Saddam : His Rise and Fall (57 page)

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 crowds 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

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.