U.S. soldiers on Tuesday captured one of Saddam Hussein’s former bodyguards and an Iraqi general who was a senior Baath Party official, the U.S. military said. A total of 14 suspects were detained in a series of raids lasting three hours in the deposed dictator’s hometown. All the suspects were from a single family that had been a pillar of support for Saddam’s regime, said Lt. Col. Steve Russell, commander of the 22nd Infantry Regiment’s 1st Battalion. He declined to identify the detainees or specify the location of the raid other than as a southern Tikrit suburb.
"We were targeting a specific family - one of the four controlling families of the former regime," Russell said. "They were trying to support the remnants of the former regime by organizing attacks, through funding and by trying to hide former regime members," he added.
About 250 soldiers surrounded and searched 20 homes, he said. Soldiers carried away a safe, photographs and computers that may be of intelligence value, Russell said. The Army had been watching the family for weeks, because of intelligence pointing to their involvement in recent attacks on soldiers in Tikrit, Russell said. They staged the sweep Tuesday when they thought they could catch the maximum number of people, Russell said. During his reign, Saddam depended on four families for support and rewarded them financially by giving them cash, prestige and land seized from other people, Russell said.
Slowly and surely taking them down. |