A few hours before the attack on the UN headquarters, US forces had bagged their biggest prize since the deadly shoot-out with Saddam's two sons. As a result of efforts by Kurdish intelligence, they had managed to capture 65-year-old Taha Yassin Ramadan in Mosul, who was essentially the number two man in the former regime. The general, who felt securely protected by his Kurdish-Arab Jaswari tribe, was part of Saddam's top leadership for three decades. During the months leading up to the war, when the rais, or great leader, was becoming more and more removed from the realities of the situation, Ramadan was the acting head of the government and its principal point of contact for state visitors, negotiators, and UN weapons inspectors.
Like his boss, Ramadan vehemently rejected the possibility of exile. "We are not well-born Efendis, but are deeply rooted in this country," Ramadan brusquely informed all emissaries who were attempting to arrange a peaceful ouster of the Baghdad clique shortly before the US military attack. "No, we will not run away. We will die in this country."
This sounded impressive and decisive. Ultimately, however, Saddam's deputy did choose living under the occupying power over heroic death, allowing himself to be arrested without resistance.
Saddam's cousin, 65-year-old Ali Hassan al-Majid, also survived the armed resistance against the Americans, contrary to initial reports of his having perished in a bomb attack. The general, who had failed miserably in his duty to defend southern Iraq, was captured last Thursday with his bodyguards. Al-Majid, who had made a name for himself by slaughtering the Kurds, was number five on the list of most-wanted Iraqis. He earned his nickname, "Chemical Ali," when he ordered a 1988 gas attack on the city of Halabja that killed 5,000 Kurds, including many women and children.
The Americans now hope that by capturing Majid and Ramadan, they have taken the most important commanders of the resistance out of commission. Ramadan had loudly boasted of guerilla attacks and the use of thousands of suicide bombers, saying "these are our new weapons; there will be a firestorm in the entire region" (Der Spiegel, June 2003).
Once the microphones were turned off, this post-socialist general was able to take a more realistic look at the future. Although he knew that the Baghdad regime under which he had served was doomed, he took comfort in the idea that "the Islamists and bin Laden thugs will take over from us."
And that's exactly the way things seem to be going. Iraq is threatening to become the new battleground between the West and Islamist terrorists who, according to intelligence sources, are "systematically" filtering across the country's hard-to-control borders with Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.
Diplomats are noting with concern that terrorism in Iraq is taking on a new form, one that is no longer limited to the Americans. Now almost all foreigners are targets, or at least those who are considered Washington's allies. A car bomb tore apart 17 people in front of the Jordanian embassy, the Italians have come under mortar attack, and hand grenades were tossed into the garden of the Turkish ambassador's residence in Baghdad.
Not surprisingly, the Jordanians are relocating their embassy personnel to Faludja, a city in the Sunni triangle considered a stronghold of Saddam supporters. "Here, in the tribal area, we feel safe," Amman's chargé d'affairs tells colleagues. What he is really saying is that the Jordanians believe that it is not activists of the deposed regime, but presumably Islamists who are behind the bomb attack.
This theory seems relatively plausible. The Sunni Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, which is supported by conservative Iranian mullahs, has now claimed responsibility for the attack on the Jordanians, and it is its activists who are said to be launching attacks under other names, as well. Their leader Mullah Krekar, who lives in exile in Norway, recently announced on Lebanese television: "The attack on the Jordanian embassy was the response of devout Muslims to the anti-Islamic activities of the king and his collaborators." The chief of this extremist group, who still enjoys political asylum in Oslo but is being threatened with expulsion because of his open support for Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, predicts "even bigger attacks."
Were the UN headquarters in the Canal Hotel also one of the group's targets? Security experts estimate that the Iraqi arm of Ansar al-Islam consists of about 150 well-trained fighters who are willing to do anything. Flyers that are being taken very seriously by diplomats in Baghdad contain threats of attacks against foreigners ("Heretics in the employ of the anti-Islamic media").
If one were to apply the Islamists' muddled logic, the fact that these terrorists targeted the UN, of all things, could also be attributed to the values that have been imported by the infidels. Moreover, many Iraqis associate the UN with the thirteen years of international sanctions that brought them shortages of food and medications. Finally, the UN weapons inspectors were also once headquartered in the Canal Hotel.
According to the newspaper Baghdad Bulletin, the US occupation authority had asked the UN mission to reduce the general security level from four to three just a few days prior to the attack. By doing so, Bremer's team wanted to create the impression "that their troops are getting the security situation under control." In return, the UN was promised greater latitude.
Aside from terrorists, religious fanatics also present a daily challenge to the US occupying forces, and this does not bode well for the noble democratization plans of Washington's strategists. Agitated Muslims have set on fire two breweries in Baakuba northeast of Baghdad, murdered owners of liquor stores in Basra, and threatened to kill owners of movie theaters. In some parts of Baghdad, imams are demanding that women wear "chaste clothing" and no makeup. In the Shiite city of Kerbela, they're attempting to bar women from driving. In many places, images of Iranian revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini have been pasted over posters of Saddam.
But where is this despot who seems to have vanished underground? He seems to flit about the country like a Jinn, an evil spirit. One day he's supposedly sighted near his hometown of Tikrit, then near Ramadi or in the mountains east of Mosul. On Wednesday night, the Americans stormed a house in Baakuba where they believed the dictator was hiding. But, like so many times before, all they found were some of his more or less distant relatives.
The media, primarily in the United States, are broadcasting gripping stories about Saddam's supposed retreat into an idyllic Bedouin lifestyle. But this theory is belied by the astonishingly frequent taped messages the vanished dictator has managed to get to Arab TV networks Al Jazeera or Al Arabija. In one of his last messages, Saddam called upon "the youth born in 70/71" to join the mujaheddin of Ramadi, an effort for which they would be paid one million dinars, or about 600 dollars.
Gruesome stories from the tyrant's final days are now coming to the surface. According to one account, Saddam had the severed heads of fallen GIs brought to his palace after the first US attack on Baghdad's airport had been repelled.
Saddam's cousin, 60-year-old Sheikh Mahmud Nida Hussein, who complains that Saddam had long since stopped listening to advice, now believes that Iraq is a country "where nothing is valid or true anymore."
The tribal leader sits alone under the arched ceiling of the reception hall in his mansion in Saddam's birthplace, the town of Audja near Tikrit. Blood relatives of the deposed dictator aren't exactly at the top of Iraqi society these days. "The worst thing about the defeat is the humiliation," says the morose Hussein, a chain-smoker, "but the Americans will suffer greatly here - and so will Iraqis."
On a dusty hill not far from the sheik's villa lies a cemetery with the clan's family plot. Saddam's sons Udai and Qusai, as well as his 14-year-old grandson Mustafa, all of whom died during the five-hour battle with US special commandos in Mosul, were the last to be buried here.
The cemetery is guarded by members of the 101st Airborne Division, almost as if they expected Iraq's most-wanted man to pay them a visit. Two Texans are asked when they think Saddam will be lying in this cemetery. They answer without hesitating: "We hope it's soon, so we can all go home."
OLAF IHLAU, CLAUS CHRISTIAN MALZAHN, VOLKHARD WINDFUHR
Translated by Christopher Sultan
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