June 10, 2003

Chalabi: Saddam Spotted, Paying Bounty for Dead GIs

Saddam Hussein has been seen north of Baghdad and is paying a bounty for every American soldier killed, the leader of an Iraqi exile group said Tuesday.

Saddam has $1.3 billion in cash taken from the Central Bank on March 18, is bent on revenge, and believes he can "sit it out and get the Americans going," said Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress.
[...]
Saddam also bought suicide vests for himself and his secretary on April 1 from the mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, Chalabi said.

The ousted Iraqi leader has been sighted on several recent occasions moving in an arc from Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, around the Tigris River toward his hometown of Tikrit and into the Dulaimi areas to the west of the Tigris, Chalabi said.

The latest sighting was about two weeks before Chalabi left on his current U.S. trip — and the best sighting was three days old.

"Now, he's put a price on American soldiers. He will pay bounty for every American soldier killed in Iraq now. This has been spread around in the western part of the country," Chalabi told the Council on Foreign Relations.

He said the casualty rate for American soldiers "is close to one a day, which is not good."[U.S.A.!!!U.S.A.!!--Jen]

The United States has been putting more troops into areas where the killings are taking place, but Chalabi said soldiers in their armored vehicles "are sitting ducks for terrorists."

While the Libs are complaining that we haven't found the WMD yet and implying that Bush "lied" about those, we also haven't found Saddam (or his sons) and yet he is surely there somewhere causing trouble, just as the WMD are there.
We will find and defuse them all--Moustache Boy included--in the fullness of time.
But we all must keep praying for our troops in Iraq: they are still in harm's way, even though the "big battles" have been fought and won.
And now Saddam's trying to give them some financial incentive in addition to plain old revenge.