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.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion