BAGHDAD, 26 April 2003 — US tanks and crack troops wearing night-vision goggles swooped on a posh Baghdad neighborhood under cover of darkness after one of Saddam Hussein’s top henchmen told them he would surrender there, neighbors told AFP yesterday. US officials said Tareq Aziz surrendered overnight but have not confirmed that the former deputy prime minister gave himself up at his sister-in-law’s house in Al-Zeitoun, in the east of the Iraqi capital.
Neighbors described a lightning raid on the house which ended with several people being driven away in luxury cars. They said they believed among them was Aziz, the highest member of Saddam’s regime to fall into US hands so far. “The soldiers came with tanks and Humvees. They crossed over my neighbor’s property. They climbed over the wall of the house and through the date palms,” said Mohammed Hillal, 34, a computer programmer who lives opposite.
“They arrived at about 1930 GMT and were gone by midnight. They were very, very quiet. There were people here guarding the area and they didn’t hear anything,” he said. Many areas of Baghdad now have security guards on street corners at night following a wave of looting by mobs after the city fell to US forces on April 9.
“The US soldiers used night-vision equipment. The electricity went down and some of the phones went down. After they brought a GMC jeep with black windows and a white BMW and some people got into them through the gate,” Hillal said. “I tried to talk with them. They assured me there would be no bombing while they were here. If I was scared of anything, I think it was the machine guns.”
He said he believed Aziz had negotiated his surrender because not a single shot was fired during the incident. “I think he negotiated with them and surrendered himself. Maybe he phoned them and contacted them. He is a Christian so maybe he contacted the Vatican, because his last visit abroad was to the Vatican,” Hillal said.
The surrender of Aziz evoked mixed feelings here among Iraqis caught between hatred of the old regime and respect for one of its more urbane members. Reactions were muted to Aziz’s arrest. “As a politician he was a very brilliant man, and I think the coalition people will benefit a lot from his knowledge of Saddam’s regime,” said Zubair Stephen, a professor of agriculture at Baghdad University.
“They don’t feel as strong as if they had captured Ali Hasan Al-Majid or the other people,” said Stephen, referring to a notorious aide to Saddam who the US says was killed in the southern city of Basra earlier this month.
