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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - Saddam Hussein accepted an 11th-hour offer to flee into exile weeks ahead of the U.S.-led 2003 invasion, but Arab League officials scuttled the proposal, officials in this Gulf state claimed. The exile initiative was spearheaded by the late president of the United Arab Emirates, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, at an emergency Arab summit held in Egypt in February 2003, Sheik Zayed's son said in an interview aired by Al-Arabiya TV during a documentary. The U.S.-led coalition invaded on March 19 that year. A top government official confirmed the offer on Saturday, speaking on...

In a sinister oil-for-murder plot, Saddam Hussein used the scandal-plagued U.N. oil-for-food program to set up the assassination of a prominent Iraqi exile politician, the slain man's family has charged. A mysterious George Tarkhaynan appears on an Iraqi Oil Ministry list, published by a Baghdad newspaper, of 270 politicians and businessmen who received sweetheart oil deals under the U.N. humanitarian program. Safia al-Souhail, a leading political figure in post-Saddam Iraq, told The Post she has evidence that Tarkhaynan is a former Beirut shirtmaker and once-trusted family friend who helped Iraq assassinate her father, anti-Saddam dissident Sheik Taleb al-Souhail al-Tamimi, in...

AMMAN, Jordan - We didn't look much alike, those of us milling about the school courtyard and lining up to vote: Elderly men in traditional Arab gowns, young men in ski jackets and women in bright, flowing robes or beneath long, black abayas. The hodgepodge of dress mirrored the mix of sects, religions and ethnicity_ Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, Kurds, Arabs. But we were all Iraqis and all willing to ignore boycott calls and intimidation attempts to have a say in our future and maybe one day live in the free, democratic, federal and united Iraq touted in election posters. We...

AMMAN (Reuters) - Jubilant Iraqi exiles cast their ballots in a "vote for freedom" on Friday and urged their compatriots in Iraq to defy insurgents and do the same. An Iraqi man shows his right index finger stained with blue ink after his casting his vote in an Amman polling station, January 28, 2005. Iraqis living abroad enthusiastically cast the first ballots in their homeland's landmark election and urged countrymen back home to defy insurgents and vote for democratic Iraq (news - web sites). (Ali Jarekji/Reuters) In the United States, Iraqi expatriates defied frigid temperatures and long trips to the...

A senior Baath party organiser and Saddam Hussein aide, Mohammed Younis al-Ahmed, has been named by western intelligence officials as one of the key figures directing the Sunni insurgency from his hiding-place in neighbouring Syria.Sources have told The Observer that Younis al-Ahmed - who has had a $1 million price tag placed on his head by the US - is one of between 20 and 50 senior Baath party figures based in Syria who, they believe, are involved in organising the guerrilla war against the US-led multi-national forces in Iraq and against the new Iraqi security forces. The naming of...

Sources close to Saddam Hussein's family have said that calls for former Iraqi officials to form a government in exile are gaining ground. The Egyptian international law counsel Hasan Umar told Aljazeera.net he believes that if Ragad Saddam Hussein and former Iraqi officials form a rival government, they would shorten the life of the "Iraqi occupation". “A government in exile would be a threat to the Iraqi interim government of Iyad Allawi that would prevent him from continuing to grant privileges to the US-led occupation forces,” he said. “Many former Iraqi officials are living outside Iraq, and can help in...

AN IRAQI exile who used to demonstrate against Saddam’s regime outside the Iraqi Embassy in London was yesterday confirmed as Baghdad’s new envoy to Britain, restoring diplomatic ties 13 years after they were cut. Salah Shaikhly, a British citizen who was stripped of his Iraqi nationality two decades ago and still has no Iraqi passport, was last night the guest of honour at the annual diplomatic corps dinner hosted by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, for ambassadors and high commissioners to the Court of St James. “I never imagined I would become ambassador,” the 64-year-old British-educated economist told The Times....

BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - The Iraqi Governing Council chose a longtime anti-Saddam Hussein exile to become prime minister of Iraq's interim government, making the surprise announcement Friday despite U.N. concerns over his ties to the United States and the CIA. The selection of Iyad Allawi - a Shiite Muslim council member who headed an exile group made up of former Saddam military officers - was an assertion of influence by the U.S.-picked body. After apparent initial hesitation, the United States endorsed the choice to head the government due to take power on June 30. A senior Bush administration official in...

NAPLES, Fla. -- A podiatrist who left Iraq 30 years ago said he is closing his Naples practice and returning to his native country to run for the presidency in 2005. Rasool Sharif, 58, said he has traveled to Iraq twice in the last two months. Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most respected Shiite cleric, recently asked him to return for more meetings, Sharif said. "I was the only American who has met with him," said Sharif, who opened the Foot & Ankle Clinic in Naples two years ago. Sharif said he is being recruited by the National Alliance of...

AMMAN, Jordan – A long row of battered taxicabs lined a street yesterday in downtown Amman, waiting to carry eager young Iraqi exiles home to battle. Emboldened by news accounts of Islamic militiamen fighting U.S.-led forces, many Iraqis said they were keen to replenish the uprising that has left hundreds of their countrymen and at least 47 coalition troops dead this week. Shiite and Sunni Muslims, age-old rivals, taunted one another about which sect was punishing the Americans more. "You always boast about what's happening in Fallujah," a young Shiite man shouted to a Sunni. "But look what we're doing...

