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01/21/2002: "INSIDE SADDAM'S TERROR REGIME"

The most senior officer ever to defect from Iraq’s Mukhabarat intelligence service, brigadier general Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy was forced into exile in the summer of 2000 when he crossed Saddam Hussein’s son Uday. After a three-day interview in Beirut, DAVID ROSE has the exclusive on al-Qurairy's brutal history of-rape, torture, and mass murder, his training of a previously unknown elite force called al-Qare' a-including an untraceable 30-commando unit that left Iraq a year ago and his strong belief that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks

April 28, 2000, was a very special day in Iraq. The president, Saddam Hussein, had turned 63. Along the 106 miles of highway from the capital, Baghdad, to Saddam's official birthplace in the town of Tikrit, government officials had erected a line of marquees, from which they dispensed free rice and lamb from steaming cauldrons. In Tlkrit itself, top presidential aide Izzat Ibrahim cut an enormous, flower- shaped cake to the tune of "Happy Birth- day to you." He ended the ceremony with a prayer: "We ask God...to prolong his [Saddam's] life, and make this an occasion of victory to us and to our nation against our enemies and the enemies of humanity."

Later that evening, Saddam's elder son, Uday, gave his father the perfect birthday gift. It had been a long time in the making. Uday had ordered his closest aide and confidant, Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy-a brigadier general in Iraq's feared intelligence service, the Mukhabarat-to put together a team of 30 specially trained fighters. In al-Qurairy's seasoned judgment, the men were the finest members of the secret unit he administered-the 1,200-strong commando force known as al-Qare'a, "the Strikers," Iraq's elite of elites, trained to a level far beyond ordinary special forces in sabotage, urban warfare, hijacking, and murder.

Al-Qurairy had given the 30 men new identities, complete with genuine United Arab Emirates passports supplied by a corrupt U.A.E. minister in the pay of the Mukhabarat: a means of travelling any- where, without creating the least suspicion they had originally come from Iraq. He had overseen their final training project-an exercise, using limpet mines and diving gear, to blow up a specially constructed mock-up of a U.S. Navy Fifth Fleet destroyer, moored in central Iraq's Habbaniya Lake. Like all al-Qare'a exercises, it had been conducted using real explosives and live ammunition. Uday had the fake ship's destruction videotaped, and that birthday evening he played the recording to his father.

Al-Qurairy never found out what happened to his 30 fighters. Less than three months after Saddam's birthday, his glittering, 20-year career as a Mukhabarat officer was at an end, and he was fighting for his life. Somehow, he managed to escape, and today he is trying to find a safe haven. At the end of November 2001, in a sparse hotel room in Muslim West Beirut in Lebanon, Henry Porter, Vanity Fair's London editor, and I interviewed him, over three intense days. The most senior Mukhabarat officer who has ever left Iraq, he gave a complete picture of his career, including his personal involvement in mass murder, torture, abduction, and rape. He supplied details of Iraq's terrorist training for Islamic fundamentalists, and described al-Qare'a-its very existence previously unknown to the Western public-for the first time.

As for the 30 fighters, al-Qurairy says all he knew about their future missions was that they would shortly be going abroad, for a long but unknown period. Abu Omer, the unit's former cook, whom we also met in Lebanon, described the first stage of their journey. In January 2001 they boarded the ferryboat which plies daily from the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr to one of the emirates, Dubai. There, untraceable as Iraqis, they vanished. They could, says al-Qurairy, be anywhere.

Like many defectors, al-Qurairy, who is 41, crossed from Iraq to its northern neighbour, Turkey. There, stuck in a Spartan refugee camp, his life going no- where, in August 2001 he did what would once have been unthinkable: he made contact with Iraq's democratic opposition, the Iraqi National Congress, which brought him to us in Beirut. The photograph on his Turkish temporary residence permit depicts him, as he was when he served the Mukhabarat: a stocky, gnome-like figure, bald, with a Saddam-style mustache. The man we met had disguised himself with a red Palestinian headscarf and a carved goatee. His manner was cheerful; his small brown eyes seemed kind. The only sign he might have been under stress was his prodigious consumption of alcohol and tobacco. On the second night, he drank a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black Label scotch. There were no ashtrays in the hotel room, forcing him to extinguish his cigarettes in a glass of water. By the end of the first morning's interview, the water was stained the color of strong tea. It is not uncommon for intelligence officers to cultivate an air of inscrutable stillness. Al-Qurairy seemed to have taken this to extremes. He'd left a wife and four children in Baghdad. Surely he must miss them, I asked. He shrugged. "Not really. They're just little kids."

