Saddam’s capture: was a deal brokered behind the scenes?

By David Pratt

January 04, 2004, sundayherald online

http://www.sundayherald.com/39096

When it emerged that the Kurds had captured the Iraqi dictator, the US celebrations evaporated.

David Pratt asks whether a secret political trade-off has been engineered

For a story that three weeks ago gripped the world’s imagination, it has now all but dropped off
the radar.
Peculiar really, for if one thing might have been expected in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s
capture, it was the endless political and media mileage that the Bush administration would get out
of it .
After all, for 249 days Saddam’s elusiveness had been a symbol of America’s ineptitude in Iraq,
and, at last, with his capture came the long-awaited chance to return some flak to the Pentagon’s
critics.

It also afforded the opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of America’s elite covert and
intelligence units such as Task Force 20 and Greyfox .
And it was a terrific chance for the perfect photo-op showing the American soldier, and Time
magazine’s ’Person of the Year’, hauling ’High Value Target Number One’ out of his filthy spiderhole in
the village of al- Dwar.
Then along came that story: the one about the Kurds beating the US Army in the race to find Saddam
first, and details of Operation Red Dawn suddenly began to evaporate.
US Army spokesmen - so effusive in the immediate wake of Saddam’s capture - no longer seemed
willing to comment, or simply went to ground.
But rumours of the crucial Kurdish role persisted, even though it now seems their previously
euphoric spokesmen have now, similarly, been afflicted by an inexplicable bout of reticence.

It was two weeks ago that the Sunday Herald revealed how a Kurdish special forces unit belonging
to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) had spearheaded and tracked down Saddam, sealing off the
al-Dwar farmhouse long ’before the arrival of the US forces’.
PUK leader Jalal Talabani had chosen to leak the news and details of the operation’s commander,
Qusrut Rasul Ali, to the Iranian media long before Saddam’s capture was reported by the mainstream
Western press or confirmed by the US military.
By the time Western press agencies were running the same story, the entire emphasis had changed
however, and the ousted Iraqi president had been ’captured in a raid by US forces backed by Kurdish
fighters’.
In the intervening few weeks that troublesome Kurdish story has gone around the globe, picked up
by newspapers from The Sydney Morning Herald to the US Christian Science Monitor, as well as the
Kurdish press.

While Washington and the PUK remain schtum, further confirmation that the Kurds were way ahead in
Saddam’s capture continues to leak out.
According to one Israeli source who was in the company of Kurds at a meeting in Athens early on
December 14, one of the Kurdish representatives burst into the conference room in tears and demanded
an immediate halt to the discussions.
’Saddam Hussein has been captured,’ he said, adding that he had received word from Kurdistan -
before any television reports.
According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the delegate also confirmed that most of the
information leading to the deposed dictator’s arrest had come from the Kurds and - as our earlier Sunday
Herald report revealed - who had organised their own intelligence network which had been trying to
uncover Saddam’s tracks for months.

The delegate further claimed that six months earlier the Kurds had discovered that Saddam’s wife
was in the Tikrit area. This intelligence, most likely obtained by Qusrut Rasul Ali and his PUK
special forces unit, was transferred to the Americans. The Kurds, however, are said to have never
received any follow-up from the coalition forces on this vital tip-off and were furious.
Whatever the full extent of their undoubted involvement in providing intelligence or actively
participating on the ground in Saddam’s capture, the Kurds, and the PUK in particular, would benefit
handsomely.
Apart from a trifling $25 million bounty, their status would have been substantially boosted in
Washington, which may in part explain the recent vociferous Kurdish reassertion of their long-term
political ambitions in the ’new Iraq’.

For their own part the Kurds have already launched a political arrangement designed to secure
their aspirations with respect to autonomy, if not nationalist or separatist aspirations.
To show how serious they are, the two main Kurdish groups, the PUK and the Kurdistan Democratic
Party (KDP), have decided to close ranks and set up a joint Kurdish administration, with jobs being
divided between the two camps. They have made it clear to the Americans that their leadership has
a responsibility to their constituency.
Last week Massoud Barzani, leader of the KDP, called for a revision of the power-transfer
agreement signed between the US-led coalition and Iraq’s interim governing council to recognise ’Kurdish
rights’.

The November 15 agreement calls for the creation of a national assembly by the end of May 2004
which will put in place a caretaker government by June, which in turn will draft a new constitution
and hold national elections
’The November 15 accord must be revised and Kurdish rights’ within an Iraqi federation must be
mentioned,’ Barzani told a meeting of his supporters.
’The Kurds are today in a powerful position but must continue the struggle to guard their unity,’
he added.

This renewed determination to fulfil their political objectives is shaking up other ethnic
residents in northern Iraq, who fear at best being marginalised; at worst victimised. Over the last week
there have been increasingly violent clashes between Kurdish and Arab students, and between Kurds
and Turkemens, in the oil rich city of Kirkuk.
Such ethnic confrontations point to another dangerous phase in Iraq’s power-brokering. If the
Kurds did indeed capture Saddam first, and a deal was struck about his handover to the US, then it’s
not inconceivable that the terms might have included strong political and strategic advantages that
could ultimately determine the emerging power structure in Iraq.