Hussein’s Son Wounded in Ambush, Iraq Says

Uday Hussein, the son of and heir apparent to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, was shot in the head Thursday during an ambush in Baghdad, according to Iraqi media reports and U.S. intelligence.

Details were sketchy late Thursday. Iraqi television described Uday’s condition as “stable” and “not a matter of concern.”

“He was the target of a cowardly attack which led to a light wound,” reported Youth TV, which is run by Uday, 32, and serves as one of several instruments of power.

But U.S. officials said that Iraq’s mere acknowledgment of the attack indicated that he may be in far more serious condition.

“If it had just been a grazing, then he would probably have taken a holiday to recover, and the regime would have denied any reporting on the incident,” a senior administration official said. “Baghdad doesn’t usually announce something like this unless it has no choice.”

A prominent Arab diplomat reportedly witnessed the shooting, which occurred as Uday was riding in his own car in an upper-middle-class suburb of the capital.

This is not the first attempt on the life of the president’s controversial, violence-prone son, widely considered to be the most rogue element in one of the world’s outlaw states. Uday was shot in the arm in 1992 while driving to his ranch north of Baghdad.

“Uday is the only person more unpopular than his father” among Hussein’s opponents, the administration official said.

In recent years, Uday, who favors silk suits and a stubble of beard, has served as a political henchman for his father and wielded his own power at various ministries and businesses at the expense of others in Hussein’s inner circle, Iraq specialists said.

“Uday has acquired a huge number of enemies because he’s a ruthless monster who kills people at dinner parties,” said a Pentagon official. A heavy drinker who also has a bad reputation for his amorous pursuit of women, Uday has also been known to fire into the ceiling to announce his arrival at parties.

The latest attack against Uday is a blow to Iraqi security officials, who have gone to great lengths to protect their leaders. Hussein and his son often engage in secret movements and travel in bulletproof vehicles. Their security chiefs send out fake motorcades. And both have personal doubles stand in for them at many public events in case of assassination attempts.

“The ambush shows that there are still some cracks in Baghdad’s armor,” a senior Pentagon official said.

Initial speculation about who or what group could be responsible falls into three broad categories, with motives ranging from political to personal, U.S. officials said.

A host of opposition groups has long campaigned from exile or underground in Iraq to unseat the regime. They include the U.S.-supported Iraqi National Congress, Kurdish nationalists in the north and Iran-backed Shiite Muslim groups. But none has made serious inroads, especially in getting close enough to take a shot at anyone in the family.

Indeed, a senior U.S. official said earlier this week that most of the Iraqi opposition groups were at a nadir in terms of impact or organization since a burst of rebellions after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

The attack also may have been engineered from within Saddam Hussein’s inner circle--those colleagues and officials who generally view Uday with disdain, suspicion and fear, according to Iraq specialists.

In 1988, Uday killed his father’s favorite bodyguard and food taster, a man who allegedly set up a liaison between Saddam Hussein and a woman who later became his second wife. Uday has been tied to several other shootings and slayings for which he was not held accountable.

But the killing of the bodyguard so outraged his father that Uday was exiled to Switzerland until Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when he returned and began a swift political resurrection.

A third possibility is that the attack came from within the extended Hussein family itself, which has one of the bloodiest records in the world’s most unstable region. In 1995, Uday allegedly shot one of his father’s stepbrothers in the leg during a family quarrel.

Uday’s victory in a 1995 power struggle led brother-in-law Hussein Kamel Majid to flee to neighboring Jordan with his brother and their wives.

Both women were Saddam Hussein’s daughters.

All four were lured back in March with a promise of amnesty. The two men then died under mysterious circumstances. Uday had been involved in trying to get them to return to Baghdad.

In recent weeks, Uday had been less visible than his younger brother, Qusai, who heads several of the regime’s security forces, including the Republican Guards, and Tarik Aziz, the regime’s liaison with the West, U.S. officials said.