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. I thought we’d catch him by accident on the side of the road. But we thought they were passing through town on a regular basis. It’s the Iraqis who stay.Ĭaptain Bradley Boyd, commander, Charlie Company, First Battalion, Twenty-second Infantry, First Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division: We assumed Saddam and his supporters weren’t hanging out in town. We were just one of the armies that had passed through-along with the Persians, the British, the Turks, the Romans. Reed: It wasn’t a place that welcomed us with open arms.Ĭolonel James Hickey, commander, First Brigade, Fourth Infantry Division: Historically, Tikrit is an interesting piece of ground: It’s on the east-west route along the Tigris, one of the great rivers of the world. This was Saddam’s hometown, 97 percent Sunni. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell, commander, First Battalion, Twenty-second Infantry, Fourth Infantry Division: Our orders were to occupy Tikrit. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Russell Shutterstock 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. currency in a suitcase.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. ![]() The soldier who participated in the raid described it as "just two rooms and a sink, there was one bed and one chair and some clothes and that's about it." Soldiers seized two rifles, a pistol, a taxi and $750,000 in U.S. ![]() Soldiers searched the hut, which was made up of a bedroom and a kitchen. "The response from soldiers was: 'President Bush sends his regards'." "He said: 'I'm Saddam Hussein, I'm the president of Iraq and I'm willing to negotiate'," Major Brian Reed, operations officer for the first brigade of the Fourth Infantry Division, told reporters at the site where Saddam was found on Saturday hiding in a hole at a hut. ![]() He showed video images of an air duct and a ventilation fan. "The spider hole is about 6 to 8 feet deep and allows enough space for a person to lie down inside of it," Sanchez said. Pulling back a rug, they dug down, finding a Styrofoam panel that covered a tiny tunnel, Odierno said. What they found was a small walled compound with a metal lean-to and a mud hut, Sanchez said.
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