A scientist describes Saddam's weapons and stealth technology programs, reports Russell Skelton. For seven years, before he was tortured and sentenced to death, Rashid (not his real name) worked at the top of Iraq's scientific establishment. He says he regularly met Saddam Hussein and his cousin and strongman deputy prime minister Abdul Tawab Huweish. After the Gulf War he was put in charge of a taskforce code named "Al Babel" to develop stealth technology to make aircraft and missiles undetectable on radar. Rashid, who now lives in Melbourne, also claims to have had access as a trusted insider to secret...

Secret bunkers held chemical weapons, says Iraqi exile April 1, 2004 Print this article Email to a friend A scientist describes Saddam's weapons and stealth technology programs, reports Russell Skelton. For seven years, before he was tortured and sentenced to death, Rashid (not his real name) worked at the top of Iraq's scientific establishment. He says he regularly met Saddam Hussein and his cousin and strongman deputy prime minister Abdul Tawab Huweish. After the Gulf War he was put in charge of a taskforce code named "Al Babel" to develop stealth technology to make aircraft and missiles undetectable on radar....

Secret bunkers held chemical weapons, says Iraqi exile April 1, 2004 A scientist describes Saddam's weapons and stealth technology programs, reports Russell Skelton. For seven years, before he was tortured and sentenced to death, Rashid (not his real name) worked at the top of Iraq's scientific establishment. He says he regularly met Saddam Hussein and his cousin and strongman deputy prime minister Abdul Tawab Huweish. After the Gulf War he was put in charge of a taskforce code named "Al Babel" to develop stealth technology to make aircraft and missiles undetectable on radar. Rashid, who now lives in Melbourne, also...

Shortly after the capture of Saddam Hussein last December, the deposed Iraqi tyrant received a visit in his underground prison cell from a rotund, balding, 59-year-old former banker. Saddam immediately recognised Ahmed Chalabi, one of the leaders of Iraq's new interim administration, and greeted him with a sneer: "So, are you going to be the new ruler of Iraq?" he inquired. Chalabi, who had been taken to Saddam's secret prison cell by US troops to confirm the captured leader's identity, made no reply. "You don't take orders from a dictator and certainly not from a war criminal," he later explained.Nevertheless...

EVERETT -- Ahmed al-Mahana's biggest fear when he returned to Iraq for his first visit in 12 years was not falling victim to a terrorist bombing. It was that his 10-year-old son Ali would not like Iraq. As it turns out, he had nothing to worry about. Ali enjoyed himself so much that when it was time to return to Everett on Feb. 20, he started crying and held onto the stairway railing in his grandparents' home, screaming that he didn't want to leave.

The Associated Press BAGHDAD, Iraq Feb. 21 — Dhia al-Hariri returned to Iraq after decades in exile to reclaim his father's beloved home, only to find Saddam Hussein's regime had turned it into a house of horrors. What was once the backyard is now a dark maze of iron-doored cells. One bedroom has a hook in the ceiling from which interrogators hung prisoners, breaking their arms and giving them electric shocks. "This was my grandmother's bedroom," al-Hariri, 54, said Saturday, standing in a room barren except for the remains of iron bars embedded in the floor where lines of prisoners...

LONDON (AFP) - An Iraqi exile group in London which claims to have supplied Britain with a key piece of intelligence on Iraqi weapons has admitted that the information might have been false. The claim that Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) was able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes of the order being given was a headline-grabbing assertion in a British government dossier published in September 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq (news - web sites) war. It was also at the heart of a row between the British government and the BBC over allegations...

THANK YOU message to Intelligent Americans from an Iraqi in Exile Hello all. I am an Iraqi Living in exile (EUROPE) and I would like to thank U.S.A for liberating us. As you can see on the video Saddam's mens have pledged many crimes against innocent Iraqis. My message to all the intelligent Americans is: Thank you for your support, and many Iraqis just like me, are very gratefull for the efforts of the AMERICAN TROOPS the real heros that liberated us. The Iraqis that are against the U.S are those that lost many $$$$ because their UNCLE SADDAM has...

BAGHDAD – After a decade of sanctions had left his physics lab a crumbling shell, Raad Mohammed decided it was time to go. In 1999, following a route trodden by thousands of the best and brightest of Iraq's academics, Dr. Mohammed escaped to Jordan without a goodbye to his lifelong colleagues. He was accompanied only by his wife, their suitcases, and handfuls of cash to bribe Mukhabarat agents at the border. He was not alone. An estimated 2,000 professors fled Iraq's 20 major universities between 1995 and 2000, according to news reports at the time. Professors say a thousand or...

Like George W. Bush, the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya - the man who first drew the world's attention to the extent of Saddam Hussein's crimes in his seminal 1989 book, Republic of Fear - was woken at 5am last Sunday by a phone call from Baghdad. Makiya was in America, where he made his home as a professor at Brandeis University during his long exile, and was staying with his family in Massachusetts when he heard Saddam had been captured. 'I jumped up and woke the kids. We put our arms round each other and for a long time, just...