Ottawa Citizen March 25, 2003
'Dirtiest of dirty' offer stiffest Iraqi resistance
By Tim Johnson
WASHINGTON -- The irregular corps of Iraqi gunmen known as Saddam's Fedayeen is better known for torturing his opponents than fighting battles. But it appears that some Fedayeen, fighting guerrilla-style, have inflicted significant casualties on coalition forces at Nasiriya and Umm Qasr.
Yesterday, U.S. military commanders said they believe Fedayeen in Nasiriya seized members of a U.S. army unit guarding a Patriot missile battery Sunday and killed a number of them.
Saddam's Fedayeen, with somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 members, is led by Mr. Saddam's elder son, Uday, and exercises control over both Iraqi civilians and soldiers, experts say. Its members, complicit in a number of alleged atrocities, are likely to fight for their lives to prevent Mr. Saddam's downfall, and their own.
"One of their tasks is to stiffen the backs of the conventional forces," said Daniel Byman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. Fedayeen members "stand behind them with machine guns."
The Fedayeen -- an Arabic term meaning men of sacrifice -- was formed four years after the 1991 Gulf War, nominally as a ruling Baath Party paramilitary organization. According to GlobalSecurity.org, Fedayeen members are recruited from regions loyal to Saddam and form more a secret police force than a military unit. Among the Fedayeen's responsibilities are public beheadings, overseen by a special squad wearing masks, which are intended to instil fear and quell revolt.
"They are the enforcers," Mr. Byman said. "They keep an eye on the military."
At a military briefing in Qatar, British Maj.-Gen. Peter Wall acknowledged that Fedayeen and other special security forces were providing much of the resistance. "These are men who know that they will have no role in the building of a new Iraq, and they have no future," Maj.-Gen. Wall said.
According to U.S. officials, some members of Mr. Saddam's Republican Guard, inserted into units to bolster their determination, may have taken off their uniforms once those units were defeated and continued to fight as guerrillas.
Members are as likely to wear civilian clothes or the black clothing favoured by Mr. Saddam's secret police as they are to wear uniforms.
They normally fight with light weapons, such as machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, but now may be using armour borrowed from Iraqi military units. They also use the conventional tools of torture, such as pliers, experts said.
"They are like the dirtiest of the dirty," said Amatzia Baram, an expert in modern Iraqi history at the University of Haifa in Israel. "They are riff-raff, badly educated and badly trained.
"It doesn't take much training to cut off heads," Mr. Baram said.
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