U.S. airstrike targets Saddam and his family
By Greg Miller, John Daniszewski and David Zucchino
Los Angeles Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Acting on an intelligence tip, a U.S. warplane dropped several bunker-busting bombs on a meeting in a residential neighborhood yesterday, and a U.S. official said the airstrike might have killed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Associated Press
"If he was in that facility, he would most likely be dead," the official said.
Iraqi firemen shoot water on the smoldering crater left by four 2,000-pound bombs dropped in the al-Mansour neighborhood of Baghdad. The attack, based on an intelligence tip, targeted top Iraqi leadership, including Saddam Hussein and his sons.
He said commanders do "not know for certain" whether Saddam or his two sons, Odai and Qusai, were inside the building when the bombs hit, but he said the CIA was confident about intelligence information that they were meeting with members of the Iraqi intelligence service at the time.
"This was the first (tip) that was fairly specific" about Saddam and his sons since the opening attack of the war, a similar salvo three weeks ago in which the military launched cruise missiles and dropped bunker-busting bombs on a residential compound where the Iraqi leader and his sons were said to have been holed up.
The bombs destroyed three buildings in al-Mansour, an upscale neighborhood in Baghdad, and left a crater 60 feet deep.
The blasts shattered windows in buildings 300 yards away, ripped up orange trees by their roots and left a heap of concrete, mangled iron rods and shredded furniture and clothes. Iraqi rescue workers looking in the rubble for victims said two bodies had been recovered and the death toll could be as high as 14.
The attack came as U.S. forces occupying the heart of Baghdad parked their tanks outside Saddam's opulent New Presidential Palace and hunkered down for a perilous night and early morning as allied airstrikes screamed around them. Explosions rocked the area around the palace, and tracer fire streaked across the pre-dawn sky.
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During fierce skirmishes yesterday afternoon, an Iraqi missile struck a field headquarters of the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, the main force in the center of Baghdad. Two soldiers and two journalists were killed and 15 other soldiers were wounded.
In addition, the Marines said two of their troops had been killed when the 1st Division fought an amphibious assault across the Tigris River as they entered the city earlier in the day.
There were reports of two possible discoveries of chemical weapons, one near the Baghdad airport and the other at an Iraqi military base east of the city of Karbala in central Iraq, but neither was confirmed by senior U.S. military officials. They said the material had to be tested more extensively to determine whether it was poison for weaponry. "We'll eventually know," said U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Penetration to the heart of Saddam's diminishing power brought a pause at the Pentagon for stock-taking. More than 125,000 allied troops were inside Iraq. Baghdad airport was in American hands, and U.S. military aircraft were using its runways. U.S. troops controlled parts of central Baghdad and two of Saddam's palaces.
A year after joining the underground Baath Socialist Party in 1957, Saddam spent six months in prison in the slaying of his brother-in-law, a communist. In 1968, the Baath Party took over in a coup Saddam helped organize. Saddam pushed aside coup leader Gen. Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr to take over as president in July 1979, a rise accompanied by a purge in which hundreds of senior party members were imprisoned or executed. Saddam spent earnings from Iraq's vast oil wealth on education and infrastructure — and on one of the world's largest armies, which he used to quash dissent at home and to try to fulfill his ambitions abroad, including the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War. He fell into political isolation after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Odai is known as a womanizer with a flamboyant wardrobe that runs from cowboy boots to flowing, gold-embroidered Arab robes. Odai has a seat in parliament and runs Iraq's most popular newspaper, Babil, and the popular Youth TV channel. He also heads the National Iraqi Olympic Committee.
The Pentagon said all but about two dozen of Iraq's more than 800 tanks had been destroyed. "The circle is closing (on Iraqi leaders) and their options are running out," Rumsfeld said. Rumsfeld was reluctant to declare victory, but such an announcement, he said, was likely to come "later rather than sooner."
Saddam Hussein and sons
SADDAM HUSSEIN emerged from a humble background to become president, prime minister, chairman of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council and field marshal. Saddam's peasant father died before Saddam was born on April 28, 1937, in the village of al-Oja near the desert town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad.
QUSAI SADDAM HUSSEIN, 37, was being groomed as Saddam's successor, observers said. He supervises the Republican Guards, Iraq's best-trained and equipped troops. He has long been in charge of his father's personal security. Exiled critics of Saddam linked Qusai to brutal crackdowns on opponents.
ODAI SADDAM HUSSEIN, 39, seemed to have been a strong candidate to succeed his father before he was shot and badly wounded in 1996. He has a reputation for brutality, and has wounded and killed several men.
Moreover, he said, victory would not necessarily depend on whether Saddam was captured or killed. "At that point — where he is not running his country — the regime has been changed."
In downtown Baghdad, Col. David Perkins, commander of the 2nd Brigade, stood outside one of the two presidential palaces seized by U.S. forces and said: "We hold the city and all major instruments of power. The regime is no longer in power. Wherever Saddam Hussein is right now doesn't matter. He's irrelevant."
Despite the enthusiasm, Iraqis still controlled a majority of the city, and Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cautioned that U.S. forces had yet to confront Special Republican Guard units, the most loyal to Saddam and responsible for protecting him and other Iraqi leaders.
At U.S. Central Command headquarters in Doha, Qatar, Capt. Frank Thorp told reporters: "We should temper down our enthusiasm. This isn't over. There may be some tough days to follow."
Indeed, the driving force behind yesterday's invasion of Baghdad was as much psychological as strategic. The raid attacked the symbols of Saddam's power and was meant to discredit his regime.
Military officials made a point of releasing video footage of their exploration of the New Presidential Palace, a plush edifice in a country where many citizens go hungry. The photos showed golden bathroom fixtures, vaulted ceilings, a large dining room and rococo bedroom furnishings. The pictures also showed American soldiers sprawled in the well-upholstered surroundings while others lounged in the palace garden amid lavender flowers. Capturing the presidential palaces reinforced the reality "that we (can) and will continue to conduct operations at a time and place of our choosing," said Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks, deputy director of operations for the Central Command. "The regime does not have the means of preventing that."
On the southwestern edge of Baghdad, just east of the Diyala River, Marines discovered what appeared to be a large-scale training camp for the Palestine Liberation Front, as well as documents indicating that Iraq had sold weapons to the PLF as recently as January for the front's fight against Israel.
Marines from the 2nd Battalion, 23rd Regiment, who found the facility said it had lecture halls, barracks, dining halls, an obstacle course, parade deck, administrative offices and bomb-making materials.
In southern Iraq, residents of Basra, the nation's second-largest city, began to embrace allied troops. Crowds mobbed British tanks. Iraqi paramilitary fighters fled into the community or out of town.
British paratroopers entering the city on foot met little resistance apart from an occasional burst of machine-gun fire. They advanced toward the center of the city amid evidence of extensive looting. Some residents decried the British and Americans for destroying their old rule without creating a replacement.
Rumsfeld acknowledged the presence of exiled Iraqis in southern Iraq and said some Iraqis — both residents and exiles — were playing a military role alongside allied forces. But he indicated that the presence of Ahmed Chalabi, head of the exiled Iraqi National Congress opposition group, did not signify any broader role for Chalabi in a new Iraqi government.
"The Iraqi people are going to sort out what their Iraqi government ought to look like," Rumsfeld said.
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
