The Scotsman April 11, 2003
Allied Troops Search For Regime Leaders
By Dan Mcdougall
TOILING in the midday sun, the looters stole everything, emerging from the dusty remains of the palace clutching marble vases, oil paintings and bone china dinner sets.
Hours earlier, a United States special forces unit had descended on the same grand residence in the upmarket Al Masour district of Baghdad in the hope of finding clues to the whereabouts of its owner. But like Saddam Hussein, Iraq's deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, had simply disappeared into thin air.
While Saddam remained the greatest prize for coalition forces last night, American and British troops stepped up the hunt for his closest aides as the US deputy secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz, expressed growing concerns that the leading figures in the tyrant's regime may already have escaped to Syria. It has emerged that, earlier in the war, US intelligence officials had refrained from killing members of Saddam's entourage in the hope that they would eventually give away his position, but last night that tactic appeared to have borne little success as allied forces struggled to bring Iraq's most wanted men to justice.
As the pressure continued to mount, the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, admitted they must "capture, account for, or otherwise deal with" Saddam and other Iraqi leaders.
In the past few days, rumours have circulated in the Arab world that the Iraqi leadership had bought themselves a safe passage to a string of luxury resorts in the Syrian Mediterranean coastal town of Latakiya. To date, there is no firm evidence as to who has escaped from Iraq, but at the height of the war, Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister, travelled to Cairo for an Arab League meeting by crossing the desert to Syria in an armoured convoy. Who else accompanied him to the Syrian border remains a mystery. Not only was Sabri able to travel out of Iraq but he returned during the height of hostilities without a murmur from the allies.
"Chemical" Ali Hassan al-Majid, who is thought to have died in his palace in Basra last week, is also widely known to have travelled to Syria in the days preceding the conflict. Even as coalition forces were massing on sea and land, Saddam's cousin and most trusted henchman was dispatched to Damascus to carry a message from the Iraqi leader promising that he would adopt a more passive military posture and surrender his oil wells if he was allowed to stay in power.
According to one Pentagon source, the real problem may lie in identifying those who took a lower profile in the regime. He said: "The problem we face is the Iraqi 'regime' has never been easily defined and its internal workings are a mystery. It has a public facade, presented to the outside world through people such as Tariq Aziz and Taha Yassin Ramadan, another deputy prime minister, but there are hundreds who have profited from and revelled in Saddam's tyranny and we must find out who they are."
A "most wanted" list of Iraqi henchmen was recently released to the military by the CIA and is believed to be headed by Tariq Aziz, Taha Yassin Ramadan and Izzat Ibrahim, Saddam's most visible vice-president. All three leaders are accused of complicity in Saddam's military atrocities, including his 1990 occupation of Kuwait, and his brutal repression of the Kurdish and Shia populations.
Indict, the opposition-backed committee that seeks to prosecute the Iraqi leadership for war crimes, also accuses Ibrahim of the use of excessive military force against the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. The most important members of the leadership after Saddam himself remain Qusay and Uday, his two sons. Three half-brothers, who were once pillars of the Baghdad regime, have been marginalised in recent years. One of them, Barzan al-Tikriti, was for many years Iraq's ambassador to the UN in Geneva but has had troubled relations with Saddam in recent months, and before war broke out was said to have been placed under house arrest.
The remaining key figures in Saddam's inner circle are shadowy aides who are accused of gross human rights violations but have either remained in the background or have not been in the limelight in recent years. They are said to include Abdel Hamid al-Tikriti, a distant cousin of Saddam. He is little known but believed to oversee the presidential secretariat responsible for the Iraqi leader's personal security.
Another figure wanted by the Americans is Mohamed Hamza al-Zubaidi, the former head of the northern bureau of the ruling Baath party. According to Global Security.org, an international security website, al-Zubaidi is known as Saddam's "Shia thug", and was involved in suppressing the Shia uprising at the end of the Gulf war. He is also said to have led the destruction of the southern marshes in the 1990s.
As crowds of looters continued to ransack the homes of Iraq's deposed leaders, war crimes specialists warned yesterday that troops must quickly arrest the top Iraqi leadership, secure government buildings and any incriminating documents, and stop frustrated crowds from meting out their own justice.
According to Neil Kritz, a war crimes specialist at the Institute for Peace in Washington, key documents and evidence could be lost in the looting. He said: "Key evidence against Saddam and his regime will be contained within government buildings and private homes and this information will form the key to prosecution in any ensuing war crimes trials. Most tyrannical regimes. like the Nazis and the Serbs in former Yugoslavia, meticulously logged and detailed their atrocities. Looking at the footage of looters escaping these buildings I am sure that key evidence is disappearing before the eyes of coalition forces."
Outside Iraq, the regime was disintegrating under the full glare of publicity as embassies and consulates closed.
Some Iraqi diplomats were seen burning papers, others huddled in nearly empty offices, reduced to watching television for any news from home and unsure of who their new boss will be.
"I haven't had contact with Baghdad for two or three weeks," Muaead Hussain, the Iraqi charge-d'affaires in Berlin, said through the locked iron gate of his embassy. "I have no idea what's going on there."
There was one report of an Iraqi diplomat afraid to go home. Diplomats in Egypt, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the Iraqi ambassador, Mohsen Khalil, has approached at least two other embassies seeking asylum.
Iraq's UN ambassador, Mohammed Aldouri, said yesterday that "everything is over" and there was no government in Iraq left to represent.
"Everything is over. There is no government that I represent. I am representing my country right now," he said.
Rumours had been sweeping the UN that Aldouri was planning to leave New York, and some television reports had him on a plane to Paris late on Wednesday.
"When I feel that everything is ready I will go. It's not easy to prepare yourself to leave," Aldouri said in an interview.
Copyright © 2003, The Scotsman Publications Ltd.
