[Rudaw] The black clothes, balaclavas, boots, the violence--it took me a while to realize where I had seen them before they became ISIS' trademarks. Then it struck me: the Fedayeen Saddam. A special force Saddam Hussein set up in the 1990s to fight a guerrilla war against any enemy--the most probable one being the American army--as the Americans were more and more critical of Saddam's ambitions.
And these highly trained and hardened men in black did actually fight against them in the first weeks of the American invasion in 2003. I remember a location in Basra where the Fedayeen were said to have fought to their deaths to defend a water basin that could have hidden weapons or chemicals.
During the street battles reported then in Basra and Umm Qasr, many Fedayeen took part. Even in the battles in the center of Kirkuk with the Peshmerga, some witnesses say the black-clothed Fedayeen were there--fighting till their demise. |