Naseer Al-Nahr, Asharq Al-Awsat

BAGHDAD, 15 December 2003 — In what will go down in modern history as the mother of all captures, US forces caught a bearded and haggard-looking Saddam Hussein in an underground hide-out on a farm near his hometown of Tikrit, ending one of the most intensive manhunts ever.

The arrest, without a shot fired, was a huge victory for US forces battling an insurgency by the ousted dictator’s followers.

“He was unrepentant and defiant,” said Adel Abdel-Mahdi, a senior official of a Shiite political party who, along with other Iraqi leaders, visited Saddam in captivity.

“When we told him, ‘If you go to the streets now, you will see the people celebrating’,” Abdel-Mahdi said. “He answered, ‘Those are mobs.’ When we told him about the mass graves, he replied, ‘Those are thieves’.”

The official added: “He didn’t seem apologetic. He seemed defiant, trying to find excuses for the crimes in the same way he did in the past.”

In the capital, radio stations played celebratory music, residents fired small arms in the air in celebration and passengers on buses and trucks shouted, “They got Saddam! They got Saddam!” After sundown, large explosions were heard in central Baghdad, and flames and thick smoke were seen; bursts of gunfire rang out from the area of the blasts. A policeman said there were no casualties.

“The former dictator of Iraq will face the justice he denied to millions,” US President George W. Bush said in a midday televised address from the White House, eight months after American troops swept into Baghdad and toppled Saddam’s regime. “In the history of Iraq, a dark and painful era is over. A hopeful day has arrived.”

Washington hopes Saddam’s capture will help break the organized Iraq resistance that has killed more than 190 American soldiers since Bush declared major combat over on May 1 and has set back efforts at reconstruction.

But Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, which captured Saddam, said the ousted leader did not appear to be directly organizing resistance — noting no communication devices were found in his hiding place. “I believe he was there more for moral support,” Odierno said.

Saddam’s capture was based on information from a member of a family “close to him,” Odierno told reporters in Tikrit. “Finally we got the ultimate information from one of these individuals,” he said.

The capture took place at 8:30 p.m. Saturday at one of dozens of safe houses Saddam is thought to have — a walled compound on a farm in Adwar, a town 16 km from Tikrit, not far from one of Saddam’s former palaces, Odierno said.

“I think it’s rather ironic that he was in a hole in the ground across the river from these great palaces that he built,” Odierno told reporters in Tikrit.

The event comes almost five months after his sons, Qusay and Uday, were killed July 22 in a four-hour gunbattle with US troops in a hide-out in the northern city of Mosul. There was hope at the time that the sons’ deaths would dampen the Iraqi resistance to the US occupation. But since then, the guerrilla campaign has mounted dramatically.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we got him,” US administrator Paul Bremer told a news conference. “The tyrant is a prisoner.”

Some 600 troops and special forces were involved in the raid that netted Saddam — though not all were aware beforehand that the objective was “High Value Target No. 1,” Odierno said.

Troops found the ousted leader, armed with a pistol, hiding in an underground crawl space at the walled compound, Odierno said. The entrance to the hiding place, covered with rugs and dirt, was a few feet from a small, mud-brick hut where Saddam had been staying.

The hut consisted of two rooms, a bedroom with clothes scattered about and a “rudimentary kitchen,” Odierno said. The commander said Saddam likely had been there only a short time, noting that new shirts, still unwrapped, were found in the bedroom.

Saddam was “very disoriented” as soldiers brought him out of the hole, Odierno said. A Pentagon diagram showed the hiding place as a 6-foot-deep vertical tunnel, with a shorter tunnel branching out horizontally from one side. A pipe to the concrete surface at ground level provided air.

Saddam didn’t fire his weapon. “There was no way he could fight back so he was just caught like a rat,” Odierno said.

Two other Iraqis — described as low-level regime figures — were arrested in the raid, and soldiers found two Kalashnikov rifles, a pistol, a taxi and $750,000 in $100 bills. A US defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Saddam admitted his identity when captured.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top US military commander in Iraq, who saw Saddam overnight, said the deposed leader “has been cooperative and is talkative.” He described Saddam as “a tired man, a man resigned to his fate.”

The White House said Saddam’s capture assures the Iraqi people that the deposed leader is gone from power for good.

“The Iraqi people can finally be assured that Saddam Hussein will not be coming back — they can see it for themselves,” White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said.

— Additional input from agencies