現在地 HOME > 掲示板
> 戦争44 > 1236.html
★阿修羅♪
|
現在地 HOME > 掲示板
> 戦争44 > 1236.html
★阿修羅♪
|
|
フセイン、それとも猿ブッシュの口？【SteveBellの漫画です。】
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,7371,1107961,00.html
A well-known prisoner
有名な囚人。
'I am Saddam Hussein the president of Iraq and I am willing to negotiate'
US troops were about to throw a hand grenade down the hole
Rory McCarthy in Ad Dawr
Tuesday December 16, 2003
The Guardian
It fell to an unnamed American special forces soldier to gingerly lift back the thin scrap of carpet. It was just after 8pm on a damp, pitch-black Saturday night and only minutes into Operation Red Dawn.
The target was a small one-room brick shack on the east bank of the Tigris river. A rare tip from a suspect questioned that afternoon suggested there was an underground shelter near the hut and that inside was hiding America's ultimate goal in Iraq: High Value Target Number One, Saddam Hussein himself.
For weeks the troops of the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 4th Infantry Division had been combing houses around Tikrit, Saddam's home town, 100 miles north of Baghdad. The "raider brigade," as they became known to fellow soldiers, had led a dozen separate operations in the hunt for Saddam. Each had drawn a blank. The brigade commander, Colonel James Hickey was beginning to get frustrated.
But when the soldier pulled back the carpet on Saturday night there was little doubt left in anybody's mind. Under the carpet and a square patch of black rubber matting, he found a dirty Styrofoam block with two string handles. He pulled it free and from inside the narrow, square hole appeared the haggard, bearded features of an ageing Iraqi man. The man raised his hands in the air and in halting English spoke the most improbable words.
"He said: 'I am Saddam Hussein. I am the president of Iraq and I am willing to negotiate,'" said Major Brian Reed, the brigade's operations officer who helped lead the raid. "The response from the US soldier was: 'President Bush sends his regards'."
Normally an American soldier is trained to clear similar rat holes, or underground facilities (UGFs) in military parlance, by dropping in a hand grenade or shooting off rounds from an assault rifle into the hole. "There was a man down there and we were about to clear that UGF in a military sort of way when two hands appeared," said Col Hickey.
Saddam had a pistol tucked in his belt but made no attempt to use it and no effort to resist. The troops also found two Kalashnikov assault rifles in the hut as well as $750,000 (£430,000) in $100 bills. The raid, which began with a power blackout at 8pm, was over in less than 25 minutes.
Dead or alive
"That individual clearly wanted to surrender," the colonel said. "He was a little bit disoriented, a little bit nervous. He calmed down shortly afterwards." The colonel insisted his troops and the special forces team working with them had been given no special instructions to try to keep Saddam alive. "Dead or alive. It depends on what the enemy does."
Outside the hut, in a field of tall, burnt sunflowers was Captain Desmond Bailey, 31, from Wetumpka, Alabama. As one of the brigade's troop commanders, he was manning a security perimeter. He listened to his radio and through his night-vision goggles watched the infra-red lights of the special forces team as they entered the hut. After a pause he heard a voice say: "We just pulled him out of a hole. We're just confirming right now."
Every senior soldier on the mission that night, as every night, carried with him a photograph of Saddam as well as a picture of a peculiar identifying tattoo the former Iraqi leader has on his left hand. Upon finding Saddam soldiers had been told to follow a series of established features checks. Moments later Capt Bailey heard the words: "We have him."
"I was pretty happy but we all thought: Is that it?," he said. "As one of my gunners said, we didn't even get to shoot."
He then watched as two special forces soldiers led Saddam out of the hut across the sunflower field and into a waiting helicopter.
He said Iraq's former dictator was slumped into the wind, his hands appeared cuffed behind his back and he looked as if he was wearing a hood, standard garb for prisoners of the US military in Iraq. The helicopter flew him off to a "secure location" in Tikrit. Ironically, that was almost certainly one of the former dictator's vast and ostentatious palace complexes that are now bases for the 4th Infantry Division.
