American soldiers overpowered and arrested a bodyguard who rarely left former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein's side yesterday and said they obtained documents and information that could help them close in on the former dictator.
As "one of Saddam's lifelong bodyguards," Adnan Abdullah Abid al-Musslit was believed to have detailed knowledge of the former president's hiding places, said Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell, who led the raid. He said documents taken from the home and information obtained from the men would be useful in the hunt for Saddam.
"Every guy we get tightens the noose," said Russell, commander of the 4th Infantry Division's 22nd Infantry Regiment. "Every photo and every document connects the dots."
PHOTO: AP
The stocky bodyguard struggled to break free as soldiers arrested him, and they had to wrestle him to the ground and drag him down the stairs, Russell said.
"Were we surprised? He's a bodyguard. That's why we went in with our steely knives and oily guns," Russell said. "If everything else had failed and we just got that one guy, we would be happy."
But the series of pre-dawn raids in the heart of the deposed dictator's hometown trapped a total of 12 people, including Daher Ziana, the former head of security in Tikrit, and Rafa Idham Ibrahim al-Hassan, a leader of the Saddam Fedayeen militia.
The raids began at 4am when soldiers fired three shotgun blasts into the locks of the house where al-Musslit was living with his family.
Moments later, soldiers pulled al-Musslit from the house, bleeding and barefoot. Soldiers stripped him to his underwear, searching for weapons, and dragged him into an Army Humvee.
A medic examined the right side of his forehead, where blood seeped through the wide tan cloth that was wrapped over his eyes as a blindfold.
Al-Musslit had retired from his job as one of Saddam's most trusted bodyguards, but the former Iraqi leader called him back into service before the war started, Russell said, citing intelligence gathered from Tikrit residents.
About a block away, soldiers stormed a house where Ziana was living, emerging from one the house's ornate arched entrances with four men with their hands tied behind their back. One of the men was identified as Ziana, Saddam's security chief in Tikrit.
Soldiers cut white sheets from the home into strips to make blindfolds for the men, who sat under guard in the front yard.
Six women, some clutching the hands of small children, wailed as soldiers threw photographs and documents into the driveway. A large portrait of Saddam lay alongside a picture of Ziana in uniform. One album featured a photo of women posing with Kalashnikov rifles.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS