Posted on 07/26/2003 11:17:32 PM PDT by Mr. Mulliner
How Saddam beat US in Baghdad
By Catherine Philp, The Times
July 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 one of Uday's tiny coterie of hand-picked personal bodyguards from 1997 until the moment his former boss finally left Baghdad to organise guerilla resistance further north.
Uday bade him farewell with a golden handshake of $US1000 ($1500), promising to be in touch again "when he was needed".
His life has been much quieter since, and it was with a look of mild surprise that the tall, broad-shouldered man opened the door to find a Western journalist standing on the doorstep alongside his cousin from Baghdad.
The cousin was the friend of an Iraqi friend who felt sure that, with Uday dead, the bodyguard could be convinced to talk about his years with Hussein's fast-living scion. And Iraqi customs make it hard to refuse someone who comes as a guest with your relative.
During a three-hour interview in a house in a town an hour northwest of Baghdad – an interview given on condition that neither the town nor the 28-year-old's name be revealed – the bodyguard said Hussein and his sons had remained in the capital throughout the war, convinced they could hold the city.
When the first bombs fell on a house in a southern suburb, where the Americans believed Hussein and his sons were meeting, he and Uday were on the other side of the city in one of dozens of safe houses belonging to trusted friends and relatives through which the three men were to pass in the weeks to come.
The bodyguard said the Americans' next "decapitation" strike came a lot closer, and that Hussein survived only because several safe houses had come under attack and he suspected there was an informant in his camp.
Hussein asked the suspect, a captain, to prepare a safe house behind a restaurant in the Mansour district for a meeting. They arrived and left again, almost immediately, by the back door. "Ten minutes after they went out of the door, it was bombed," the bodyguard said.
Hussein had the captain summarily executed, while the Pentagon was claiming that the strike had probably finished off Uday and his father.
When Baghdad fell on April 9, the three men were in separate houses in Adhamiya, a Sunni neighbourhood full of loyalists, where Hussein did a televised walkabout two days before.
Uday's bodyguard was not present on that occasion, but was there two days later when, to the astonishment of all around, Hussein and his sons appeared for Friday prayers at a mosque in Adhamiya, a few kilometres from where US troops were patrolling.
"There were crowds all around and an old woman came up to Saddam and asked: 'What have you done to us?'," the bodyguard recalled.
"Saddam clapped his hand to his head and said, 'What can I do? I trusted the commanders but they were traitors and they betrayed Iraq. But we hope that before long, we will be back in power and everything will be fixed'."
The men never appeared in public again, but the bodyguard said they were able to travel freely from safe house to safe house in unmarked cars, sometimes under the noses of the Americans. "Once we were in Mansour, their convoy was going by and we just drove right past them in ordinary cars. They never saw us," he said.
The bodyguard said Hussein and his sons had remained in Baghdad in the genuine belief they could hold the city. Only later, when they believed they had been betrayed by their commanders, did they consider an alternative. "The resistance was not factored in before the war," he said. "There was a closed meeting five or six days after the war, and that is when they began to discuss the resistance."
Yeah, he really beat the US in Baghdad, all right.
Looks as though one elderly woman's accusing question made him re-think his public jaunts. [snicker]
Saddam is out of power,
Both of his sons are GRAVEYARD DEAD,
all of his ministries are no longer occupied by his Ba'athist friends
All of Saddams Palaces are occupied by American troops
And 38 of his 55 most powerful Comrads have been captured by our forces...........
That is not what I call a victory, I call that a total ass whippin
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