PARIS/BAGHDAD, 26 May 2003 — One of Saddam Hussein’s cousins, Special Republican Guard chief Maher Sufian Al-Tikriti, betrayed the deposed Iraqi leader by ordering his elite forces not to defend Baghdad after making a deal with the United States, the French newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche reported yesterday.
Citing an Iraqi source close to Saddam’s former regime, the newspaper said that the general, responsible for defending the Iraqi capital, left Baghdad aboard a US military transport plane, bound for a US base outside Iraq.
His departure, along with that of a 20-strong entourage, came on April 8 — the day before US forces swept into Baghdad, and after US Marines announced that the general had been killed, the paper reported.
Before he left Baghdad, following the capture of the capital’s international airport on April 4, Sufian ordered his troops to lay down their weapons, another Iraqi general, Mahdi Abdullah Al-Dulaimi, was quoted as saying.
Sufian does not appear on the US military’s list of most wanted Iraqis, which names Barzan Al-Ghafur Sulayman Majid as commander of the Special Republican Guard.
An Arab diplomat told Le Journal du Dimanche that the plot was hatched more than a year before by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), noting: “Many suitcases filled with dollars were floating around.”
“Being cautious, those who accepted the deal only agreed to defect once the American soldiers were in sight. The signal was to be the taking of the airport in Baghdad,” the diplomat added.
In Baghdad, the US military said yesterday it had captured a suspected ringleader behind attacks on coalition troops in the flashpoint Iraqi city of Fallujah, and nabbed 17 others.
It said the suspect in Fallujah was arrested in a raid early Saturday and that 17 others had been detained, all of them believed to have taken part in attacks on coalition troops. The statement did not make reference to specific attacks in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, where US troops said Thursday they had shot dead two people who took part in an ambush. It also did not say where the others were captured.
US troops have also disarmed a militia group affiliated to pro-American Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi as part of a campaign to impose law and order in the country. The US military dissolved the Free Iraq Forces (FIF) and disarmed its fighters, said Entifadh Qanbar, spokesman for Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The FIF, with fewer than 700 fighters and armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, had been working under US command.
