Americans show their hand in hunt for full deck

THEY have become the ace in the pack for military memorabilia collectors the world over.

From the moment the "55 Iraqi Most Wanted" deck of playing cards was unveiled at an otherwise predictable press briefing at US Central Command in Qatar on April 11, they took on a life of their own.

Learning by heart which of Saddam's henchmen are in each suit is the ultimate anorak activity and checking off the list with each capture and surrender now fills the news gap that used to be taken up with marking each mile of advance by troops moving towards Baghdad.

The rogues gallery is made up of government ministers, military commanders and specialist advisors to the president.

Saddam is of course, the trump card, the ace of spades the innuendo being that his reputation is as black as the old expression would have it.

The cards were reputed to be in the backpacks of every US soldier dispatched into the field.

As essential as his gas mask and NBC (nuclear/biological/chemical) suit, they were to remind him who the real enemy were in a land of unfamiliar faces. A similar device was employed in World War II, when air corps soldiers were issued decks printed with the silhouettes of German and Japanese fighter aircraft to help them distinguish the enemy and develop the kind of instant recognition essential to survival in air battle.

Almost six decades later, the public lapped up the rugged romanticism of the Iraqi leadership folding like a house of cards, their fate being dealt out by the US military, which assumed the form of a tarot card reader holding the fortunes of an expectant client in his hands.

But there is something of a desert myth about the cards.

The versions now touted over the internet and in collector stores at $9.99 a set are imitations, printed up, packaged and piled on shelves with lightening speed by the same deft entrepreneurs who brought you Saddam dolls and Comical Ali T-shirts.

The army only ever had 200 decks printed up for top commanders and public relations purposes.

Despite their instant popularity, George Bush's $80 billion war chest was not about to be raided to print up the tens of thousands of sets it would take to equip every soldier and his little brother/girlfriend or mother back home.

But whatever about the colourful truth about the most-wanted cards, they represent a deadly serious and vitally important aspect of the military campaign in Iraq.

Baghdad may have fallen more quickly than anyone dared hope but until the men who once ruled from the city's palaces, prisons, military bases and underground bunkers are captured or verified dead, few Iraqis will be convinced to let down their guard and feel confident about a future free from the fears of the past.

The search for the faces on the cards had an early success when, on April 12, Amer Hamudi al-Sadi, a presidential scientific advisor and alleged head of the regime's chemical weapons programme, gave himself up to coalition forces in Baghdad. The seven of diamonds, he was number 55 on the list.

A day later, number 51, the five of spades, Watban Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, was taken into custody in northern Iraq, giving the coalition forces their first member of Saddam's extended family.

He is Saddam's half-brother, a key member of the ruling Ba'ath Party, and was retained as an advisor to the former president.

Four days passed and another half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim Hasan al-Tikriti, the five of clubs and number 52 on the list, a senior figure in the Ba'ath Party, trusted member of Saddam's inner circle and former ambassador to the UN, was also captured alive.

The capture of another key figure, Hikmat Mizban Ibrahim al-Azzawi, on April 18 was a double victory for the coalition. This time the quarry was caught by the Iraqi police in Baghdad and turned over to the First Marine Division in the city a reassuring sign that the Iraqis were beginning to trust their liberators/occupiers.

The eight of diamonds and number 45 on the most wanted list, Hikmat was a deputy prime minister in control of economics & finance. The coalition believes he could hold invaluable information about the billions of dollars Saddam is suspected to have secreted away in foreign bank accounts.

A similar fate awaited Ba'ath Party regional command chairman Samir Abd al-Aziz al-Najim, who was picked up by Iraqi Kurds near Mosul in Northern Iraq and handed over to coalition forces. As chairman of the ruling party in Baghdad, he is expected to have in-depth knowledge of the party structures and chains of command which would prove vital to any attempt at a war crimes prosecution.

The four of clubs, he was number 24 on the list.

Since then the coalition have also taken into custody Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research Abd al-Khaliq Abd Al-Gafar, regional commander for the Central Euphrates Muhammad Hazmaq al Zubaydi and Jamal Mustafa Abdullah Sultan al Tikriti, son-in-law of Saddam and his Deputy Chief of Tribal Affairs.

Of those three, al-Zubaydi is the most symbolically important catch. He played a leading role in the murderous suppression of Shi'ites in the south in the ill-fated uprising which followed the last Gulf War in 1991.

His capture gives some satisfaction to the survivors of the slaughter and helps the US regain some of the goodwill they lost in buckets when they effectively abandoned the Shi'ites to their bloody fate last time out.

But this brings to the grand total of just eight the number of most wanted currently in custody.

Another, number five, Ali Hassan al-Majid, or Chemical Ali, Saddam's dreaded hatchet man who ordered the use of chemical weapons against Kurdish communities at Halabja in 1988, is presumed dead after the bombing of his southern Iraqi palace early in the campaign.

Rumour also has it that Saddam's hapless information minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, or Comical Ali as he came to be known, killed himself after the humiliation of being made to insist to the world's media that the Americans were being driven out of Baghdad when TV footage was simultaneously showing coalition soldiers roaming unimpeded around the very building he was broadcasting from.

But the fact remains that, despite all the might of the coalition's bunker buster bombs and the "reliable" intelligence that guided the missiles to strategic buildings, Saddam, his sons Qusay and Uday, and most of their subordinates are still at large and none of those captured come from the top of the deck.

Ahmed Chalabi, influential leader of the Iraqi National Congress and a certain key figure in any new Iraqi administration, gave discomfiting emphasis to this situation when he stated bluntly at the weekend that Saddam and his sons were still alive and on the move around the country.

Until he can be pinned down, however, rumours will continue to circulate, more in hope than certainty, that the Iraqi president did indeed die in one of the massive blasts that rocked his regime, or, more dangerously for international security, that he is hiding in Russia or being harboured by Syria.

With the coalition under pressure to bring humanitarian aid, clean water and power back to Iraq, to hold a lid on simmering discontent, keep rival religions and factions apart, and locate the elusive weapons of mass destruction, the search for the 55 most wanted has to compete for manpower and resources.

But the Americans have shown their hand now and unless they can stomach getting up from the table while the game is still alive, they are going to have to play on to the end.