The night I caught Saddam
The Sunday Times October 02, 2005
The night I caught Saddam
An Iraqi who worked with US special forces tells Alex Leith how he wrestled with the dictator after flushing him from his hiding hole
The photograph shows Saddam Hussein moments after he was pulled from his “foxhole”, bloodied and bewildered. Crowded around are members of an American elite special forces unit. But kneeling on his prostrate body and staring defiantly into the lens is a young man in a camouflage anorak. His look betrays more than the professional satisfaction of a job well done.
The photograph quickly found its way on to the internet, and it was at first assumed that the young man was an American soldier. He is, in fact, a 35-year-old Iraqi exile named Samir. And at last he is ready to tell the story of the night he helped to capture Saddam. He has agreed to give an interview for a documentary I am producing, his one proviso being that I conceal his full name. He is still fearful of reprisals against his family in Iraq.
We meet in a hotel in St Louis, Missouri, where Samir settled after fleeing Iraq in 1991. As a 20-year-old student he was one of thousands of Shi’ites and Kurds who rose against Saddam at the end of the first Gulf war, encouraged by the promise of western assistance.
As Saddam set about imprisoning, torturing and murdering thousands in revenge, Samir made a run for it, spending three years in a refugee camp before making a new life as a garage mechanic in the States.
The second Gulf war in March 2003 gave him hope that he might see his family again. He offered his services to the US military and was quickly hired as a translator. By December 2003 he was working in northern Iraq as translator to a special forces unit, Task Force 121. Its role was to hunt down and capture the 55 “most wanted” members of Saddam’s regime, represented by the infamous “deck of cards”. Saddam was top of that list, known to the forces hunting him as High Value Target 1 or HVT1.
Intelligence suggested Saddam had gone to ground somewhere near Tikrit, his home town, where he could rely on family and tribal ties for protection. Task Force 121 worked with the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division as they captured numerous members of the old regime. With each arrest they came a little closer to Saddam.
Months of painstaking work finally paid off in December 2003, when Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Musslit, one of Saddam’s bodyguards, was picked up. Known as “the Fat Man”, he was one of only two men thought to know Saddam’s whereabouts.
Al-Musslit was interrogated in one of Saddam’s old palaces. At first he lied, but he did not hold out for long, says Samir. “He started crying and said, ‘Don’t kill me, I will take you to Saddam before it gets too late. Saddam’s going to know I’ve been captured. Let’s go now’.”
On a map of the area around Tikrit he pointed out the small town of Ad Dawr where, he claimed, Saddam was hiding on farmland belonging to a family of loyalists. Members of Task Force 121 took al-Musslit on a reconnaissance mission in an Iraqi van with tinted windows so that he could point out the exact location. Then, as night fell troops cordoned off a 2km x 4km perimeter around the farm. Apache helicopters flew overhead.
At 8pm strike teams raided two buildings where Saddam was thought to be hiding. They were empty. But al-Musslit also knew of a dilapidated set of outbuildings where there was a small underground hideout. The soldiers tried to find this location, taking him with them, but he lost his way on the maze of dirt roads in the dark.
“He kept telling us, ‘This one. No, no, the other one. No, this one, the other one.’” said Samir. Finally, with night-vision goggles, al-Musslit found the buildings.
They formed a small walled compound among the orange groves on the bank of the Tigris river. A hovering helicopter lit the area. As the soldiers swept through the site they captured two young farmers. But there was no sign of Saddam.
Inside the compound there was a small bedroom and a lean-to kitchen. In the bedroom, clothes and shoes were strewn about; the kitchen contained food, including a box of Mars bars. Washing hung from a clothes line crudely strung between two date palms in the courtyard. Dried fruit and meat hung from a nearby tree. But there was no Saddam. Even the sniffer dog failed to find a scent.
Samir confronted the two farmers. They were young brothers barely out of their teens. “We know Saddam is here,” he told them, “and we know there is a bunker. Where is it?”
Both feigned ignorance. Samir recalls with a mixture of incredulity and grudging admiration their refusal to give Saddam up, but he knew they were lying and he felt that a little more pressure might yield results. While one brother was kept outside, the other was dragged into the compound.
“We scared him with the dog to make him talk, but he didn’t. I punched him in the face, I was shaking him up and down (telling him), ‘We’re gonna find Saddam, and if you lie to us we’re gonna put you in jail for a long time. You’re not going to see your family again’.” It was no use. Either fear or devotion prevented the farmer from giving up Saddam.
Finally, al-Musslit was brought into the compound. The special forces soldiers had by now come to the conclusion that “the Fat Man” had lied. They started shouting at him, demanding to know where the bunker was. Samir translated: “You told us Saddam is here. You told us there is a bunker in the ground. Tell us now! Show us where the bunker is!”
Al-Musslit, who was still in handcuffs, looked utterly defeated. After a pause he slowly raised his arms and nodded to a rug at the edge of the compound area, about 5ft from where he stood. One of the special forces soldiers was standing on the rug, and looked down at his feet in slow surprise.
“That’s the bunker,” said al-Musslit quietly, “that’s the bunker you guys are standing on.” The soldiers looked confused. Al-Musslit shuffled over and tapped with his foot. “Dig,” he said. “Dig in here.”
Pulling the rug aside, one of the soldiers began digging at the soft earth. About 15in down he stopped abruptly. There, among the dirt and sand, were two rope handles. The soldier gently cleared the earth around the handles and tugged. A large Styrofoam block came away revealing the entrance to a hole barely large enough for a man.
Samir stared in disbelief. “We used to see Saddam on TV, the hero, the powerful man, the scary man. Just no way I believe he’s in that hole — a small, dirty hole.”
The hole was about 6ft to 8ft deep. At the bottom of it there was a narrow entrance into a tunnel. Squeezing into it would have been no mean feat for a 66-year-old such as Saddam.
One of the soldiers directed a burst of gunfire into the ground at the base of the hole and there was a scream of terror from inside.
“Samir,” a soldier shouted, “come and talk to him. Tell him to come out before he gets killed.”
Samir moved to the edge of the hole and stared into the darkness. Around him the men of Task Force 121 aimed their weapons into the gloom, the lights on the guns offering some illumination.
“I want to see your hands up! Put your hands up!” Samir yelled.
From within the hole, a voice responded in Arabic: “Don’t kill me! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Don’t kill me!”
Saddam could not understand the order to put his hands up, says Samir. “First he put up his right hand and they told me to tell him we want to see the other hand up. When I told him I want to see the other hand up for some reason he thought we wanted his left hand. He put his right hand down and he just put the left hand up. And I tell him, ‘No, both hands up’.”
Finally two shaky hands emerged. For Samir all thoughts of personal safety evaporated. “Maybe Saddam pull a gun and fire or commit suicide; or maybe like a bomb is gonna come out of the hole. For some reason I didn’t think about it. Saddam is near — the man who destroyed my life — I want to see him, I want to pull him out.”
Samir lunged for the hands. Suddenly the soldiers around him were joining in, pulling Saddam by his clothes, his hair, his beard — any part of him they could get hold of. He was lifted clear of the hole and thrown onto the ground. Saddam uttered only one phrase in English: “America, why?”
His appearance was shocking. Eight months on the run had taken their toll. “He looked so old and tired. And he looked so scared and shaken. He was hair all over — long beard, long hair. His hair was greasy — God knows how many times he never took a shower.”
Samir could scarcely control his emotions. “I was so angry at him. For some reason I really, really almost lost my mind.”
As Saddam was searched and handcuffed by the soldiers, Samir snarled: “You destroyed my country. Where were the promises you made on TV? You said you’re gonna fight the coalition forces. You didn’t do it. You are a coward man. Where is your army? Where are your bodyguards? Where are the people that are gonna fight for you? Nobody wants to fight for you. You are hiding in that hole like a rat!”
Saddam’s bewildered and frightened demeanour quickly gave way to outraged anger. “I have people to fight for me,” he spat back at Samir. “The heroes, the Iraqis, the greatest Iraqis who are going to fight the Americans. I am Saddam Hussein. I am the president. You don’t talk to me like this! I am Saddam Hussein!”
Grabbing Saddam by the beard with both hands, Samir started shaking him, yelling in his face: “You killed Kurds! You killed Shi’ites! You destroyed the country.” Then he spat at him.
“I wanted him to feel like he is nobody,” Samir explains now, “the same way he made us feel for many years.”
Saddam responded with primal rage. He had never been spoken to in such a way. Struggling against Samir’s grip, he tried in vain to bite his arm. Samir let him go in disgust, but Saddam was not finished.
“You are nothing but a traitor. You’re a spy. You are not Iraqi,” Saddam shouted. “I didn’t destroy the country — the Americans destroyed the country. I am Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis — good Iraqis — know who Saddam is. Not you. You are no good. You love the United States. You are a spy.” This was too much for Samir.
“He made me really upset and I had to punch him in the face. I punched him a couple of times in the face with some kicking in the face and head and he started bleeding from his mouth.”
As Saddam spat back, special forces soldiers pulled Samir off. But Samir managed to persuade his boss to let him be photographed kneeling over his former president.
There was one final confrontation between the two men. As they waited for a helicopter to land, Samir noticed that Saddam was staring up at the stars. “I said to him, ‘How beautiful is the sky? You see the sky? You see the beautiful stars? You’re never going to see them again. We’re gonna take you to Cuba. You’re gonna be in prison until the day you die. This is what you get. This is what you deserve.’”
Saddam replied that he was not looking at the stars — he was looking to Allah. Samir was incensed by the suggestion. “I told him, ‘You don’t even know the word Allah. If you know Allah and you believe in Allah, you wouldn’t do what you did to the country. You killed Iraqis. You killed the children. You killed the old people. You are against God.’ He told me, ‘God loves me. I’m Saddam Hussein. I’m a good man, and people know who Saddam is.’”
As the helicopter touched down, the dictator's bravado disappeared. When the soldiers guided him forward to strap him into the aircraft, he began to struggle, says Samir.
“We had to pick him up and throw him in the helicopter.”
Zero Hour: Capturing Saddam will be broadcast on the Discovery Channel UK on Wednesday at 10pm
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions . Please read our Privacy Policy . To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the Syndication website .
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1806865,00.html
The night I caught Saddam
An Iraqi who worked with US special forces tells Alex Leith how he wrestled with the dictator after flushing him from his hiding hole
The photograph shows Saddam Hussein moments after he was pulled from his “foxhole”, bloodied and bewildered. Crowded around are members of an American elite special forces unit. But kneeling on his prostrate body and staring defiantly into the lens is a young man in a camouflage anorak. His look betrays more than the professional satisfaction of a job well done.
The photograph quickly found its way on to the internet, and it was at first assumed that the young man was an American soldier. He is, in fact, a 35-year-old Iraqi exile named Samir. And at last he is ready to tell the story of the night he helped to capture Saddam. He has agreed to give an interview for a documentary I am producing, his one proviso being that I conceal his full name. He is still fearful of reprisals against his family in Iraq.
We meet in a hotel in St Louis, Missouri, where Samir settled after fleeing Iraq in 1991. As a 20-year-old student he was one of thousands of Shi’ites and Kurds who rose against Saddam at the end of the first Gulf war, encouraged by the promise of western assistance.
As Saddam set about imprisoning, torturing and murdering thousands in revenge, Samir made a run for it, spending three years in a refugee camp before making a new life as a garage mechanic in the States.
The second Gulf war in March 2003 gave him hope that he might see his family again. He offered his services to the US military and was quickly hired as a translator. By December 2003 he was working in northern Iraq as translator to a special forces unit, Task Force 121. Its role was to hunt down and capture the 55 “most wanted” members of Saddam’s regime, represented by the infamous “deck of cards”. Saddam was top of that list, known to the forces hunting him as High Value Target 1 or HVT1.
Intelligence suggested Saddam had gone to ground somewhere near Tikrit, his home town, where he could rely on family and tribal ties for protection. Task Force 121 worked with the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division as they captured numerous members of the old regime. With each arrest they came a little closer to Saddam.
Months of painstaking work finally paid off in December 2003, when Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Musslit, one of Saddam’s bodyguards, was picked up. Known as “the Fat Man”, he was one of only two men thought to know Saddam’s whereabouts.
