In a new audiotape purporting to carry the voice of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, the speaker urged his supporters to continue the uprising against American occupation forces. The voice said the tape was made Sunday.
The message was a rambling discourse, apparently intended to encourage and instruct his supporters in the continuing guerrilla war against the US occupation.
"The feeling of defeat and bitterness might lead some people to commit treason ... instead of being a gun pointed at the enemy," said the voice, which sounded like Saddam and was broadcast yesterday by the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera satellite television station.
The last message purporting to come from Saddam was broadcast Tuesday by Al-Arabiya, a second Arab satellite broadcaster. That tape acknowledged the death of his two sons, Uday and Qusay, who were gunned down in a fierce firefight with American forces in Mosul.
The US State Department said on Thursday that the person who led the US military to Saddam's sons will receive a US$30 million reward.
The State Department did not name the recipient as a matter of policy. But Nawaf al-Zaidan, who owned the house where the Saddam's sons were killed, is considered the most likely.
Saddam's two daughters, meanwhile, arrived in Jordan accompanied by nine children on Thursday and were granted official protection, a high-ranking Jordanian official.
A close relative said the daughters, Raghad and Rana, and their children flew in from Syria, where they had fled two weeks after the fall of Baghdad.
Raghad and Rana married two Iraqis who defected to Jordan in 1995 with their wives and a total of seven children.
The families returned to Iraq in February 1996, but the two men, their brother and a sister, as well as other family members, were assassinated by Saddam's regime after being accused of treason.
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