‘Shock and awe’ begins but fate of Saddam unknown
As bombs rained fire on Baghdad and reports came in of a string of blasts in
the northern Iraqi town of Mosul, a massive bombardment campaign was underway in Baghdad.
US-led forces pounded Iraqi targets with thousands of guided weapons in a pulverising blitz designed to shock the teetering Iraqi regime into surrender.
The Pentagon said before the campaign that the number of precision bombs dropped on the first night of the campaign would be 10 times greater than a corresponding period in the 1991 Gulf War.
Top US officials expressed satisfaction with the war so far, as US mechanised calvary units rolled deep into southern Iraq while meeting little resistance.
“We’re making progress,” President George W Bush said during an Oval Office meeting with top lawmakers, including the top opposition Democrats in the House and the Senate, Nancy Pelosi and Tom Daschle, who have sharply criticised his diplomacy.
“We will stay on task until we’ve achieved our objective, which is to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and free the Iraqi people so they can live in a society that is hopeful, democratic and at peace in its neighbourhood.”
Intelligence experts, meanwhile, tried to sift rumour from fact in the fog of war trying to ascertain whether Saddam Hussein was killed, injured or escaped an opportunistic US airstrike on a compound in Baghdad in the first salvo of the war on Thursday.
Intelligence officials still believe Saddam Hussein may have been injured or even killed in the cruise missile attack on one of his compounds, it was reported yesterday.
They believe the Iraqi president was still inside a bunker in his Baghdad compound when it was hit in an attack by 36 cruise missiles in the early hours of yesterday.
One or both of Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay were also in the building and may have been hit, they said.
It was still unknown if they survived or were injured. A senior US official told the Washington Post: “The preponderance of the evidence is he was there when the building blew up. He didn’t get out.”
Military sources at Central Command in Qatar said they still had no idea whether Saddam himself was dead, alive or injured.
Group Captain Al Lockwood, spokesman for British forces, said: “We have no idea. If he is, we would hope somebody realises that the easiest way to stop this would be then to give up the weapons of mass destruction and talk to us about how we are going to bring Iraq back into the civilised world.”
Doctors were reportedly brought to the Baghdad compound after the strike, heightening speculation that Saddam or one of his sons was injured.
The White House said it had no concrete information on the fate of Saddam Hussein, despite one report quoting an intelligence official saying that the Iraqi leader was almost certainly in the compound hit by US bombs and missiles.
“I don’t report on rumours,” said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, adding there was nothing concrete to report.
“I don’t know how Saddam Hussein is feeling today,” Fleischer said.
CIA analysts have concluded, however, that a tape purportedly of the Iraqi leader, aired after the strike at dawn on Thursday, was genuine, despite suggestions that a body-double had substituted for him.
“US intelligence believes it was most likely Saddam Hussein on the tape, but it is not clear when it was made,” an intelligence official told AFP.
The assessment was based on the latest technical analysis, the official said.
CONNECT WITH US TODAY
Be the first to know the latest news and updates
