Saddam
was held by Kurdish forces, drugged and left for US troops
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LONDON, (AFP) -
Saddam Hussein was captured by US troops only after he had been taken
prisoner by
Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to
recover him, a British Sunday newspaper said.
Saddam came into the hands
of the Kurdish
Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the
al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday,
leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, which quoted an
unnamed senior British military intelligence officer.
The newspaper said the
full story of
events leading up to the ousted Iraqi president's capture on December
13 near his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq, "exposes the
version peddled by American spin doctors as incomplete".
A former Iraqi
intelligence officer, whom
the Express did not name, told the paper that Saddam was held prisoner
by a leader of the Kurdish Patriotic Front, which fought alongside US
forces during the Iraq war, until he negotiated a deal.
The deal apparently
involved the group gaining political advantage in the region.
An unnamed Western
intelligence source in
the Middle East told the Express: "Saddam was not captured as a result
of any American or British intelligence. We knew that someone would
eventually take their revenge, it was just a matter of time."
We got
him: Kurds say they caught Saddam
By Paul McGeough, Herald Correspondent in Baghdad
Sydney
Morning Herald - Australia - December 22, 2003
Washington's claims
that brilliant US intelligence work led to the capture of Saddam
Hussein are being challenged by reports sourced in Iraq's Kurdish media
claiming that its militia set the circumstances in which the US merely
had to go to a farm identified by the Kurds to bag the fugitive former
president.
The first media account of the December
13 arrest was aired by a Tehran-based news agency.
American forces took Saddam into
custody around 8.30pm local time, but sat on the news until 3pm the
next day.
However, in the early hours of Sunday,
a Kurdish
language wire service reported explicitly: "Saddam Hussein was captured
by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. A special intelligence unit led by
Qusrat Rasul Ali, a high-ranking member of the PUK, found Saddam
Hussein in the city of Tikrit, his birthplace.
"Qusrat's team was accompanied by a
group of US
soldiers. Further details of the capture will emerge during the day;
but the global Kurdish party is about to begin!"
The head of the PUK, Jalal Talabani,
was in the Iranian capital en route to Europe.
The Western media in Baghdad were
electrified by
the Iranian agency's revelation, but as reports of the arrest built,
they relied almost exclusively on accounts from US military and
intelligence organisations, starting with the words of the US-appointed
administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer: "Ladies and gentlemen: we got 'im".
US officials said that they had
extracted the vital
piece of information on Saddam's whereabouts from one of the 20
suspects around 5.30pm on December 13 and had immediately assembled a
600-strong force to surround the farm on which he was captured at
al-Dwar, south of Tikrit.
Little attention was paid to a line in
Pentagon
briefings that some of the Kurdish militia might have been in on what
was described as a "joint operation"; or to a statement by Ahmed
Chalabi, head of the Iraq National Congress, which said that Qusrat and
his PUK forces had provided vital information and more.
A Scottish newspaper, the Sunday
Herald,
quoted from an interview aired on the PUK's al-Hurriyah radio station
last Wednesday, in which Adil Murad, a member of the PUK's political
bureau,
said that the day before Saddam's
capture he was
tipped off by a PUK general - Thamir al-Sultan - that Saddam would be
arrested within the next 72 hours.
An unnamed Western intelligence source
in the Middle East was quoted in the British Sunday Express
yesterday: "Saddam was not captured as a result of any American or
British intelligence. We knew that someone would eventually take their
revenge, it was just a matter of time."
There has been no American response to
the Kurdish claims.
An intriguing question is why Kurdish
forces were
allowed to join what the US desperately needed to present as an
American intelligence success - unless the Kurds had something vital to
contribute to the operation so far south of their usual area of
activity.
A report from the PUK's northern
stronghold,
Suliymaniah, early last week claimed a vital intelligence breakthrough
after a telephone conversation between Qusrat and Saddam's second wife,
Samirah.
www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/21/1071941612613.html