Bulletin de liaison et d'information - Institut kurde de Paris

Revue de Presse-Press Review-Berhevoka Çapê-Rivista Stampa-Dentro de la Prensa-Baszn Özeti
TIME AUGUSTll,2003
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[~'~!,~~~:~Q j MAN HUN T .
VEN WHEN HE RULED IRAQ, SADdam
Hussein led a nomad's life.
As President he was too paranoid
to sleep in the massive,
marble-lined palaces he erect-
. ed ail over Iraq as monuments
to his power. According to close
associates, he would stay instead
in ~maIl houses on the edges of his various .
compounds, changing location every eight
to 10 hours and keeping an assistant on
duty around the clock to pack and unpack
his suitcases. Saddam, his former secretary
says, so admired the fortitude of the Bedouin
tribes that wander the Iraqi wilderness that
he often headed into the mountains-accompanied,
of course, by caravans of aides,
cooks and bodyguards-to bed down among
them. "He lived very simply;' says the secretary.
"He didn't need much:'
That can be a useful quality when
you're rumiing for your life. If Saddam's
circumstances are anything like those of
his sorts Uday and Qusay, who died in a
shoot-out with U.S. forces ill Mosul two
weeks ago, he is traveling with only the
barest essentials: money and guns. U.S.
officials figure that Saddam has probably
dispensed with all his well-known bodyguards,
who would be recognizable to the
growing number of former regime courtiers
who are showering U.S. forces Withinformation
about the whereabouts of their
old boss. "He'll have people around him
that no one knows;' says a Pentagon official
close to the search for Saddam.
And while the U.S.hunt for Saddam remained
furious in the cities of Baghdad
and Tikrit, American commanders told
TIME they had picked HP a rush of new intelligence
that suggested Saddam was
moving through the arid plains outside the'
northwestern city of Mosul, seeking sanctuary
with Bedouin loyalists he hoped
would defend him to the death. Locals
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