Hussein Guards Seized by U.S.

U.S. officials said they captured up to 10 of Saddam Hussein’s bodyguards Friday, further boosting their confidence after tracking down his two sons that a deluge of would-be informants and tips would lead them to the former dictator.

The arrests Friday near Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown, might yield vital recent information about Hussein’s movements.

Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of the Army’s 4th Infantry Division in Iraq, said it was a sign that Hussein’s chances of evading capture were dwindling.

“We continue to gain more and more information about where he might be,” the general said during a teleconference with reporters at the Pentagon.

The way Hussein’s sons Uday and Qusai died Tuesday -- barricaded in a residence in Mosul with only one bodyguard and Qusai’s 14-year-old son -- also is indicative of the former Iraqi leader’s troubles, said officials of the U.S.-led occupation force.

It underscored how vulnerable and alone Hussein is likely to be, said Chris Harvin, a spokesman for the occupation authority in Baghdad. With the deaths of his sons, and the arrest last month of his closest personal aide, Abid Hamid Mahmud Tikriti, Hussein has fewer and fewer people on whom he can rely.

“When we get Saddam, you’re going to see the same thing -- he’s going to be alone in a house,” Harvin predicted. “Somebody is going to sell him out. Somebody is going to turn him in.”

The corpses of the two sons were put on display for journalists Friday, one day after they were shown to members of the new Iraqi governing council.

To allay doubts among some members of the Iraqi public that the two were indeed dead, the men this time were shorn of the beards they had grown, apparently to disguise themselves. Uday’s face was also reconstructed -- a wound that had smashed his nose and distorted his features was sewn up -- so that it more closely resembled the way he looked in life.

The coalition’s decision to show the bodies carried an implicit message for Iraqis, Harvin said: “It says we’re helping you. We’re making progress. No. 1 is next, and we’re going to get him.”

Another official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, voiced optimism that the $25-million bounty offered for Hussein will prove a powerful motivation for Iraqis to come forward with information. Cooperation could increase after a reward is paid to the unidentified informant who revealed the location of Uday and Qusai.

“Money talks,” the official said.

U.S. officials said in Washington on Friday that they expected to pay out the $30 million -- $15 million each for information leading to the death or capture of Uday and Qusai -- to the informant.

The last reported public appearance by Hussein was on the morning of April 9, the same day U.S. forces reached the center of Baghdad, when witnesses said they saw him in the northern part of the city. Since then, he has been a shadowy figure of rumor and legend.

A secretive unit, Task Force 20, drawn from the U.S. military’s Delta Force and the CIA, has been leading the hunt for Hussein as well as other remaining senior regime officials. Shortly after Uday and Qusai died in a fierce gun battle at the house in Mosul, members of the task force, dressed in civilian clothes under their body armor, went through the building. They took away documents, computers and personal belongings of the occupants.

In addition to Task Force 20, each of the military divisions in the country has its own intelligence unit, cultivating Iraqi sources and interrogating the hundreds of prisoners seized in raids on suspected loyalists of Hussein’s Baath Party.

U.S. officials say the detentions of mid-level Baathists, members of the Republican Guard and the Fedayeen Saddam militia are giving U.S. forces valuable information and a better base of knowledge from which to conduct their hunt.

Odierno said Hussein and those with him were “moving around very quickly.”

“We continue to tighten the noose,” he said. “They are not living a very good life right now because we are constantly on their trail.”

Besides the arrests of the bodyguards, soldiers of the 4th Infantry Division seized a large weapons cache in a house and three adjacent bunkers near Samarra, a mainly Sunni city south of Tikrit on the Tigris River that is divided between pro-Hussein and anti-Hussein factions.

The weapons found in one bunker included AK-47 rifles, 42 sniper rifles, 21 submachine guns, seven machine guns, 42 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 152 rocket-propelled grenade rounds and 45,000 sticks of dynamite.

Odierno said both the weapons find and the arrest in a house south of Tikrit of Hussein’s bodyguards were based on tips that have been pouring in from ordinary Iraqis, and which have intensified since Uday and Qusai were killed.

Of the 13 people detained, the general said, between five and 10 were Hussein’s personal bodyguards.

U.S. forces also have spoken to one of Hussein’s three wives, according to Odierno, but he did not specify where the conversation took place.

The chief civilian U.S. official in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, has said that he believes Hussein is alive and most likely in the vicinity of Tikrit.

But there have been suspected sightings elsewhere in the country.

A former head of Iraqi military intelligence, Wafiq Samarrai, was quoted in the British paper the Independent as saying Hussein has been seen in the Balad-Baqubah farming area north of Baghdad, where U.S. forces have been frequently attacked.

Retired Lt. Gen. Shakur Mahmoud, mayor of Samarra, told The Times that Hussein was seen in his area about two weeks ago.

In addition to U.S. forces hunting for Hussein, Samarrai and several political parties that have returned from exile also have intelligence operations. And the country’s new governing council decided last week to create a civil militia that would assist the U.S. with intelligence-gathering and fighting remnants of the Baathist regime.

“Who knows who will get him? But if all the people are against this ruler, his movements will be very restricted,” said Mahmoud, the Samarra mayor.

“Since the street does not support him, he is finished.”

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Times staff writer Alissa J. Rubin in Baghdad and Times wire services contributed to this report.