New Tape Allegedly From Hussein Is Aired

A man claiming to be Saddam Hussein urged Iraqis to mount a resistance campaign and drive the “occupiers” out of Iraq in a new audiotape aired here Thursday, the 35th anniversary of the day the former dictator’s party came to power.

The tape provided the only pointed reminder of the ousted regime on a day that had been widely expected to produce a surge in guerrilla attacks.

“The new governance council is appointed by occupiers,” said the voice on the tape, aired on the Al Jazeera satellite TV network. “So it doesn’t serve Iraq, but serves the occupiers themselves. Don’t be bluffed by what they say. The only solution is to resist until we expel them from our country.”

The taped comments, whose authenticity couldn’t be verified immediately, assailed the new Iraqi governing council as a puppet of the United States, Britain and Israel. The council, which the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority cites as its biggest achievement so far in postwar Iraq, is a 25-member group representing a broad swath of the nation’s religious and ethnic groups.

L. Paul Bremer III, the U.S. civilian administrator overseeing the reconstruction of Iraq, Thursday called the council a “huge step forward, not just for the Iraqi people but for the Arabic world.”

Iraqis can begin drafting a new constitution as soon as September, with elections to follow, perhaps within a year, he said in an interview, adding that Americans will remain no longer than necessary.

On a tense day that for years had been a state holiday in Iraq, Bremer acknowledged that security issues remain the No. 1 challenge facing occupation officials.

He insisted that U.S. forces would succeed in quelling the violence. “It will happen,” he said.

The improving conditions throughout the country are at odds, he said, with the widespread perception in the United States and the Arab media: In Baghdad, for instance, shops are open. Even the power works -- albeit in fits and starts, he said. Compare that, he said, with the situation when he arrived here eight weeks ago, when, as he put it, “Baghdad was on fire.”

Bremer’s comments came as U.S.-led forces -- battling what new Central Command chief Gen. John Abizaid acknowledged Wednesday was a “classic guerrilla-type war situation” -- rode out on tense patrols.

The occupying authorities have heavily guarded U.S. facilities and launched a series of raids during this week of former holidays. In a show of confidence, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, considered a prime architect of the war that toppled Hussein’s government, arrived in Baghdad on Thursday.

The taped message was the second released this month that claimed to be from Hussein. A previous message, which the CIA concluded probably was the voice of the former Iraqi president, urged Iraqis to provide cover for resistance fighters opposing the U.S.-led occupation.

In Hussein’s home city of Tikrit on Thursday, U.S. Army patrols appeared to be on extra alert. A military convoy blocked two lanes of the highway into the city so that no vehicles could pass it, or even draw near. Soldiers pointed weapons at any cars that drew to within about 100 feet.

Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, said attackers did manage to fire a few mortar rounds that landed outside the main gate of a former presidential palace complex now being used as the divisional headquarters in Tikrit. She characterized it as a shoot-and-run attack by untrained assailants. No one was wounded.

About 25 miles to the south, in the city of Samarra on the Tigris River, residents reported that six rockets or rocket-propelled grenades were fired at U.S. military positions late Wednesday. Aberle said she had no information on the incident.

Both Tikrit and Samarra are in Salahuddin province, an area where many Hussein loyalists are believed to operate.

Aberle said raids conducted over the past five days had yielded a rich haul of weapons and ammunition, some of it buried on local farms.

In the past 24 hours, she said, troops had found 300 AK-47 rifles, 23 mortars, sniper rifles, 500 grenades, 54 crates that held more than two tons of C-4 explosives, 10 crates containing 25,000 blasting caps, two crates of antiaircraft ammunition, and thousands of rounds of ammunition for Kalashnikov rifles. The troops also seized about $100,000 in U.S. currency and 18.2 million Iraqi dinars (worth about $12,000), she said.

Bremer warned that a broad array of arms remained hidden throughout Iraq. The seizures came one day after suspected insurgents narrowly missed a C-130 cargo plane landing at Baghdad’s international airport with a surface-to-air missile. Defense officials said it was at least the second such incident in as many weeks.

“This is a very heavily armed country. Saddam spent tens of billions of dollars on arms,” Bremer said in his office at Hussein’s former Republican Palace in Baghdad. “There’s an awful lot of stuff here. We have to just keep plugging away at these caches, and we are.”

The raids were part of what the military calls Operation Ivy Serpent, the latest mission targeting remnants of the Hussein government. In about 85 raids since Saturday, soldiers have detained 480 people, including what the Army called 48 “targeted” individuals. U.S. forces suffered no casualties from hostile fire; they killed one Iraqi combatant, Aberle said.

The rifles were found buried on a farm, she said, and the crates of explosives were hidden in a shed. According to Aberle, the raids were sparked by the increasing numbers of Iraqis telling U.S. forces about activities by pro-Hussein factions. “We don’t just go randomly and knock down doors and see what is there,” she said. “There has to be a reason.”

Times staff writer John Daniszewski in Tikrit contributed to this report.