Saddam's mouthpiece Aziz defects, reports

Iraqi Kurds claimed today that Saddam Hussein’s urbane mouthpiece Tariq Aziz has defected and is in the region they control in northern Iraq.

The Foreign Office was probing the reports. The investigation, which was revealed during a Commons debate, came amid conflicting reports in the Kurdish regions that deputy premier Aziz had surrendered.

“We do have reports that are as yet unconfirmed that Tariq Aziz has defected to northern Iraq to Kurdish Democratic Party territory,” said Mike O’Brien, a junior Foreign Office minister.

In Washington, US officials disputed reports that Aziz had defected or had been injured. The officials said they had no information that would support those reports.

But in the northern Kurdish autonomous region today, reports circulated that Aziz had abandoned the Baghdad regime.

Rashid Ahmad, the deputy director for the KDP Sulaymaniyah branch, said: “He is in KDP-controlled land.”

He gave his location as in the regions of Irbil, a city of 400,000, but gave no details on when, where or how the purported surrender took place.

Ismail Sayer, an Iraqi opposition figure in the Democratic Platform of Iraq, also said in Sofia, Bulgaria, that Aziz had given himself up.

“Tariq Aziz has escaped from Baghdad to the north region,” he said.

However, the KDP spokesman in the northern city of Irbil, Fawzi Hariri, said, “We have heard the reports and we don’t confirm them.”

Aziz is the only Christian in the Iraqi leadership and one of Iraq’s best-known figures around the world. He was born in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and is believed to have close ties in the area.

The Kurds, a minority oppressed by Saddam’s regime, established the northern enclave after the 1991 Gulf War and live under the protection of British and US air patrols.