About 20 minutes later, Col Hickey, who was commanding the raid from a Humvee several hundred metres further back down the riverbank, got on the radio and called his commanding officer, Major General Raymond Odierno, chief of the division. "I said: 'General Odierno, this is Colonel Hickey. We have captured HVT-1.' He said: 'Really?' I said: 'Yes sir.' And I told him I had $750,000 in the back of my Humvee for him.
"I felt a great sense of accomplishment but only momentarily," said the colonel. "We have work to do. I was doing my duty."
In the weeks after the 4th Infantry arrived in Iraq, following the collapse of Saddam's regime, it became increasingly clear to them that Saddam was probably hiding in or around Tikrit, in the centre of their patch of territory. In the end Saddam was captured just outside the town, a few miles from the village of al-Awja, where he was born in 1937.
Col Hickey has slowly built up an understanding of the complex web of Sad dam's key supporters and his men and led more than 500 raids as he tried to crack the former dictator's security circle. "We have built a fairly elaborate estimate of who Saddam's supporters were in the area," he said. He determined that as few as five large families were supporting the reclusive Iraqi dictator. "Though it did provide security, it also worked against them," he said. "Once we learnt who did what, it allowed us to work against them."
More than a month ago Col Hickey and his colleagues made what turned out to be a crucial reassessment of Saddam's network. "It was a matter of who was who and who was doing what," he said. "One part of our assessment changed rather dramatically." His brigade began to focus on one particular target, an Iraqi man the colonel described only as "middle-aged with a very large waistline".
The man was not from Saddam's family or tribe, nor was he on the list of 55 most-wanted regime figures but it became clear that he held crucial evidence that could lead the soldiers to the Iraqi leader.
The brigade tried to catch their new suspect in a series of five raids before dawn on December 4 in Tikrit. They caught his "subordinates," who were involved in "financing enemy activity," he said. But the target was not caught. Then he was tracked to Samarra and the following day there was another raid to catch him. Again the suspect slipped through the net but the soldiers made some arrests and recovered $1.9m (£1.13m). There was a third raid in Beiji on December 7, but again the suspect escaped.
Real target
Finally, last Friday a different US military unit captured the man in a raid in Baghdad. Only on Saturday morning did the colonel learn of the arrest. The suspect was rushed to Tikrit and questioned for up to four hours as Col Hickey prepared his troops for a major operation that evening to capture Saddam. At first the target was a granary north of Tikrit and he began deploying his troops. But by 5pm, as the interrogation progressed, it became clear the real target was in fact south of Tikrit, close to the town of Ad Dawr, the family home of Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam's vice-president and the most senior Iraqi regime figure still on the run.
The suspect described an underground facility and the military identified two targets for the raid: two houses in the village of Ad Dawr codenamed Wolverine One and Wolverine Two. "I wanted to move fast and execute a coup de mains on the objective," Col Hickey said.
In the end the brick hut was found just a few hundred yards beyond Wolverine Two. It was a shabby, run-down lean-to and in the garden was the small, muddy hole, that was Saddam's hiding place. "We were expecting something more elaborate. What we found surprised us. We didn't think it would be so humble and simple."
Because the tip came from a suspect who had been detained during a US raid it is unlikely he will pocket the $25m (£14.9m) price on Saddam's head. In fact American troops had already called at the hut in previous operations, but had never thought to lift up the grey patch of carpet under the date palm that hid the entrance to the Iraqi dictator's hideout.
Col Hickey flew to Baghdad the morning after the raid to watch Paul Bremer, America's proconsul in Iraq, make the first public announcement of Saddam's capture.
"It felt like we have really done something," the colonel said. "It is more than just military, I know this was important to a lot of people. I really felt like we were delivering something to them.
"Like any autocratic regime, Saddam Hussein's had a high degree of strength but it was ultimately fragile and weak."
Special report
Iraq
Chronology
Iraq timeline
Interactive guides
Click-through graphics on Iraq
Key documents
Full text of speeches and documents
Audio reports
Audio reports on Iraq
More special reports
Politics and the war
Aid for Iraq
Iraq - the media war
The anti-war movement
28.01.2003: Guide to anti-war websites
Useful links
Provisional authority: rebuilding Iraq
Iraqi-American chamber of commerce
題名には必ず「阿修羅さんへ」と記述してください。