officer.
He admitted there had been confusion over amounts of chemical agents produced but explained: ‘At the end of 1991, the SSO [Special Security Organisation] gave orders to our programme as well as the biological and nuclear people to hand over all documents. We handed over fifteen wooden crates.’
Saeed said that in 1994, when UN inspectors required a complete disclosure report, he had asked the intelligence service for the documents. ‘They said it was all destroyed, so we had to do it all from memory. It took six months working day and night and maybe some numbers were not right.’
After the 1995 defection of Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law and Minister of Military Industrialisation, Saeed said: ‘They found 150 wooden boxes on his chicken farm, including all our documents.’
Given his insistence that Iraq is free of banned weapons, he is at a loss to explain its cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors. ‘We had lied to them from 1991–5 over the VX programme, which they only found out about when Kamel defected so they didn’t trust us,’ he said.
‘More than twenty times I said to General Amin, “Please let my inspectors go everywhere freely without all these agents so we can build confidence and finish this issue.” But he always replied, “It’s not your decision. It’s Iraqi policy.”’
Explaining the climate of fear, Saeed said: ‘When the inspectors were in town I was terrified of bumping into them shopping on al-Rashid Street, because even if I said hello the security agencies would make a report on me.’
He added that when the UN asked to interview scientists in Cyprus, ‘The Vice President called us all into a meeting and told us we were forbidden to go to Larnaca. They made clear our families would be killed if we went.’
So why would Saddam have led his country into a war if Iraq was free of weapons of mass destruction? ‘Maybe Saddam just wanted to look big or maybe there were things going on I did not know about,’ he said. ‘We were completely away from the forbidden programme.’
Pushed on what he meant by ‘the forbidden programme’, his voice dropped to a whisper. ‘We knew the Mukhabarat had small laboratories around Baghdad, but not where or what they were doing. They couldn’t have been producing anything, as I know all the top scientists and we would have known.’
An Iraqi general involved with the procurement of supplies for this programme told me that there were secret laboratories in the basements of houses in Baghdad. ‘The programme completely changed after Kamel’s defection. Whereas in the 1980s there were large production facilities, after 1996–7 the personnel were changed and we had small teams of just three or four people.’
Consulting his Saddam watch, he added: ‘Even in the 1980s we never had as much as people thought. The scientists were terrified of Saddam so would never admit if they had failed to produce anything.’
Though Saeed denies that any of his teams cooked the books, he admitted that if the UN had declared Iraq free of weapons and had lifted sanctions, he thought it ‘95 per cent likely’ the regime would have resumed production of chemical weapons ‘in six months’.
Fearful of what the British and Americans will do with him, he says he dreams of returning to Brighton. ‘I wish I’d taken the estate agent job,’ he said. ‘I understand the property market has done very well.’
The summer of 2003 in Baghdad was about the last time one could still safely travel around, interview anyone, and go out for meze, wine and kebabs in the evenings in restaurants like Nabil’s in Arasat Street. One Sunday I took a rare day off to go with Bob Drogin and another good friend, my former col
league Philip Sherwell from the Sunday Telegraph, for a picnic in the ancient city of Samarra right in the middle of what would soon become known as the Sunni triangle. We visited the gold-domed Askariya mosque, one of Iraq’s holiest Shia shrines, which contains the tombs of the tenth and eleventh imams, and then climbed the amazing spiral minaret, more than a thousand years old and fifty-two metres high, and phoned home from the top.
Saddam was still on the run then so as we were not far from his home town of Tikrit, we looked for him in the cellars of the old Caliph’s Palace on the bank of the Tigris. Four months later, in December 2003, he was indeed found in a cellar not far from there, that of a farmhouse about ten miles south of Tikrit.
By then Samarra would be a no-go area, succeeding Fallujah as the centre of what was by then a full-blown insurgency. When the US eventually took control, they built an eight-foot-high wall round the city. They used the spiral minaret we had climbed as a lookout point, and in April 2005 its top was blown off. In February 2006 insurgents targeted the Askariya shrine, blowing up the shining dome that had dominated Samarra’s skyline.
Before I left Baghdad, Bob gave me a souvenir brass plate with a kitsch painting of the spiral minaret against a pink sky. Sometimes, listening to the daily news of bombs in Iraq, I look at it on my shelf and wonder if we really did picnic there that day.
Saddam Stole Our Water
Sunday Times Magazine, 27 July 2003
HALIMA HASHIM has a face wrinkled as a walnut from a life under the sun, and black olive pits of eyes. Her abaya, the long black robe covering her head and body, flaps around her in the hot sand blast of a desert wind, the anonymous costume of the Arab village woman. But standing in a canoe re-enacting her wedding day, she commands all the attention of an Oscar-winning actress. ‘So, we were here,’ she said, hauling on board her husband Jaseem, a small man in dishdash, the long Arabic dress, chequered headcloth and thick bifocals from which he peered out with a bewildered expression. ‘Then behind us were forty, maybe fifty boats full of people clapping and singing. Come on, children!’
Small Wars Permitting Page 30