Saddam Hussein Calls Top Leadership Into Emergency Session
A Declaration of War?
by DEBKAfile
13 October 2002
Saddam Hussein wasted no time before calling his leadership and parliament into emergency sessions Saturday, October 12, in response to the congressional endorsement US president George W. Bush gained for waging war on Iraq. DEBKAfiles Gulf sources report that the day after the US Senate in Washington approved a pro-war resolution, the Iraqi ruler went through the motions of seeking a parallel mandate from Iraqs governing institutions. The mandate he demanded to defend the Iraqi republic and people against American aggression is tantamount to a declaration of war.
Our sources add that the Iraqi ruler also demanded that his successor be named
in case he comes to harm in the hostilities. Only one name was put forward by,
Saddams son Uday Hussein. The top Iraqi brass perceived this action as
a legitimate counter-move against the American drive to oust the Saddam Hussein
regime in Baghdad. They are divided only over the wisdom of publishing the decision
now, at the risk of flawing Saddam Husseins image of as an unvanquished
war leader, or rather leaving it up to the Iraqi voter who will be asked in
a referendum taking place Tuesday, October 15, to endorse the Iraqi president
for a second seven-year term.
While these moves are essentially ritualistic, they point to the Iraqi governments
realization that the time has come for Iraq to respond actively
to US military operations in and around Iraq for the last three months. DEBKAfiles
military sources see Iraq gearing up for military action. It will
not immediately take the form of unconventional warfare against American forces
in the field or other pro-American targets like Israel, Qatar, Jordan and Saudi
Arabia. But a message is being broadcast that the time for using them is not
far off.
The debate going back and forth in Washington last week over what kind of government
will rule Iraq after Saddam Hussein is gone in which secretary of state
Colin Powell, the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, the Pentagon spokesperson
Victoria Clark and the New York Times have been actively engaged distracted
attention from some important military developments:
A. The US-Turkish special forces takeover
of northern Iraq with the help of pro-American Kurdish and Turkmen units is
complete. Americans commandos have been beefed up by US Marines and engineering
units. The stretch of territory now in US hands ranges from Sinjar near the
Syrian border in the west and runs east as far as 10-15 miles north of the oil
town of Mosul. Then, still further east, US-led forces have by-passed the friendly
Kurdish stronghold of Erbil, which commands the highway to the second northern
oil city of Kirkuk, to fetch up on a line roughly 20 miles south of Erbil, 35-40
miles north of Kirkuk.
DEBKAfile s military sources report that Iranian Badr Force units, a sort
of Iranian Revolutionary Guards foreign legion, have joined the US-Turkish thrust
into the area of the northeastern Iraqi key town of Sulimaniyeh. Comprising
mostly Iraqi and Afghan exiles, this force has linked up with the US-led covert
offensive in Iraq under a secret Iran-US military cooperation pact, first revealed
in DEBKA-Net-Weekly No. 78 on September 27.
B. In the west, a military standoff has
developed along Iraqs Jordanian border region, an area considered the
strategic gateway to the Iraqi heartland - Saddams hometown Tikrit and
Baghdad. The military sources of DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weekly s (No.
79, October 4) reported fierce battles taking place from late September into
the first week of October, between US special units and Middle East commandos,
around the H-2 and H-3 bases, centers of command cores, air defense installations,
missile bases and air force facilities. The fight put up by the Americans prevented
Iraqi transporters from reaching those west Iraqi bases and positioning several
mobile surface missile batteries. But reinforced Iraqi units fought back and
prevented the American-led assault troops from coming close enough to those
bases to lay them to siege.
The prime cause of this standoff was Washingtons reluctance to throw adequate
air might into backing up US-led ground forces.
C. In the south, the American war command
continues to beef up its troop concentrations in bases ranging from Cairo-West,
Jordan mainly in the air-ground base of Ruwayshid near the Iraqi border,
Eritrea and Djibouti in East Africa, the Indian Oceanisland of Diego Garcia,
Socotra (Yemen), and Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain along the Gulf.
Last week, the Americans tested the operational systems of the new base they
have built at Herat in eastern Afghanistan, but then ran into a snag. Iranian
defense minister Admiral Shakhmani first declared on October 4 that Iran would
not shoot at American warplanes straying into its airspace on their
way to attacking Iraq. DEBKAfile and DEBKA-Net-Weeklys military sources
reported this was interpreted in Washington as permission for American planes
to take off from the Afghan base to the east and reach Iraq through Iranian
skies. A spokesman in Tehran later denied its defense minister ever made this
statement, putting paid to the use of Herat for striking at Iraq from the east,
which would have rounded off the American aerial siege of Iraq.
According to DEBKAfile s sources in Tehran, Iran-US relations were the
main topic of the talks British foreign secretary Jack Straw held in Tehran
Thursday, October 10. Straw obtained some promises from the Iranian leadership
that included: refraining from selling weapons to Iraq, buying Iraq oil or sending
Iraq supplies in the course of the American offensive.
