Fedayeen Saddam - a look into their world, and the reason they continue to fight

New Republic Online ^ | March 29, 2003 | Khalid Makiya

[DED]

The world is now getting acquainted with the Fedayeen Saddam, the thugs who are keeping Iraqi citizens in check, most vividly right now in the cities of the south. They were created by Saddam's elder son Uday in 1991 with the specific purpose of countering any future intifada, especially in the predominantly Shi'ite south. (Saddam has since given control the Fedayeen over to his more stable son Qusay.) According to a former Iraqi intelligence officer who worked for the opposition while he was still in the security services and only made his (narrow) escape when his activities were uncovered, the organization largely recruits young teenagers, whose families are impoverished. The sanctions did a great deal to draw such jobless kids into the Fedayeen. The organization is known also to have drawn from criminal elements.

The Fedayeen training in the infamous camps of Salman Pak, Khalid says, is characterized by its intensity and its deliberate attempts, through psychological means, to isolate recruits from society at large and transform them into a fiercely disciplined and deliberately cruel force. The training instills in recruits a sense of paranoia, the feeling that the very precariousness of the regime is a personal threat to them. This is a force that sees plots against the regime everywhere, even though the regime is all-powerful over them. This paranoia soon turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the people they terrorize would gladly rip them limb from limb if they got half a chance. The Fedayeen, in other words, is a force that knows what fate awaits it after liberation. Khalid is certain that, unlike the regular army, they will therefore fight to the finish.

In order to escape detection, not every Fedayeen member travels around armed. What this force seems to have done in preparation for the war is to hide weapons caches in each town, in nondescript places. When it comes time to fight, they go from place to place as civilians, locate their weapons, and surprise their targets.

Khalid says they are frequently strangers to the towns and cities in which they operate. This is their Achilles' heel, but it is also the essential ingredient of what makes them cohere as a force whose first and foremost task is to act as an insurance policy against another intifada. Now that the war to destroy Saddam is underway, the regime is collecting on that insurance policy.

The danger is that the Americans won't know how to tell them apart from ordinary Iraqis. Indeed, rooting out such a force will be virtually impossible for anyone who does not have an intimate familiarity with Iraqi society and daily life under Saddam.

[Kevin Curry]

Except the Fedayeen

And coalition snipers.