It is not until al-Qurairy begins to talk of the terrorist training camp he used to run at Salman Pak, a 45-minute drive south from Baghdad, that he speaks with real feeling- unconcealed pride. "It's got a long-established history and we're proud to be associated with it," he says, "because it's trained the elite-the people who've carried out operations abroad, who are on the Interpol wanted lists. By the time a trainee leaves our school he can protect any V.I.P. or assassinate any V.I.P. In 1979, when Saddam Hussein executed half his Cabinet, they had the honor of executing them at the camp." Alone of all Iraq's myriad security installations, Salman Pak remains directly answerable to Saddam. "When he writes to the camp," says al-Qurairy happily, "he calls it 'the school of the liars.' "

On a satellite photo, he picks out Sal- man Pak's main features. In the southern part of the camp, at a bend in the Tigris River, is the barracks used for non-lraqi Arabs, Islamic fundamentalists who first came to Salman Pak in 1995 to be trained in classes of 24 by al-Qurairy's closest friend, Brigadier General Jassim Rashid al-Dulaimi. He is a man who practices what he preaches: he is wanted by Lebanese authorities for the 1994 murder of an opposition leader in Beirut. As recently as the summer of 2000, al-Qurairy saw the Arab students being taught to hijack aircraft on Salman Pak's own passenger jet, an Old Russian Tupolev. They all took a special course, he says-"how to gain control of the cockpit and passengers without using fire- arms." Professional pride meant the Iraqis ensured the Islamists reached a high standard: "When we train non-lraqis, we're not training them to preach in a mosque. We don't expect them to preach in a mosque, but to carry out offensive duties." But al- Dulaimi and his fellow instructors, all members of Saddam's secular Baath Party, regarded their Islamist students with con- tempt. "When Jassim and I go for a drink after work, Jassim says they are sons of bitches. They have all this work to do, but they spend half their time praying."

AI-Qurairy was responsible for running the north part of Salman Pak, and for al-Qare'a. He served as the unit's staff general and supervised its formation, at Uday's behest, from the best and most politically reliable fighters from an earlier and larger special-forces group-the Fedayeen Saddam, 'Saddam's Martyrs." (He remained in charge of. the Fedayeen as well.) From the time of its conception in 1995, al- Qurairy says, al-Qare'a was seen as a super-elite, as a force inured to violent death.

Faced with the aftermath\ of defeat in the Gulf War, Saddam believed that "to defend the country, sometimes you have to go on the attack." That could mean several things, including assassination, hijacking, and suicide missions. "Trainees who fail are used as targets in live ammunition exercises," al-Qurairy explains. "So they die. ... The training is purely offensive and not only offensive but suicidal. They are made to sign a document when they join that specifically says that orders will ask individual members to commit suicide on missions." The suicide-attacker principle was not original. Al-Qurairy says, "They got that idea from the Islamists."

In one training procedure, regularly repeated, students had to land three helicopters on the roof of a speeding train on Salman Pak's own railroad, and then hijack it. With sudden animation, al-Qurairy gets up from his chair and performs a series of jumps and pirouettes, demonstrating the difficulty of the necessary maneuvers. "Fifty took part; 38 passed," he says. "Twelve failed. They were used as 'passengers' in sub- sequent exercises."

Part of the role envisaged for al-Qare'a is to crush future internal rebellion. But the unit's primary ethos remains aggression against enemies abroad. "That's the very nature of our training," al-Qurairy says. "We have to go outside lraq-why would we train to blow up a building in Baghdad?" In July 2000, al-Qare'a moved en masse from Salman Pak to a camp near Basra on the Kuwait border, with orders to begin a campaign of sabotage and murder inside Kuwait. On that occasion, the plan was aborted.

In Arabic, says Nabeel Musawi, the Iraqi National Congress member who acted as our translator, there is a saying: "Evil comes back to the evildoer." If any individual could be said to prove this maxim's veracity, it is al-Qurairy. He, it swiftly became apparent, was no reluctant, press-ganged recruit to what the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya calls Saddam's "republic of fear." He embraced its beliefs and inhuman practices with unrestrained enthusiasm. Even in exile, he still refers to Saddam by his respectful title, "Haji." He proudly relates how, when Uday was lying in the hospital after the 1996 shooting that left him crippled, he had the honor of bending over his hospital bed and kissing him.