Al-Musslit was interrogated in one of Saddam’s old palaces. At first he lied, but he did not hold out for long, says Samir. “He started crying and said, ‘Don’t kill me, I will take you to Saddam before it gets too late. Saddam’s going to know I’ve been captured. Let’s go now’.”
On a map of the area around Tikrit he pointed out the small town of Ad Dawr where, he claimed, Saddam was hiding on farmland belonging to a family of loyalists. Members of Task Force 121 took al-Musslit on a reconnaissance mission in an Iraqi van with tinted windows so that he could point out the exact location. Then, as night fell troops cordoned off a 2km x 4km perimeter around the farm. Apache helicopters flew overhead.
At 8pm strike teams raided two buildings where Saddam was thought to be hiding. They were empty. But al-Musslit also knew of a dilapidated set of outbuildings where there was a small underground hideout. The soldiers tried to find this location, taking him with them, but he lost his way on the maze of dirt roads in the dark.
“He kept telling us, ‘This one. No, no, the other one. No, this one, the other one.’” said Samir. Finally, with night-vision goggles, al-Musslit found the buildings.
They formed a small walled compound among the orange groves on the bank of the Tigris river. A hovering helicopter lit the area. As the soldiers swept through the site they captured two young farmers. But there was no sign of Saddam.
Inside the compound there was a small bedroom and a lean-to kitchen. In the bedroom, clothes and shoes were strewn about; the kitchen contained food, including a box of Mars bars. Washing hung from a clothes line crudely strung between two date palms in the courtyard. Dried fruit and meat hung from a nearby tree. But there was no Saddam. Even the sniffer dog failed to find a scent.
Samir confronted the two farmers. They were young brothers barely out of their teens. “We know Saddam is here,” he told them, “and we know there is a bunker. Where is it?”
Both feigned ignorance. Samir recalls with a mixture of incredulity and grudging admiration their refusal to give Saddam up, but he knew they were lying and he felt that a little more pressure might yield results. While one brother was kept outside, the other was dragged into the compound.
“We scared him with the dog to make him talk, but he didn’t. I punched him in the face, I was shaking him up and down (telling him), ‘We’re gonna find Saddam, and if you lie to us we’re gonna put you in jail for a long time. You’re not going to see your family again’.” It was no use. Either fear or devotion prevented the farmer from giving up Saddam.
Finally, al-Musslit was brought into the compound. The special forces soldiers had by now come to the conclusion that “the Fat Man” had lied. They started shouting at him, demanding to know where the bunker was. Samir translated: “You told us Saddam is here. You told us there is a bunker in the ground. Tell us now! Show us where the bunker is!”
Al-Musslit, who was still in handcuffs, looked utterly defeated. After a pause he slowly raised his arms and nodded to a rug at the edge of the compound area, about 5ft from where he stood. One of the special forces soldiers was standing on the rug, and looked down at his feet in slow surprise.
“That’s the bunker,” said al-Musslit quietly, “that’s the bunker you guys are standing on.” The soldiers looked confused. Al-Musslit shuffled over and tapped with his foot. “Dig,” he said. “Dig in here.”
Pulling the rug aside, one of the soldiers began digging at the soft earth. About 15in down he stopped abruptly. There, among the dirt and sand, were two rope handles. The soldier gently cleared the earth around the handles and tugged. A large Styrofoam block came away revealing the entrance to a hole barely large enough for a man.
Samir stared in disbelief. “We used to see Saddam on TV, the hero, the powerful man, the scary man. Just no way I believe he’s in that hole — a small, dirty hole.”
The hole was about 6ft to 8ft deep. At the bottom of it there was a narrow entrance into a tunnel. Squeezing into it would have been no mean feat for a 66-year-old such as Saddam.
One of the soldiers directed a burst of gunfire into the ground at the base of the hole and there was a scream of terror from inside.
“Samir,” a soldier shouted, “come and talk to him. Tell him to come out before he gets killed.”
Samir moved to the edge of the hole and stared into the darkness. Around him the men of Task Force 121 aimed their weapons into the gloom, the lights on the guns offering some illumination.
“I want to see your hands up! Put your hands up!” Samir yelled.
From within the hole, a voice responded in Arabic: “Don’t kill me! Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! Don’t kill me!”
