DUBAI, 18 April 2003 — Two Arab-language newspapers placed Saddam Hussein and his son Qusay in Baghdad last week on the day US tanks drove to the heart of the capital and Iraqis toppled a massive statue, symbolically ending his 24-year rule. Al-Jazeera yesterday showed what was thought to be Saddam’s hastily-abandoned last abode in Baghdad.
A half-filled glass of water and a stained cup stood on a desk next to crudely sketched military plans in an office where Jazeera said the Iraqi leader taped messages entreating his people to fight US invaders. A suitcase was left next to an unmade bed.
But despite the best efforts of US and British intelligence services, US special forces, tens of thousands of US troops and scores of international media, there was no sign of the ousted Iraqi leader. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card said in an online discussion he believed Saddam was dead.
But a survey of 7,122 people published by Gulf News yesterday showed a majority believed he was alive, hiding outside Iraq. US officials have stressed that while they launched the war to end Saddam’s rule the success of their military campaign does not hinge on his fate. “If we don’t find every one of them, but we can account that the regime is not in place, then we have succeeded and we believe we have succeeded,” Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks told journalists at US Central Command in Qatar.
Still Washington has put a price on Saddam’s head and made him the Ace of Spades in a pack of cards depicting most-wanted Iraqis. Clues emerged yesterday concerning the elusive leader’s movements in the dramatic days when US troops pressed toward Baghdad and ultimately took control of the battered city. London-based Al-Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat newspapers quoted witnesses as saying Saddam appeared near the Azamia mosque in northern Baghdad on April 9 the day Iraqis, with the help of US tanks, pulled down a massive statue of Saddam and dragged its decapitated head through the streets.
That corroborated a report from a man who described himself as a former Iraqi Army officer. He told Reuters he saw Saddam at about that time outside a mosque in the Aadhamiya district of north Baghdad. Al-Hayat quoted witnesses as saying Saddam arrived at around noon in a convoy of three cars, accompanied by his younger son Qusay and his body guard, Al Amin Abd Hamed Hamoud.
Dressed in military fatigues, Saddam stood on top of one of the cars and delivered a half-hour speech telling the gathering: “I am fighting alongside you in the trenches,” Hayat quoted one witness as saying. Witnesses told Hayat the Iraqi leader and his entourage departed about 12 hours before a US air raid on the area which they said destroyed part of a graveyard behind the mosque.
Jazeera yesterday showed a relatively modest Baghdad home where the Iraqi leader, who had built himself sumptuous palaces, was said to have spent the last days of his rule. A sitting room ringed with yellow-and-green striped sofas was where Jazeera said Saddam held his last meetings with the Revolutionary Council and senior aides.
An adjacent room, sparsely furnished with a conference table covered in white fabric and surrounded by white plastic chairs, appeared to be the room where Saddam was shown in a videotape meeting with his sons and advisers in the days after the war began. Jazeera said the room was also where Saddam’s last speech was recorded.
An office seemed to be the one where Saddam, looking tired and wearing large glasses, filmed a statement aired on March 20, three hours after being targeted by the US air raids that opened the war. An Iraqi flag stood in the small office, an Iraqi eagle symbol hung on drawn blue curtains.
A presidential stamp on an ink pad rested on a sturdy desk near a piece of white paper that read in Arabic: “The president orders the Revolutionary Council...” In the bedroom, a uniform with a shoulder insignia that Jazeera said indicated the highest rank in the Iraqi military hung on a clothes tree. In the bathroom was a box of Cartier cologne.
Meanwhile, according to a report from New York, the Committee to Protect Journalists yesterday mourned the death of Argentine camerawoman Veronica Cabrera. She is the first female journalist to die while covering the war in Iraq. Her death brings the total number of journalists killed in this war to 13, the CPJ note said.
Cabrera, who was traveling with fellow American TV correspondent Mario Podesta, died in a Baghdad hospital yesterday from injuries she sustained in a car accident on the highway between Amman and the Iraqi capital. Podesta was killed instantly in the crash, the CPJ said.
In another development, according to a report from Amman, the United Nations boosted the tempo of its aid deliveries to Iraq yesterday, bringing 100 trucks of food into the stricken country from Turkey and opening up a new supply route via Jordan. The Turkish convoy was the largest of its kind into northern Iraq and carried more than 3,000 metric tons of food to an area believed to be running dangerously low of basic supplies. “It’s another breakthrough and it shows we are scaling up dramatically our food aid,” said Maarten Roest, a spokesman for the UN World Food Program. However, the United Nations said the US military was preventing a first postwar team of international humanitarian staff from flying to northern Iraq, hindering plans to oversee food, water, health care and demining programs in the region.
Around 30 aid workers have been blocked in Larnaca, Cyprus, since Monday after failing to get security clearance from US military authorities for their planned flight. “This delay is slowing down the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Aid officials say Iraq is in desperate need of medical and food deliveries following a month of fighting and years of economic sanctions and misrule.
“Time is running out for the 60 percent of the Iraqi people who are entirely dependent on food handouts and our goal is to restore the system by the beginning of May,” said Khaled Mansour, another WFP spokesman in Jordan.
Jordanian food convoy, carrying some 1,400 metric tons of wheat flour, was bound for Baghdad yesterday — the first humanitarian delivery to the Iraqi capital since US-led forces launched the war to topple Saddam Hussein on March 20. Prior to the Jordan crossing, security constraints had limited WFP humanitarian convoys to the Turkey corridor.
The UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said it managed to get a convoy of nine lorries carrying drinking water into southern Iraq from Iran on Wednesday — the first such cross-border operation between the two former enemies in 17 years.