Al-Qurairy was born to a wealthy, prominent family north of Baghdad. His parents were Baath Party members, and he joined at the age of 10. By 18, he was the party's youngest full-time organizer. In al-Qurairy's opinion, Michel Aflaq, the party's founder, "was a greater prophet than Muhammad himself." The Baath Party's official ideology-in fact a vague mishmash of socialism and nationalism- was "written to serve humanity." Cursed by poor high-school grades, al-Qurairy missed university, and in 1980, a year after Saddam became president, he began to train for the Mukhabarat.

In London, I met another of Iraq's Mukhabarat defectors, who like al-Qurairy, spent six months at the Mukhabarat's "April 7th" camp at Diyala, northeast of Baghdad. "The fatal-casualty rate was 5 percent," this defector says. "In my course, we lost three men." The graduation ceremony was peculiarly brutal. The new graduates were put in a yard with 200 or 300 dogs. "We had to show what we can do" the defector continues.

"So we catch them with our bare hands and kill them with our teeth, by biting the arteries in their necks. Then we had to jump off a bridge into filthy, sewage-Iaden water, holding another dog. You mustn't let the dog go. If the dog lives, you are out of the Mukhabarat."

Al-Qurairy recalls the same experience. But as far as he is concerned, "to Mukhabarat people that was just a joke. Mukhabarat training was much more serious than that."

In 1990, by now a captain, al-Qurairy joined with the Iraqi forces that invaded Kuwait, and helped administer the seven- month occupation. It was a time for frolics. One day a young Palestinian woman made the mistake of visiting the Mukhabarat office, to complain that her estranged husband was failing to pay child support. In a conversation with Iraqi National Congress officers, al-Qurairy said the woman was beautiful-and that he, along with others in the Mukhabarat, raped her and let her go. Then al-Qurairy told the husband of what they had done, reminding him to pay up.

Saddam's defeat in Kuwait in March 1991 was followed by rebellion, by Kurds in the North of Iraq and by Shiite Muslims in the South. (Saddam and the Baathists come from the other principal Muslim sect, the Sunni.) George H. \\I: Bush had made a televised call to the Iraqi people to "force Sad- dam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside." For the Baath regime and its servants, it was the moment of deepest peril. Fourteen provinces were lost, and in most of them all Mukhabarat agents and officers were killed. "Once the people woke up," says al-Qurairy, "they were out to get revenge."

He turns to us with a smile. "We have you to thank for letting us save the day." The U.S. had already halted the allied advance, failing to take the road to Baghdad when it lay almost undefended, and allowing Sad- dam's best troops, the Republican Guard, to escape the military debacle unscathed. To the regime's barely suppressed amazement, America said it had no objection to Iraq's flying its helicopter gun ships. Iraq's Mukhabarat, says aI-Qurairy, interpreted this announcement as a "green light" for repression. Far from planning to protect the rebels from the air, thus ensuring Saddam's down- fall, it seemed America intended Saddam to survive. If Saddam's orders were 'Lash out, take the land back, even if it's bare land,'" aI-Qurairy says. The Mukhabarat were to do whatever it took to regain the lost territory, however great the human cost. In the first phase of the repression, the Mukhabarat and the army asked no questions at all. In some Shiite cities, says al-Qurairy, all the young men were rounded up and killed.

At Razaza, on the shores of Milh Lake in central Iraq, thousands of people from the Shiite city of Kerbala, including women and children, gathered in the open air. Al- though the air force and Republican Guard were storming their city, they thought they would be safe there. "The orders came: 'Use helicopters, gun them all down.' Then they immediately called for bulldozers to dig mass graves. The bulldozer drivers radioed back, 'Quite a lot are still alive.' The order came in response: 'Don't waste bullets. Bury them!"' While these and other massacres unfolded, U.S. fighters and reconnaissance planes watched uselessly from the skies high above.

