Posted on 02/28/2005 6:26:42 AM PST by Brilliant
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 27 - Iraqi officials said Sunday that Syria had captured and handed over a half-brother of Saddam Hussein who has been accused of playing a leading role in organizing and financing the insurgency that has tormented Iraq since Mr. Hussein's overthrow nearly two years ago.
Syrian officials in Damascus confirmed the transfer, and said the half-brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan al-Tikriti, once the widely feared head of Iraq's two most powerful security agencies, was one of a group of officials from the former Iraqi government who were arrested in Syria and delivered into Iraqi custody. An Associated Press report, quoting unidentified Iraqi officials, said there were 30 men in the group.
The sudden Syrian move in handing over Mr. Hassan and the other fugitives came under intense pressure from the United States. The longstanding tensions between the nations worsened sharply in the aftermath of the bombing on Feb. 14 that killed the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in Beirut, and mounted further with the suicide bombing in Tel Aviv on Friday that killed four Israelis. Ever since Mr. Hussein's overthrow, Syria had insisted that it knew of no wanted Iraqi fugitives on its soil, much less of any involved in the insurgency.
The Associated Press report cited the Iraqi officials as saying he had been captured in the Syrian town of Hasakah, about 40 miles west of the Iraqi border and about 120 miles west of the insurgent-battered city of Mosul.
Officials in the office of Ayad Allawi, Iraq's interim prime minister, said more details would probably be given on Monday, either in Baghdad or in Washington.
A statement issued by Dr. Allawi's spokesman, Thaier Naqib, emphasized the brutality of Mr. Hassan in the 1990's, when he headed, in succession, the Mukhabarat and the General Security Directorate, which between them arrested and killed tens of thousands of Iraqis.
The statement also noted the major role that it said Mr. Hassan had played in sustaining the insurgency, saying he had "made a major contribution to the planning, supervision and execution of terrorist activities inside Iraq."
A similar point was made by Barham Salih, a Kurdish politician and deputy prime minister. In a telephone interview, he confirmed that the arrest had been in Syria, and said that it should serve as a warning "to all those who would try to destabilize Iraq from beyond its borders."
The United States has long contended that Syria has been harboring top officials of the ousted government and allowing them to finance and steer the insurgency in Iraq. In the aftermath of the attacks in Lebanon and Tel Aviv, the Bush administration and the Israeli government pointed a finger of blame at Syria and its president, Bashar al-Assad. After the Hariri assassination, Washington noted the presence of 15,000 Syrian troops in Lebanon, and Mr. Hariri's role in demanding their withdrawal.
Pentagon officials applauded the capture of Mr. Hassan, who was listed as No. 36 on the list of 55 most-wanted Iraqis that the American government compiled after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003.
One senior defense official described Mr. Hassan as "a big fish," but said it was too soon to gauge the long-term impact of his capture on the insurgency, whose decentralized hierarchy has enabled the rebels to weather the arrest of other leaders, including Mr. Hussein himself and two other half-brothers, Barzan al-Tikriti and Watban al-Tikriti.
Syria's vulnerability to pressure has compounded under the drastic strategic changes that came with the American-led toppling of Iraq's former government.
Syria's government rules in the name of the Baath Party, a branch of Iraq's party of the same name, and Syria has for 40 years used a milder form of the same authoritarian practices and secret police tactics.
Now, the Damascus government is faced with 150,000 American troops across its eastern border in Iraq and, since last Sunday, a new American offensive against insurgents along the Euphrates River corridor that runs up to the Syrian border 300 miles northwest of Baghdad.
Before the transfer of the Iraqi fugitives, Syria had made other unexpected conciliatory moves. In recent days, it responded to demands for an end to its 16-year-old troop presence in Lebanon - demands that have the support of France, the former colonial power in Lebanon, as well as of the United States - by saying it would withdraw all its troops to the Bekaa region of Lebanon, and would consider a total pullout.
On Sunday, several American scholars specializing in Syria described Mr. Hassan's handover as typical of Syrian tactics in recent years. They described a double game of provoking and assuaging Washington, offering covert support for groups like Hezbollah, and more recently the Iraqi insurgents, then making timely concessions to the United States to ward off serious trouble.
"Ever since the 1980's, Syria has played this game of being both the arsonist and the fire department," Michael Doran, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, said in a telephone interview.
He added: "They miscalculated how badly the Hariri assassination would backfire. Now, they're trying to curry favor with Washington to prevent the United States from coming down too hard on them. They've backed themselves into a corner, and they're trying to get out."
Last month, a Bush administration official told a reporter that Syria had captured a high-level Baathist figure, whose detention was leading to the arrests of others inside Syria, and that those captured were in Syrian custody, with an understanding between Syria and the United States not to disclose what was going on.
A senior State Department official praised Syria for arresting Mr. Hassan, but said Syria needed to make many more arrests and do far more to shut down support for the Iraq insurgency. He said the person arrested had earlier been identified by the United States as having operated freely in Syria and Lebanon.
