4/30/2023 0 Comments Saddam hussein capture facts![]() We shared it all with our special-operations guy. Hickey: recognized him because we had captured all these photographs. I’ve been waiting to meet you.” He looked at me and said, “I’ve been waiting to meet you too.” When I took the hood off him, it was like, bam. Ibrahim was supposed to have a chin like John Travolta’s. I knew exactly what he was supposed to look like. And by the way, he was at the house last night.” I went to the other prisoners and took off their hoods, and one of them was the bodyguard-it was Mohammed Ibrahim. He eventually said, “I know where Ibrahim is. The night of December 12, after the Baghdad team conducted the raid and brought back the prisoners from one of the houses, I started interrogating the prisoner they said owned the house and quickly realized that he was the deputy of the bodyguard, Mohammed Ibrahim. I was manifested to leave the country the morning of December 13 and had returned to Baghdad. Hickey: They scooped up a bunch of guys, handed them over to the interrogators. To prevent the whack-a-mole, we hit them all simultaneously. Russell: We were able to determine a few locations in Tikrit, Samarra, and Baghdad where Mohammed Ibrahim might be. The last few weeks before Saddam’s capture, it was one raid after the next to get to Mohammed Ibrahim. Maddox: When we as a team decided to focus on Mohammed Ibrahim-and that’s where all our focus was-it was easy, because we didn’t give any stupid leads the time of day. I couldn’t care less whether we killed or captured.īoyd: By December we knew that Saddam was exploiting some seam to stay elusive. So I said, “Let’s dust off everything we know about Saddam Hussein.” We kill or capture Saddam, that’s going to take the wind out of their sails. Hickey: We had to do something strategic to bring the violence down. They didn’t have the numbers to do a full press on the town, but guys would come in, start fighting, and the temperature would go up for a week or two until we got them or they moved on to another city. It was like sketching out Tony Soprano’s family.īoyd: We called it the “Traveling Roadshow.” The insurgency was in this transition from fedayeen fighters-Saddam loyalists-to the growing AQI. We got some chairs, some Pepsis, put them in a cool place in the building, and for the next two and a half hours, they sketched out on butcher paper Saddam’s security apparatus: half a dozen families, cronies who had been with him since the 1950s, people related by blood or marriage. Russell: The biggest breakthrough came in June, when two businessmen came to a complaint center we’d set up for Iraqis. And that gave us new prisoners, and through their interrogations, they started to talk about a certain family-the al-Muslits-and their former role as a bodyguard family for Saddam. The Special Forces team and I started to pursue individuals who we learned about from prisoners. We had to use HUMINT from prisoners exclusively. There was not a single cell phone used to track any part of this hunt. You ain’t finding those guys without cell phones. Army: If you look at how we got Zarqawi, how we got bin Laden, it was cell phones. ![]() Staff Sergeant Eric Maddox, interrogator, U. That work fell to the roughly thirty thousand troops of the Army’s Fourth Infantry Division, working alongside a special team of Delta Force operators known as Task Force 121 intelligence suspected he might be found: northwest of the capital, around Tikrit and the area that would later be labeled the Sunni Triangle-reflecting the ancestral roots of Saddam’s Sunni backers. In fact, the search for Saddam, aka “High Value Target #1,” never stopped, particularly in areas where U.S. troops settled in to occupy post-Saddam Iraq. government established its own interim government in Baghdad, called the Coalition Provisional Authority and more than 150,000 U.S. Bush took to the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln and, under a banner reading mission accomplished, proclaimed major combat operations over the U.S. As months passed and priorities shifted, it seemed that our interest in finding him did, too. Saddam made his last public appearance on April 9, 2003, in the streets of Baghdad, as U.S. This is the story of the hunt for the Ace of Spades-the ruler of Iraq, Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti, known around the world simply as Saddam-told by those who caught him. In the first weeks of the Iraq war, the Pentagon assembled a pack of playing cards denoting Iraq’s most wanted, the fifty-five figures in the Iraqi government and military deemed its most important targets.
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