After the first month, al-Qurairy says, the operation became marginally more discriminating. He was transferred to a camp at Radwaniya, north of Baghdad. Alleged rebels were brought to the camp each morning, subjected to cursory interrogation, then dispatched. "They brought them in buses, and they left in lorries, dripping with blood. Every lorry we and the special-security agency possessed was being used for dead bodies, taking them to mass graves. We kept each grave open for days; when it was full, we'd dig another one. ...When you see the bullets being fired all the time, and the lorries coming out, drenched in blood, and blood drenching the ground because there was nowhere for it to go- the effect stays with you forever. ...It took me days during that period before I could sleep. Some of my friends in the Mukhabarat simply lost their minds. They could not cope with the level of murders we were committing."

One recalls the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's account of the massacres of Jews perpetrated by the German Police Battalions in Poland in 1942. Like the Mukhabarat, the Police Battalions killed their victims with shots to the head. Goldhagen quotes one killer's recollection: "The executioners were gruesomely soiled with blood, brain matter, and bone splinters. It stuck to their clothes." It can have been no different at Radwaniya. On one morning, al-Qurairy says, he checked his list of prisoners' names. He was up to No. 4,300. That was the number of killings that had taken place that morning. In all, he says, at least 100,000 were killed there in a few weeks. The Iraqi National Congress estimates that 330,000 Iraqis were murdered in the spring of 1991. AI-Qurairy believes the true figure may well be higher.

AI-Qurairy claims he is still haunted by the memory of these terrible events. Yet as he describes them, he seems devoid of emotion, and matter-of-fact. Does he believe in God? I ask. For the first and only time, he pauses, apparently unable to provide an answer. "This is a hard question. I'm not a strong believer. We mention God by instinct, not because we think about it. I had to think!" The Iran-lraq war of 1980-88 "hardened our attitudes towards death." Yet the killings of 1991 were on such a scale, "even our own people can't come to terms with what they did," he says.

If I ever went back to Iraq," al-Qurairy says, "they would put me on a machine and cut me to pieces." There are taxis with Baghdad license tags for hire on Beirut's streets, some almost certainly driven by members of the Mukhabarat; from Beirut to Baghdad by road takes less than nine hours. The Iraqi National Congress had arranged our meetings with al-Qurairy with care. Until the previous evening, he had been staying in a safe house in another Middle Eastern state. He was brought to Lebanon by a member of that country's intelligence service, who had the experience and the paperwork to travel the region freely. He was introduced to us by Nabeel Musawi, our translator and effectively al- Qurairy's case officer.

Based in an office in London protected by bulletproof glass, the Iraqi National Congress is an underground intelligence network that hopes to topple Saddam. Led by Ahmed Chalabi, a genial, wealthy intellectual with a mathematics Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, it has built its own net- work, its effectiveness enhanced by technology. In London, Ahmad Allawi, the Iraqi National Congress's director of operations, exchanges dozens of highly encrypted E- mails each day with agents in Iraq who have been given digital cameras, small titanium laptops, and satellite phones. The Iraqi National Congress has handled many other defectors from within the regime- Khidhir Harnza, for example, who ran Sad- dam's nuclear-weapons program, and Wafiq Samaraii, his head of military intelligence. Before arranging our interviews with al- Qurairy, Musawi and his colleagues had de- briefed him thoroughly, checking every aspect of his story with sources inside Iraq and with other defectors. There was no doubt he was what he claimed. Before we met him, he had spent three days in Ankara, Turkey, with agents from the FB.I. and C.I.A. A senior C.I.A. analyst told me that, as far as the agency was concerned, al-Qurairy was telling the truth.

On our first night in Lebanon, we all dined together in a traditional Lebanese restaurant next to a Roman bridge. Shouting over the noise of the cabaret, Musawi laughed at al-Qurairy's jokes, slapped his back good-humoredly, and played the convivial host. It was left to his fellow opposition activist, Zaab Sethna, to tell us later how much effort this bonhomie required. Musawi's father and two cousins disappeared in 1981, taken as prisoners by the Mukhabarat. His quest to uncover their fate cost him years and thousands of dollars in bribes. It was not until 1995 that he learned they had been murdered shortly after their abduction and were buried in an unmarked grave.

Toward the end of our stay in Beirut, Musawi and Sethna left abruptly on another assignment-a meeting in Bangkok with a new Iraqi defector. This man, a building contractor, claimed to have been working to construct new facilities that Saddam would use to restore his biological- and chemical-weapons arsenals and to develop a nuclear bomb. Before their departure, the two activists showed us "contracts the defector had sent them. The documents suggested he had been building radiation- proof underground laboratories. That same day, President Bush ordered Saddam to admit U.N. weapons inspectors or "face consequences."

In 1995, when Saddam's son Uday took control of the Fedayeen, the unit that was to spawn aI-Qare'a, aI-Qurairy found himself cast as his principal henchman. In addition to his duties at Salman Pak, he had a new office in the Iraqi Olympic Committee's downtown- Baghdad building that Uday had made his headquarters. What happened there had little to do with the noble ideals of athletics. Beneath the building's ground floor, its cells slotted into the spaces between the piles of its foundation, is a dungeon that has housed as many as 520 detainees. "We were under strict orders to deny its existence, al-Qurairy says. "For a long time, even Saddam didn't know about it." Worst were the sensory- deprivation cells-almost sealed, painted red, with red lightbulbs and only a tiny slot for the passage of food. Prisoners would be kept there for up to three months before being re- moved for release, a determinate prison sentence, or execution.

Many of the Olympic committee's victims had committed no transgression,

even by the warped standards of Saddam's Iraq. They were businessmen or children of wealthy families whom Uday saw as ripe targets for extortion. In one case, al-Qurairy says, a businessman had arranged to import a shipment of steel for construction, and had deposited his payment with a bank in Baghdad to transfer to his foreign supplier. Uday arranged for the paperwork to disappear, "and then they brought him to us." Uday had stolen the money, and after interrogation the businessman was given a stark choice: pay for the steel again or die. On other occasions, people were simply ransomed, for as much as $100,000.

Sometimes the reasons for arrest were more personal. Al-Qurairy named a famous Iraqi concert pianist, who was seized from his own wedding and brought to the committee. When al-Qurairy arrived at work the next day, he was baffled: "I looked at his record. There was nothing obvious to do with politics or business." The man was a yoga practitioner, al-Qurairy says, "so I decided to take advantage of his presence and asked him to teach me some yoga." A few days later, the pianist was transferred to the prison at the Presidential Palace. Finally, after the victim had been imprisoned for 40 days, al-Qurairy asked Uday why he was there. Uday replied, speaking of the pianist's bride,” I fucked her two years ago!" Eventually, the pianist was released.

Other committee victims had been arrested for political offences, drug dealing, prostitution, theft, or minor corruption. What- ever the reason, at night they would be taken, blindfolded, to the building's third floor and interrogated. "Usually they're ready to confess, but they're tortured anyway. It's just part of the process: they have to go through torture and a confession." The luckier ones would merely go through "light beatings, just kickings and punchings." Those who showed signs of resistance would be handed over to the "real professionals": hard-core sadists whose names were well known- men al-Qurairy named as Ghalib Jawad, Samir Adnan al-Obeidi, and, the most in- famous of all, Kadum Sharqia. I ask al- Qurairy what methods Sharqia used, and he shrugs. "To him, torture is like an exercise. Once they're out of our control, it's none of our business."

Al-Qurairy says he personally supervised at least 1,000 arrests on the commit- tee's behalf, a small fraction of the total. Many of his victims were women: "Mainly pharmacists who were overcharging, and nurses. I followed one nurse's case very closely, because I really fancied her-she'd been arrested for trying to restore a girl's virginity. I liked her a lot." Were the prisoners raped? "Once they get in there, they're open to all. Most of them are more than happy to be had if it means the end of their ordeal. Those who resist, they take them anyway. Most of the women hope it will reduce their sentence or get them discharged, so they submit to it. To them, we're one step below God. If they're nurses or university students, it's great."

Many of the committee's prisoners are later executed. Al-Qurairy doesn't know exactly how many: "It's like the flow of oil. It never stops. Thousands come through the gates of the Olympic committee. We don't know what happens to them. There's no judicial process. They just disappear." The committee, he stresses, is only one of many portals to Iraq's apparatus of detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing. Since d the Gulf War, Iraq's gulag has expanded v substantially. "My estimate is that thousands die each year. And this continues.

As we were interviewing al-Qurairy in v Beirut, becoming lost in the horror he so baldly described, it became apparent t that the defeat of the Afghan Taliban was a only a matter of time. America and its partners in the anti-terrorist coalition were conducting a furious debate over whether to t extend military action to Iraq. The Pentagon appeared to be the main source of hawks. The Europeans, including Britain's 11 prime minister, Tony Blair, were urging caution, claiming that a strike against Saddam 1= was unjustified and might easily destabilize i1 the Middle East. One argument was being, repeated often: that there was no conclusive evidence of an Iraqi role in terrorism in general, nor in the September 11 atrocities specifically.

As yet, there isn't a case that would stand up in a court of law. We know Mohammed Atta, the hijackers' leader, who flew the first 1: airplane into the World Trade Center, twice met a notorious Mukhabarat special-operations expert in Prague in the months before the attacks; and it is believed that his former roommate in Hamburg, Marwan al-Shehhi (who flew the second W.T.C. plane), and another Hamburg associate, Ziad Jarrah (the hijacker who piloted Flight 93 before it crashed into the ground in Pennsylvania), both met Mukhabarat men in the U.A.E. That amounts to strong evidence of a connection with the 19 hijackers. A1-Qurairy s says: "When I saw the World Trade Center a attack on television I turned to a friend and said, 'That's ours.'"

Yet there are other issues besides responsibility for September Il-such as justice for the people of Iraq. By granting y Saddam his "green light" in 1991, the West v appeared to condone a further decade of killing. Now, perhaps, it has a chance to d put that right.

In the roughest way possible, justice started to catch up with al-Qurairy. Nabeel Musawi's Arabic proverb was coming true. In February of 2000, Saddam gathered his b top 400 officials, including al-Qurairy, and warned he was launching a major drive against a corruption, backed by a military committee. Offenders could expect only one penalty: death. It placed al-Qurairy in a very difficult position. Uday had been running a vast, multimi1lion-dollar scam against his father's 1 government, involving illegal transfers of dozens of government buildings. Al-Qurairy had signed many of these contracts, and 11 now he feared they would come to light. So he wrote a report denouncing Uday to Saddam's personal secretary, hoping-as Saddam had promised his loyal disciples-it would remain confidential.

On July 24, 2000, he returned to Baghdad from a mission to inspect the al-Qare'a camp on the Kuwaiti border. A driver was waiting at the station, saying Uday wanted a meeting. Ushered into Uday's office at the Olympic committee, al-Qurairy spent an hour reporting on his inspection of the al-Qare'a camp, then, he says, Uday changed. "He said, 'You sonofabitch, you think you care more about government money than we do?' I was so shocked, I immediately stood up. I said, 'Sir, there is a military committee investigating, this means execution.' He produced an electric cattle prod from nowhere, and he jabbed me with it between my legs. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, I was in a red cell in the Olympic-committee prison."

Al-Qurairy was moved to an isolation cell at the Presidential Palace. After 40 days he was released. But first, he had to see Uday again. There was a gold scimitar on his wan, a gift from one of the U.A.E. sheikhs. Uday said, "If I see your face or hear your voice again, I’ll cut your head off.", As al- Qurairy ,was well aware, temporary release, followed by re-arrest and execution, was a common tactic. Abandoning his family and everything he owned, he fled by taxi.

As we say our good-byes to al-Qurairy, I wonder what win become of him.

His admitted crimes make political asylum in the West an unlikely possibility. It seems the C.I.A. has no further use for him. He speaks of returning to Turkey and trying again to become a refugee, using a ~'clean" false identity. Perhaps America will topple Saddam through bombing or supporting a coup d'etat, he muses. In that case, there might be a role for him in a reconstructed, yet still Baathist, Iraq: "The truth is, I was born a Baathist. If you're born Christian, you don't question your mom and dad taking you to church. ...Till September 2000, the thought of ever leaving Iraq, of leaving my position or the party, never entered my mind."

Al-Qurairy believes that Saddam and his family's hold on power, though hard, has become brittle. "Nobody does my job for the love of Saddam. ...There is a lot of anger inside many people. If there is a U.S. strike on Baghdad, and it's clear the regime is being targeted, for example by bombing the Presidential Palace, no one will stand and fight-not al-Qare'a, not the special forces. They will turn against the regime, because they remember hen."

I look into those warm, brown eyes a final time. I realize that his eventual destiny will make little difference. Whatever hap- pens to al-Qurairy, they are the eyes of a man who is already dead.