‘Caught like a rat’ as soldiers stood stunned

WHEN darkness fell, the Americans moved into position, 600 of them, from infantrymen to elite special forces.

Their target: two houses in a rural village of orange, lemon and palm groves. Someone big was inside, they were told.

But when they struck, they found nothing.

Then they spotted two men running away from a small walled compound in the trees. Inside, in front of a mud-brick hut, the troops pulled back a carpet on the ground, cleared away the dirt and revealed a Styrofoam panel. Underneath, a hole led to a tiny chamber, just big enough for a single person to squeeze into.

At first they didn’t recognise the man hiding inside, with his ratty hair, wild beard and a pistol cradled in his lap. But when they asked who he was, the bewildered-looking man gave a shocking answer.

He said he was Saddam Hussein.

“He was just caught like a rat,” said Major General Raymond Odierno, commander of 4th Infantry Division, which led the hunt in the area for one of the world’s most wanted men and conducted the raid that caught him. “When you’re in the bottom of a hole, you can’t fight back.”

The farm is near the town of Ad Dwar, nestled among palm trees along the Tigris River just a few miles from Saddam’s birthplace of Uja. Over the past few weeks, US intelligence began to focus in on the area. On Saturday, “we got the ultimate information,” Odierno said.

The soldiers waited for darkness on Saturday and launched what they called Operation Red Dawn.

At 8pm, the soldiers attacked their two objectives but came up empty. Troops spotted two men fleeing from another house nearby, the soldier said, about 200 yards from the original target. The men were arrested.

The troops cordoned off the area and began a careful search.

Pulling back a rug, they dug down, finding a Styrofoam panel that covered a tiny “spider hole, Odierno said.

Inside lay Saddam, wearing a long, salt-and-pepper beard and dishevelled hair. He had a pistol on his lap but didn’t move to use it. When asked about his identity, the former dictator confirmed he was Saddam.

“We didn’t stay there long. It smelled really bad,” one soldier said.

At about 9:15pm a helicopter whisked Saddam away, heading south toward Baghdad, Odierno said. Officials didn’t say where he was being held. Saddam was described as cooperative, but also as “a tired man, and also I think a man resigned to his fate”.