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How Saddam beat US in BaghdadBy Catherine Philp, The TimesJuly 26, 2003UDAY Hussein's personal bodyguard broke a three-month silence yesterday to give the first authoritative account of how Saddam Hussein and his sons spent the war. In an exclusive interview, the bodyguard claimed that far from fleeing Baghdad, the three men held out in the capital for at least a week after its fall. He said they evaded repeated US attempts to assassinate or capture them, and even appeared in public under the noses of American troops. The man, whose father served as a bodyguard to Saddam Hussein, was...

<p>BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) --Saddam Hussein and his sons were shocked at their defeat by U.S.-led forces and met secretly after the fall of Baghdad to plan a guerrilla resistance, according to a former bodyguard for Uday Hussein.</p> <p>The bodyguard, who called himself Abu Tiba, was interviewed by Newsday reporter Matthew McAllester in Iraq shortly after his boss was killed Tuesday, according to the U.S. military, along with his brother, Qusay Hussein, by U.S. forces in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.</p>

One of Saddam Hussein's top generals was not included in the US card deck of 55 most-wanted Iraqis. Now stories are circulating in European, Middle Eastern and other foreign press that he was paid off to ensure the quick fall of Baghdad. On May 25, the French paper Le Journal du Dimanche, citing an unnamed Iraqi source, claimed that General Maher Sufian al-Tikriti, Saddam's cousin and a Republican Guard commander, made a deal with US troops before leaving Iraq on a US military aircraft. Allegedly the deal had been secured in advance by the CIA, but by prearrangement was implemented...

SADDAM HUSSEIN’S propaganda boasted that allied troops would commit suicide at the gates of Baghdad. However, the only remains to be found at the entrance to the capital are those of the Iraqi military machine, which is soon to be recycled. Just ten days ago, this was an empty patch of wasteland. Now, as far as the eye can see, covering hundreds of acres, lie the carcasses of Saddam’s Army. Tanks are piled on top of one another, their guns pointing skywards. Turrets of decapitated armoured vehicles lie upside down in the dirt. Air defence guns hug each other in...

<p>Baghdad -- In the final days before Baghdad fell, Saddam Hussein's son Qusai issued a series of military orders that sent thousands of elite Republican Guard troops to their certain death in the open countryside.</p> <p>According to accounts provided to The Chronicle by more than a dozen Iraqi military officials -- some of them still hiding from American forces -- the orders exposed the core of the Iraqi military to devastating U.S. air attacks and left the capital's defenses markedly weakened.</p>

In the jumble of images on our television screens, it's difficult to understand just what's happening in the Middle East. But the most important thing that's happening is invisible. Minds are changing. And have been since April 9, when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down by jubilant Iraqis. What people in the Middle East had been seeing and reading in Arab media was a story framed by the assumptions of pan-Arab nationalism. Innocent Iraqis were being killed. The Americans were mired down. Iraqis would stubbornly resist an attack on Baghdad. The Arab media, wrote Abdulhamid al-Ansary in the...

<p>Fifty-eight years ago, in World War II, U.S. generals dismissed the importance of Berlin and stood aside as their Soviet allies seized the city. But in this year's campaign in Iraq, says a British military historian, the Americans grasped from Day One the importance of conquering the enemy capital.</p>

The Fall of Baghdad By Tim Judah 1. On the morning of April 10, the day after resistance collapsed in most of Baghdad, I talked to a small group of looters at a warehouse belonging to the Ministry of Finance who were carting off brand-new water coolers and air-conditioning units. Except when they scuffled with one another, they were friendly and unapologetic. A young man named Habib, who had two water coolers strapped to the top of a taxi, said, "Now we have freedom, this is our right. We've earned these things and we're poor." Sitting on top of an...

Saddam killed his top commander as Marines stormed Baghdad SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COMSunday, May 4, 2003 LONDON — Iraqi President Saddam Hussein killed his leading military commander on charges of treason as U.S. forces captured Baghdad. The London-based A-Sharq Al Awsat daily said Saddam and his younger son, Qusay, executed Gen. Seif Eddin Al Rawi on April 8. The newspaper said Al Rawi, commander of the elite Republican Guards, was accused of treason and shot in the head and back. Al Rawi was summoned by Saddam and executed on the day U.S. marines captured the Iraqi capital. The newspaper...

WASHINGTON The swank cocktail party celebrating the fall of Baghdad was the hot ticket on Embassy Row.The host was the Bush administration's vicar of foreign policy. The guests on Saturday, April 12, included Tony Brenton, acting head of the British Embassy, and dozens of ambassadors from the smaller countries that fashioned the fig leaf known as the coalition of the willing.The ambassador of Eritrea was welcomed to the house on Kalorama Road, even as the French ambassador, who lives directly across the street in a grand chateau, was snubbed. The German ambassador is kaput, but the ambassador of the Netherlands...

AMMAN, Jordan -- Amer Ahmed recalled the television pictures of Iraqi fighters resisting U.S. soldiers in the sleepy port of Umm Qasr, unlikely Arab heroes pinning down the invaders as soon as their boots stepped onto Iraqi sand. Then only days later, Ahmed watched from his home in Amman as Baghdad abruptly fell. American troops were practically joyriding through the storied Arab capital, with no one to challenge them. The dream of Arab champions putting up a fight against the superpower was shattered. "In Baghdad, the Iraqis had weapons. They had an army. If you fought only with your hands,...

THE MARKETS ARE treating the fall of Saddam and the extraordinary history we've been watching this past week as a non-event. In my view, they couldn't be more short-sighted. Let's sidestep for a moment the admittedly fascinating, complex and profound geopolitical implications of the stunning coalition military victory and focus on the one thing that will mean the most to markets world-wide: oil. Relatively little is being written on this vitally important aspect of the conflict, which is surprising given that many accused the U.S. of fostering a war in Iraq for the primary if not sole purpose of getting...

  Sky's Chater in Baghdad ME AND SADDAM'S HEAVIES First light came with gunfire throughout the city.A fat, waxing American moon hung over Baghdad. The armoured wagons of the US Marine Corps surrounded our hotel, writes Sky's Baghdad correspondent, David Chater. The pools of burning oil had been extinguished...but fresh flames were being set by the looters.My last night in the Iraqi capital after three weeks of war.Paranoia punctuated the dawn drive westwards to Jordan.In the outskirts of the city, we passed a checkpoint still manned by the Iraqi militia.Then through the Coalition's surrounding chokeholds where all questions were...

Final Assault I got wind that the climactic raid of the 82nd Airborne's liberation of Samawah will take place starting around midnight tonight, and culminating in an infantry assault across the bridges spanning the Euphrates. The dense north side of the river--the stronghold of the guerillas who had poured withering fire onto the 325 during the first push to take the bridges a couple days earlier--will now be frontally attacked and occupied. This time, the men will be immediately preceded over the bridges by Bradleys and other armored vehicles from the 41st Infantry Regiment, assigned to support the 82nd here....

BAGHDAD - Among the Iraqis who have recovered bodies from shallow mass graves at the country's largest prison is the family of a retired general they say disappeared after meeting with UN weapons inspectors. "We came to this place because someone told us that he may be buried somewhere here," said Abu Haldoon, the brother-in-law of retired Air Force Gen. Engineer Ali Hussein Habib. Habib retired in 1991 after heading a team of military officers in developing Iraq's chemical weapons program, Haldoon said. In early February, UN experts searching for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction interviewed the...

With the Iraqi people dancing atop a dictator's fallen statues, the pundits who forecast an American bloodbath have begun to change their story. Implying that our military achievement wasn't all that grand, they tell us Saddam didn't even have much of a plan to defend his country. Absolute bull. Saddam had a classic 20th-century, industrial-age war plan. But our forces fought a 21st-century, post-industrial war. We have witnessed the end of an era along the road to Baghdad. Every other military establishment and government in the world witnessed it, too. We shall hear a great deal from think tanks in...

<p>BAGHDAD, Iraq -Iraqi military commanders, certain they could never counter overwhelming American air power, thought they could defeat the United States by making a bloody stand for Baghdad that would so sicken the American public that the United States would withdraw its troops and go home.</p>

File photo of Arab volunteers flashing victory signs aboard a bus leaving from Baghdad   TUNISIA, April 19 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - After three tough weeks in Iraq, Tunisian volunteers who fought against the U.S.-led invasion forces returned home with haunting memories and bitter feeling of betrayal and hatred."We left for Iraq as volunteers to join the Iraqis who are die-set to defend their country, but returned victims to betrayal by some Iraqi army members and hatred - and even attacks - by some Iraqi civilians," recalled Al-Tayeb Bin Othman, a 27-year-old teacher."Upon reaching Baghdad, we stayed for...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 19 - On the gilded marble tablets posted at the gateways of a score of presidential palaces, it was known as "The Era of Saddam Hussein." Yet in the 26 days of American warfare it took to bring that era down, the hallmark of Mr. Hussein's rule was revealed not as one of grandeur, but of gangsterism and thuggery. On the pediments of his palaces, Mr. Hussein mounted 30-foot bronze busts of himself as Saladin, the Mesopotamian warrior who conquered Jerusalem with his Islamic army in the 12th century. But Mr. Hussein's legacy, revealed with merciless...