Iran agreed to send a secret delegation to Baghdad headed by Revolutionary Guards
commander Yahya Rahim-Safavi to test Iraqs readiness to consider a leadership
change in Baghdad who would accept UN Security Council resolutions to the letter,
thereby obviating the need for war.
D. DEBKAfiles military sources report
that some of these developments slowed down the impetus of the US-UK air offensive
against Iraqs air and air defense resources. While air raids continue
against Basra and Talil in the south and H-2 and H-3 in the west, Iraqi air
command and control centers in the north near Kirkuk and at Taj in central Iraq
have not been touched..
E. Most alarming are signs that the Islamic
extremist al Qaeda is back in action and its initiation of a fresh wave of strategic
terrorist strikes. The groups two chiefs, who appeared to vanish off the
face of the earth eleven months ago in the thick of the Tora Bora battle, began
to surface in the first week of October and signal that they are very much alive
and as threatening as ever. Bin Laden was reported on October 4 by a Saudi correspondent,
who talked to al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan, as preparing to reappear soon
and wake up the sleeper cells.
His senior deputy, Ayman Zawahri, declared in a recorded interview aired by
the Arab satellite TV station on October 6 that the youth of Islam will
target key sections of your economy.
From that moment on, the terror attacks have been coming thick and fast.
Limburg Attack Just the Beginning
On the day of the interview, the French oil supertanker Limburg was struck on its way into a Yemen port in an attack similar to the crippling of the USS Cole frigate two years earlier at Aden port. Responsibility was claimed by the Yemeni Aden-Abyan Islamic Army, an umbrella organization for Yemeni extremists who identity with al Qaeda goals operating around Aden, in the Hadhramauth and in northern regions bordering on Saudi Arabia. Among them are 300 or 400 Yemeni Islamists who fought the Americans in Afghanistan and made good their escape home through Iran. DEBKAfile s military sources report that, since early September, US special forces have been operating in Yemen to break up the terror networks the Afghanistan veterans have been building among Yemeni tribes. In recent weeks, clashes occurred in Hadhramauth and on both sides of the Yemen-Saudi frontier, between American commandos and high-ranking al Qaeda fighters.
The fact that the all-out American campaign against al Qaeda has not reduced
the networks ability to bring off a strike as meticulously planned and
strategically damaging as the attack on the Limburg, means that the sea traffic
passing through the region - tankers, US warships and aircraft carriers and
commercial shipping, some of it carrying equipment and supplies to American
forces in the Gulf of Aden - are vulnerable to terrorist attack.
Two day after the Limburg was struck, Kuwaiti terrorists fired on US Marines
on joint maneuvers in Kuwait, killing one and injuring two. The oil emirate
abutting Iraq is an important point of concentration for a US troop invasion
of Iraq. Yet a large and high-placed al Qaeda cell, its members drawn from some
of the emirates most prominent families, including even the Mufti of Kuwaits
Grand Mosque, has been at large inside the protective US military perimeter
-
under the noses of US and Kuwaiti intelligence.
What is more, the American military buildup for war on Iraq has seemingly become the magnet of a resurgent al Qaeda campaign. The concatenation of the two events certainly beg such questions as:
1. Is the current wave of terror the product of joint pre-planning between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahri and the rest of the al Qaeda command? The circumstantial link between the timing of the terror incidents and the Iraqi leaderships time-table is glaring enough to provide all the evidence the Bush team may still lack of Saddams association with terrorists.
2. What are the chances of the current wave of terrorism spreading to American targets in other parts of the world and America itself? This is to be expected in the near future.
3. Are other terror groups likely to join al Qaedas campaign of terror? The Palestinians and the Hizballah are likely to back up bin Laden by targetingIsrael and Jordan.
The internal situation in Iraq is not exactly ripe for the hyped up debate on
the shape of government in post-warBaghdad. DEBKAfiles intelligence sources
perceive no signs of collapse in the Baghdad regime or the army command. Reports
of clandestine US contacts with Iraqi commanders to persuade them to hold their
fire in battle are probably exaggerated, disseminated more to demoralize than
as an expression of tangible deals.
Some of the difficulties now facing the US campaign to win over Saddams
followers in the army are largely generated by Washington itself.
Talk of replacing the Saddam regime with a new, democratic administration, is perceived by Iraqs Sunnis, the backbone of the existing regime, as a threat to dilute the authority of central government, dissolve the army and secret services and fragment the country into autonomous Shiite, Kurdish and Turkmen sectors. However much many Sunni tribal leaders and generals may detest Saddam and his family, they find the Bush vision dismaying in that it will force them out of the privileged positions they enjoy, thanks to Baghdads repression of Iraqs non-Sunni peoples.
As for Iraq divesting itself of unconventional weapons, that too is feared by
many high-placed Iraqis who hate the ruler, because they believe it would leave
their country completely at the mercy of Tehran and Iranian domination of the
Persian Gulf region.
Therefore, the road to a democratic Iraq even assuming the war is quickly
won is bound to be uphill and tortuous. [Emphasis Added]