Saddam could not understand the order to put his hands up, says Samir. “First he put up his right hand and they told me to tell him we want to see the other hand up. When I told him I want to see the other hand up for some reason he thought we wanted his left hand. He put his right hand down and he just put the left hand up. And I tell him, ‘No, both hands up’.”
Finally two shaky hands emerged. For Samir all thoughts of personal safety evaporated. “Maybe Saddam pull a gun and fire or commit suicide; or maybe like a bomb is gonna come out of the hole. For some reason I didn’t think about it. Saddam is near — the man who destroyed my life — I want to see him, I want to pull him out.”
Samir lunged for the hands. Suddenly the soldiers around him were joining in, pulling Saddam by his clothes, his hair, his beard — any part of him they could get hold of. He was lifted clear of the hole and thrown onto the ground. Saddam uttered only one phrase in English: “America, why?”
His appearance was shocking. Eight months on the run had taken their toll. “He looked so old and tired. And he looked so scared and shaken. He was hair all over — long beard, long hair. His hair was greasy — God knows how many times he never took a shower.”
Samir could scarcely control his emotions. “I was so angry at him. For some reason I really, really almost lost my mind.”
As Saddam was searched and handcuffed by the soldiers, Samir snarled: “You destroyed my country. Where were the promises you made on TV? You said you’re gonna fight the coalition forces. You didn’t do it. You are a coward man. Where is your army? Where are your bodyguards? Where are the people that are gonna fight for you? Nobody wants to fight for you. You are hiding in that hole like a rat!”
Saddam’s bewildered and frightened demeanour quickly gave way to outraged anger. “I have people to fight for me,” he spat back at Samir. “The heroes, the Iraqis, the greatest Iraqis who are going to fight the Americans. I am Saddam Hussein. I am the president. You don’t talk to me like this! I am Saddam Hussein!”
Grabbing Saddam by the beard with both hands, Samir started shaking him, yelling in his face: “You killed Kurds! You killed Shi’ites! You destroyed the country.” Then he spat at him.
“I wanted him to feel like he is nobody,” Samir explains now, “the same way he made us feel for many years.”
Saddam responded with primal rage. He had never been spoken to in such a way. Struggling against Samir’s grip, he tried in vain to bite his arm. Samir let him go in disgust, but Saddam was not finished.
“You are nothing but a traitor. You’re a spy. You are not Iraqi,” Saddam shouted. “I didn’t destroy the country — the Americans destroyed the country. I am Saddam Hussein. The Iraqis — good Iraqis — know who Saddam is. Not you. You are no good. You love the United States. You are a spy.” This was too much for Samir.
“He made me really upset and I had to punch him in the face. I punched him a couple of times in the face with some kicking in the face and head and he started bleeding from his mouth.”
As Saddam spat back, special forces soldiers pulled Samir off. But Samir managed to persuade his boss to let him be photographed kneeling over his former president.
There was one final confrontation between the two men. As they waited for a helicopter to land, Samir noticed that Saddam was staring up at the stars. “I said to him, ‘How beautiful is the sky? You see the sky? You see the beautiful stars? You’re never going to see them again. We’re gonna take you to Cuba. You’re gonna be in prison until the day you die. This is what you get. This is what you deserve.’”
Saddam replied that he was not looking at the stars — he was looking to Allah. Samir was incensed by the suggestion. “I told him, ‘You don’t even know the word Allah. If you know Allah and you believe in Allah, you wouldn’t do what you did to the country. You killed Iraqis. You killed the children. You killed the old people. You are against God.’ He told me, ‘God loves me. I’m Saddam Hussein. I’m a good man, and people know who Saddam is.’”
As the helicopter touched down, the dictator's bravado disappeared. When the soldiers guided him forward to strap him into the aircraft, he began to struggle, says Samir.
“We had to pick him up and throw him in the helicopter.”
Zero Hour: Capturing Saddam will be broadcast on the Discovery Channel UK on Wednesday at 10pm
Copyright 2005 Times Newspapers Ltd.
This service is provided on Times Newspapers' standard Terms and Conditions . Please read our Privacy Policy . To inquire about a licence to reproduce material from The Times, visit the Syndication website .
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-1806865,00.html
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