Saddam Hussein Captured

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Saddam Hussein Captured

 

 

By Joseph Logan

 

AD-DAWR, Iraq (Reuters) - U.S. troops seized Saddam Hussein hiding in a filthy hole near his hometown of Tikrit in a coup for Washington's beleaguered occupation force in Iraq.

 

Grubby and bearded, the fugitive (news - Y! TV) 66-year-old dictator was dug out by troops from a cramped hiding pit during a raid on a farm in Ad-Dawr village late Saturday, the jubilant U.S. commander in Iraq Ricardo Sanchez said Sunday.

 

 

Gunfire crackled in celebration across the country as Iraqis greeted a U.S. military video showing their once feared leader, disheveled and sporting a bushy black and gray beard, undergoing a medical examination after seven months on the run.

 

 

The arrest is a boon for President Bush, whose campaign for re-election next year was haunted by dogged attacks on U.S. troops and their allies. Saddam may also provide intelligence on alleged banned weapons.

 

 

Saddam, who once seemed almost to believe his own claims of invincibility and urged diehard loyalists to go down fighting, gave up without a shot being fired, Lieutenant General Sanchez told a news conference in Baghdad.

 

 

"Ladies and gentlemen, we got him," a beaming U.S. administrator Paul Bremer said in his first comments to the news conference where the film was shown. "The tyrant is a prisoner."

 

 

Cheering Iraqis in the audience shouted "Death to Saddam!"

 

 

Leading members of the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council said they would put Saddam on trial in Baghdad. He may face the death penalty as he answers for a three-decade reign of terror and for leading his oil-rich nation into three disastrous wars.

 

 

"We want Saddam to get what he deserves. I believe he will be sentenced to hundreds of death sentences at a fair trial because he's responsible for all the massacres and crimes in Iraq," said Amar al-Hakim, a senior member of the Shi'ite party the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

 

 

Bush will comment at noon and believes Saddam's capture will assure the Iraqi people that he "will not be coming back," a spokesman said.

 

 

"Saddam Hussein was a brutal oppressive dictator who was responsible for decades of atrocities. And the Iraqi people can finally be assured that Saddam Hussein will not be coming back," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

 

 

NO END TO VIOLENCE

 

 

The White House warned, however, that Saddam's capture may not mean an end to violence, which continued hours after he was seized, with a suspected suicide car bombing that left at least 17 dead at a police station in Khalidiyah, west of Baghdad.

 

 

A U.S. soldier was killed Sunday when an explosive device he was trying to disarm blew up.

 

 

"There are unfortunately still people in Iraq who have no future because their loyalties are to Saddam. We expect they will continue to fight to the death," a senior White House official said.

 

 

More than 300 U.S. soldiers have been killed in action since U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in March to oust Saddam -- nearly 200 of them in guerrilla attacks since Bush declared major combat over on May 1.

 

 

U.S. officials say anti-American Muslim militants affiliated to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network have become active in Iraq amid the chaos following Saddam's ousting on April 9.

 

 

U.S. officials will also hope to extract vital intelligence on the alleged weapons programs which formed the public grounds for Bush to go to war in defiance of many U.N. allies.

 

Little evidence of banned weapons has been found, helping fuel continuing international wrangling over the lack of security in Iraq and the cost of rebuilding a country that holds the world's second biggest oil reserves.

 

However, there was broad consensus among opponents of the U.S. invasion that getting Saddam behind bars was a good thing. France, Germany and Russia, all fierce critics of Bush's war, hailed the arrest as likely to improve security in Iraq.

 

"This has lifted a shadow from the people of Iraq. Saddam will not be returning," said British Prime Minister Tony Blair (news - web sites), Bush's main ally in the invasion of March 20.

 

In the Arab world, there were mixed feelings, with many ordinary people welcoming the final humiliation of a man who had invaded two of his neighbors, Iran and Kuwait, oppressed Iraq's Shi'ite majority and launched gas attacks on Kurdish villages.

 

Others, however, regretted the role the U.S. occupiers played in his overthrow and capture and some lamented the passing of a figure they saw as a defender of Arab interests in the face of the global superpower.

 

HOLE IN THE GROUND

 

Saddam's capture was in stark contrast to the bloody demise of his once powerful sons Uday and Qusay, who went down with guns blazing against an overwhelming U.S. force in July.

 

Saddam kept up a series of taped appeals to his countrymen after that. But a huge manhunt and the $25 million price on his head must have cramped his role in the guerrilla war. It was unclear if any bounty would be paid for his capture -- U.S. forces paid out $30 million to a man who informed on his sons.

 

Sanchez said the farm where Saddam was seized near Ad Dawr, south of Tikrit, had been surrounded by troops acting on a tip.

 

It was a humiliating end to a lifelong adventure that began not far away in a poor village on the Tigris river outside Tikrit. Clan connections in the Sunni-dominated military and a taste for ruthless street violence took Saddam to the top of the Arab nationalist Ba'ath party which seized power in a 1968 coup.

 

He crushed all opposition and spent huge amounts of Iraq's oil wealth on marble-lined palaces and massive monuments to himself. Many of the former are now barracks for U.S. troops while the latter were pulled down by joyful Iraqis months ago.

 

The soldiers finally tracked the fugitive down to the bottom of a narrow, man-sized hole in the ground, some six to eight feet deep, Sanchez said.

 

Washington had made Saddam No. 1 -- the "ace of spades" -- on a list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis.

 

Saddam would be put on trial, Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi told Reuters. A tribunal system for Iraqis to try Saddam and fellow Baathist leaders was set up only last week and U.S. officials say it could make use of capital punishment. From http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...4/ts_nm/iraq_dc

 

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