"It's to their credit that he's been arrested, but there are a number of others the Syrians ought to be able to find," the official said. "They're not off the hook as far as we're concerned. We want to see them do some more significant things. One swallow does not a spring make."
On the Pentagon's deck of playing cards portraying the most-wanted men in the Hussein government, Mr. Hassan appeared as the six of diamonds, with a black-and-white portrait showing him as a young, smiling man with black sideburns, a thin mustache and a distinct likeness to Mr. Hussein. The two men have the same mother, though they were born many years apart.
The Pentagon's eagerness to capture Mr. Hassan was underscored earlier this month when Central Command, with overall responsibility for the war in Iraq, posted his name on a list of wanted officials from the former government.
The United States posted a $1 million bounty for Mr. Hassan's capture, and repeatedly pressed the government in Damascus to take action to arrest him and others. American military commanders have said captured insurgents had traced a pattern of cross-border movements bringing large sums in American dollars and recruits to the insurgents.
It is likely that Mr. Hassan will be taken to Camp Cropper, an American military detention center near Baghdad's international airport where Mr. Hussein and dozens of other senior officials of his government are being held. He may also eventually join them on trial before the Iraqi Special Tribunal set up to try the top-ranking members of the old government.
A statement issued by Prime Minister Allawi's spokesman, Mr. Naqib, said Mr. Hassan was guilty of "killing and torturing many of the sons of Iraq," and described his arrest as showing "the determination of the Iraqi government to chase and capture all those criminals who have committed genocide and bloodied their hands with the killing of the Iraqi people."
Mr. Hassan's capture suggested that the insurgency is to some extent a family affair for relatives of Mr. Hussein. It was a reminder, too, that Mr. Hassan's own son, Yasser al-Sabawi, was cited by Iraqi security officials last year as being among those wanted for the kidnapping and beheading of Nicholas Berg, a 26-year-old American.
With Mr. Hassan's capture, only 10 of the 55 individuals on the Pentagon's most-wanted list remain at large. Among those, the man most eagerly hunted, with a $10-million bounty on his head, is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a vice president under Mr. Hussein, who was reported after the capture of Baghdad in April 2003 to have moved back and forth across the Syrian border.
This week or next, the special tribunal is expected to make a formal start to the trials, and the man who tribunal officials have named as most likely to appear first in the dock is Barzan al-Tikriti, who like Mr. Hassan served Mr. Hussein as a senior intelligence official, in his case as deputy head of the Mukhabarat from 1977 to 1983. American officials have said investigative judges are almost ready to hand formal charges to the tribunal, in a process called referral. The procedure is expected to be brief, followed by a 45-day adjournment before the tribunal begins the substantive part of the trial.
Some of the charges against Mr. Tikriti will be tied to the massacre in 1982 of hundreds of people in the Shiite Arab village of Dujail, about 40 miles northeast of Baghdad, officials have said. The killings took place after assassins tried but failed to kill Mr. Hussein as he rode through the village in July 1982 in a motorcade. The Washington Post reported Sunday that two other Hussein-era officials believed to have been involved in the massacre, Abdullah Rwayid and his son Muzhir Abdullah Rwayid, were arrested on Feb. 21.
Mr. Tikriti has already outlined the core of his defense, saying at a brief court appearance last July that he was, in effect, only a cipher for Mr. Hussein, who appointed many of his relatives to top positions.
As Mr. Hassan's capture was announced, the war across Iraq ground on, with new casualties to add to the nearly 1,500 American soldiers and thousands of Iraqis who have died. The American command said two soldiers were killed in southeast Baghdad on Saturday in an ambush that involved a combination of a roadside bomb explosion and small-arms fire.
The military also said a marine died Saturday in combat in Babil province, south of the capital, scene of what American soldiers call the triangle of death because of its history of attacks by insurgents and criminal gangs.
[Ten people were killed and 15 wounded Monday in a car bombing in Hilla, south of Baghdad, Agence France-Presse reported, citing the Iraqi police.]
The A.P. reported that a bomb had exploded inside the police headquarters in the northern town of Hammam Alil on Sunday, killing five people, according to a coroner at a Mosul hospital.
In western Baghdad, gunmen killed two policemen heading to work, police officials said.
The police in Baghdad also found the headless body of an Iraqi woman dressed in black robes with a sign that said "spy" pinned to her chest.
In Latifiya, a town in the triangle of death, Iraqi troops found four beheaded bodies on a farm, The A.P. reported. The four were said to have been members of the Badr Organization, the armed wing of a powerful Shiite political party, the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution. The victims were reportedly kidnapped Saturday.
More to the point, it looks like Syria is about ready to change its behavior, at least slightly.
The 6 of diamonds bites the dust!
I have only 6 left that haven't been captured or killed. Maybe I'm behind, but that is my count.
That's what I was thinking.
I wonder why the Syrians have suddenly become so cooperative? I suspect that they over-reached on the Hariri assassination and and trying to make cosmetic amends to take the heat off.
I think there are many Baathists hanging out in Syria directing the terror efforts against our troops and the Iraqi govt.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.