BAGHDAD, 27 February 2004 — The commander of US forces said yesterday that Saddam was in good health but offered no further details on the former Iraqi president’s confinement.
“Health is good, no issues,” Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez told reporters. “He’s in good health.”
The International Committee of the Red Cross visited Saddam in jail for the first time last Saturday. The visit was arranged after Saddam was declared a prisoner of war, entitling him to certain rights under the Geneva Conventions.
The ICRC ordinarily does not give details of such visits or the state of confinement, limiting their comments to reports to the governments holding prisoners.
The general warned that the so-called foreign fighters had eclipsed Saddam supporters as the greatest threat to the war-battered country.
“What has happened and is very clear is that the terrorist elements of Zarqawi, Ansar Al-Islam and linkages to Al-Qaeda have begun to take preeminence in the actions being conducted against the coalition,” Sanchez said.
The US-led Coalition Provisional Authority has identified Abu Mussab Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born Palestinian long suspected of ties to Al-Qaeda, as the brains behind a slew of suicide car bombings in Iraq since August.
Coalition officials and the White House earlier this month unveiled a memo which they attributed to Zarqawi as proof of a plan by Al-Qaeda elements to ignite a civil war among Iraq’s divided ethnic and religious communities.
Sanchez blamed fighters allegedly linked to Zarqawi for the bombings since mid-January at the gates of the coalition’s Baghdad headquarters, the offices of two Kurdish political parties in Arbil, a police station in Iskandariyah and an Iraqi Army recruiting center in Baghdad.
Nearly 300 people were killed in the attacks.
February has been the deadliest month in Iraq since Saddam’s regime was toppled last April despite a drop in attacks on US forces from a high of 50 to between 18-20 a day.
With the capture of Saddam on Dec. 13, US forces gained intelligence that allowed them to arrest key players and dismantle links between guerrilla cell networks, Sanchez said.
A case in point, the coalition no longer portrays figures like Izzat Ibrahim Al-Duri, Saddam’s former No. 2 as an insurgency mastermind.
“We’ve disrupted the leadership structure of the former regime elements” since Saddam’s arrest, Sanchez said.
“Today we see them operating at the cell level... and working to try to reestablish some sort of cohesiveness and direction above that.”
So where Sanchez and US civil administrator Paul Bremer once depicted Al-Duri as the missing link in an alliance between militants and Saddam supporters, now he is depicted as a hunted man whose time was running out.
“I believe Al-Duri is definitely on the run,” Sanchez said.
Asked about the likelihood of civil war, which Zarqawi is accused of hoping to provoke, Sanchez conceded there was some danger but played it down.
“Is it possible that the country will move toward civil war and the coalition forces find themselves separating ethnicities. It is possible but I don’t think it’s likely,” the general said.
