Saddam's Sons Confirmed Dead
MOSUL, Iraq — Saddam Hussein's sons Odai and Qusai (search) were killed Tuesday when U.S. soldiers stormed a house in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul (search), U.S. military officials said Tuesday.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez of U.S. Central Command (search) announced late Tuesday night that Odai and Qusai were two of the four people who died in a firefight between U.S. troops and Iraqis at a house in Mosul earlier in the day.
Sources at the Pentagon and within the Bush administration earlier told Fox News that at least four "high-level" targets were killed inside the house, a large villa that belonged to one of Saddam's cousins. A senior administration official said the U.S. was "90 to 95 percent certain" that Saddam's sons were among the dead.
Officials said four bodies were transported out of the house. Three were adults -- Odai, Qusai and a bodyguard. The fourth body was of a teenager -- possibly Qusai's son.
Sanchez would not say how a positive identification of the bodies had been made. The U.S. government has DNA samples on Saddam's sons, but testing was expected to take some time. U.S. officials said they wanted to talk to people who knew Odai and Qusai in order to identify the bodies and look for distinguishing marks.
One U.S. official told Fox News that "they were shot up" so much that it is difficult to make a positive identification of the bodies.
The house was burned to the ground after a loud, four-hour gunbattle between the people inside and soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division (search).
Widespread and sporadic gunfire crackled across Baghdad after dark Tuesday as word spread that Saddam's feared and hated sons may have been killed.
"It's celebration. People have heard about what happened," a U.S. military spokesman told Reuters.
Officials told Fox News that they had two pieces of intelligence that directed them toward the house and that "there was some indication that Qusai and Odai were inside."
Residents of the city, 280 miles north of Baghdad, said the American soldiers were searching for Saddam's sons, who have been reported in the area. A reporter from Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera said eyewitnesses told him that Saddam's sons were in the house when it was raided.
"Individuals of very high interest to the coalition forces were hiding out in the building," Lt. Col. William Bishop of the 101st Airborne Division told Reuters.
"This morning we went to the building and surrounded it."
Gen. Frank Helmick, the U.S. general in charge of the raid, told Fox News that U.S. soldiers were fired at by people inside the house as they approached, and the Americans called in helicopters and an unmanned vehicle for assistance before storming it.
"We received direct fire from the building multiple times. We used a scaled escalation of force," Helmick told Fox News' Steve Centanni at the scene of the firefight.
Helmick said U.S. forces couldn't get into the building because of the small-arms fire they were facing, so "we had to use bigger caliber weapons to render the building safe" -- including missiles, helicopters and grenade launchers.
Members of Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division, wouldn't who -- if anyone -- they brought out of the house, but all the troops "have smiles on their faces and they seemed to have carried out this mission successfully," Centanni reported.
There were no U.S. fatalities.
Witnesses in the neighborhood said there are tunnels below the house. U.S. forces towed away a gray SUV from the side of house.
Mosul was believed to be the exit route for some of Saddam's family members trying to get out of Iraq and flee to Syria.
Fox News military analyst Col. Bill Cowan said he hoped Saddam's sons had been captured and not killed.
"I think in this case, it'd be great to have them alive," he said.
"I think for the [Iraqi] population to see these two guys shackled, incarcerated and really given some harsh treatment … will have a most profound and long-term psychological advantage."
The United States has offered a $25 million reward for information leading to Saddam's capture, and $15 million for his sons.
Cowan added that Saddam's sons might provide good intelligence on their father's whereabouts.
"It appears that good intelligence led to this raid," Ret. U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Valleley, a Fox News military analyst, said. "One event can lead to the other. So hopefully, this will lead to determining in some way where Saddam may be."
In Washington, President Bush's advisers were huddling around during a conference call trying to determine whether Saddam's sons were alive. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has briefed the president personally on the assault. White House officials seem less optimistic than the Pentagon about the turn of events.
"He [Bush] will be kept appraised of any updates as they become available," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. "The president is aware of the reports and is aware of the military operation that took place today."
Intelligence sources say the U.S. task force -- Task Force 20 -- was going after high-level targets during the Mosul raid, but they would not say whether the soldiers knew they were going after Odai and Qusai.
Task Force 20 -- including Army delta forces and CIA operatives -- was originally given the responsibility of finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but later it was ordered to refocus its efforts on hunting down Saddam and his inner circle. Sources confirmed to Fox News that special forces were involved with the raid.
The task force is basically a "hit team" that follows up only on solid intelligence.
"I think we're all anxiously awaiting confirmation," about the sons' deaths, Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, told Fox News Tuesday. "There's no question they were diabolical forces in Iraq."
Snowe, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the potential death or capture of Qusai and Odai shows the world that the U.S. work in Iraq is far from over.
"I think it goes to show how important our role is in Iraq and continues to be that we have to remove these forces of fear," Snowe said. "Iraq was one of the most atrocious regimes ... no one can really underestimate the threat that Saddam Hussein posed."
I think that we all recognized that as long as Saddam Hussein continues to exist, he poses a threat to the Iraqi people -- they will never be able to breathe easy if they know he's there."
Odai, Saddam's eldest son, was commander of Iraq's paramilitary unit, known as the Saddam Fedayeen, and he was also chairman of the Iraqi Olympic Committee. He is No. 3 on the coalition's most-wanted list, after his father and Qusai.
Iraqi Olympic athletes say they were routinely jailed and tortured for losing competitions or disobeying Odai's orders.
During Saddam's reign, Qusai was in charge of all the military, intelligence and security services in Iraq, including the elite Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization, which protected the regime and its weapons.
From 1988 to 1999, Qusai often ordered mass executions of several thousand prisoners, and suppressed revolts among the al-Dulaym tribe in 1995 and among Shiites in 1997.
Both Odai and Qusai were active in the management of the general office of the military intelligence service, the Istikhbarat, and the internal intelligence service, the Mukhabarat.
Qusai was considered the more likely of the two to succeed their father.
Fox News' Jim Angle, Bret Baier, Wendell Goler and Greg Palkot contributed to this report.
I hope they live to spend it.