Scoffing at the U.S. in Hussein Country

When a friend brought Saddam Hussein’s secretary to Wamidh Ahmad Rija’s simple home and asked him to take care of the man, how could he refuse?

He couldn’t, he says.

“According to our Arab tradition, we have to receive him,” the 22-year-old said with a slight shrug.

So he showed his guest into the family reception room, bare except for thin mats for visitors to sit on and a television tuned to Al Jazeera, the leading Arabic satellite channel.

That was Sunday.

At 1 a.m. Tuesday, 30 to 40 U.S. soldiers stormed the house and seized Abid Hamid Mahmud Tikriti, Hussein’s right-hand man and No. 4 on Washington’s list of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis.

The capture comes in the midst of intensifying sweeps of the Tikrit area, including neighboring villages such as Qadisiyah, where Mahmud was seized, and Al Auja, Hussein’s birthplace, where every resident is proud to declare that he is a cousin of the former dictator.

While the Americans don’t always tell the Iraqis who or what they are looking for, interviews with Iraqis who have been interrogated and released -- among them Mahmud’s erstwhile host, Rija -- suggest that U.S. forces are hot on the trail of Hussein himself.

This part of Iraq is Hussein country: tribal, Sunni Muslim and heavily Baath, the party the former president counted on for support. Most people here worked for the regime, and almost everyone would like to see it return to power.

It is the part of Iraq where Hussein could find shelter in almost any house he approached and be assured that his hosts would not betray him.

Even the graffiti, much of it freshly painted in green Arabic lettering on the low walls that border Tikrit’s main street, tell the story. “Congratulations on your birthday, sir, despite the new situation,” reads one sign. Another reads, “Saddam still exists, you dog Bush.” And one: “Anyone who deals with the Americans should be killed.”

Although a local resident almost certainly played a role in Mahmud’s capture, the Americans’ questioning of people here seems futile to Hussein loyalists.

“They are asking silly things. ‘Have you seen Saddam Hussein?’ ‘Where did you see him?’ And the answer they get is, ‘No, I haven’t seen him.’ And that is reality,” said Marwan Adnan Nasiri, a 37-year-old lawyer who said six or seven of his cousins have been detained. Some of them have been released.

“If I knew where Saddam was, I would never tell you,” he said with a pleasant smile, “because you are an American.”

Nasiri’s view, widely shared in Tikrit, is that the “the ex-regime is the best. The majority of Iraqis liked Saddam. He has kept our dignity.”

Rasheed Mamoud Mohammed, 40, spoke warmly of Hussein from a bed in the well-equipped Tikrit Hospital, which was built by the previous government.

Mohammed was recovering from an attack by would-be carjackers that left him with four bullet wounds. His affection for the former president seems to have been unaffected by his brief imprisonments by members of the ruling family.

He likes the Americans too. The local commander of the U.S. base in Tikrit visited him in the hospital.

But Hussein, he’s family. “Yes, of course I would invite him if he came to my house,” Mohammed said as he smiled broadly and waved his hands expansively, yanking the intravenous line in his hand as he did so.

“All the people in Tikrit like Saddam,” he said. “They don’t like his relatives because they did bad things in his name.”

In the same neighborhood where Hussein’s secretary was caught, the three houses belonging to Nasiri’s extended family were searched just hours before Mahmud was captured. The U.S. soldiers found nothing, not even weapons, and apologized for the inconvenience, but the incident only deepened Nasiri’s disdain for the Americans and his loyalty to Hussein.

“The Americans promised us liberty, but now there is an absence of security, and we are deprived of our liberty when they come into our houses in the middle of the night and frighten our children,” he said as he sat in his family’s well-furnished reception room, dark because the curtains were drawn to keep out the June heat. As the electricity went on and off, an air conditioner sporadically rumbled.

In the dirt streets of Aldorat, a hamlet about 20 minutes north of Tikrit, Americans are also asking questions, said Nafa, a worker in the local water treatment plant who was detained by U.S. forces for 23 days and who would give only his first name.

A slight man, with skin weathered by the sun, he speaks reluctantly about his detention, but he clearly was puzzled by his interrogators’ queries, whose wide range suggested the breadth of U.S. interests during this post-conflict period.

“They asked me: ‘Do you know anybody who came from Iran to Iraq? Do you know anybody entering Iraq from Syria? Do you know anybody in the Badr Brigade?’ ” he said. The Badr Brigade is the armed support of Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, a Shiite leader who recently returned from exile in Iran and is based in the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq.

But for most of those detained in the Tikrit area, the questions focus either on Hussein’s whereabouts or that of the Fedayeen Saddam, the deposed leader’s fiercest fighters, who are now believed to be one of the forces behind the recent assaults on U.S. troops.

One soldier was killed Thursday and two were injured in a grenade attack on an ambulance from the 804th Medical Brigade, near the town of Al Iskandariyah, about 40 miles south of Baghdad. The ambulance was taking a patient to a combat support hospital, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Central Command.

Such attacks underscore the importance Washington places on determining the fate of Hussein and his sons, because it is believed that the failure to capture them encourages their supporters to make a stand against the U.S.-led occupation.

But for Tikritis like Rija and a cousin who was detained with him when the Americans captured Hussein’s secretary, the unfolding events felt beyond their control.

When they opened their front door to the neighbor who brought Mahmud, they saw a man they barely recognized from the television images, where he usually appeared in a military uniform and black cap.

Here was a bearded man in a simple ankle-length robe wearing the traditional white Arab headdress.

“He just had two suitcases and a pistol. Nothing else,” Rija said.

The suitcases were stuffed with U.S. dollars.

Mahmud spent the first night in the reception room, sleeping on the floor.

The second night, he went to the top-floor bedroom, with scuffed walls and a bed, a vanity, a wardrobe and a plastic coatrack, the whole thing illuminated by a single bare bulb.

He put his suitcases on top of the wardrobe.

“He seemed relaxed, you know, because he didn’t have a big job anymore. He watched television, he ate with us,” Rija said.

Early Tuesday morning, however, Rija realized it was all over, even before the soldiers entered the house.

“I knew when I heard the helicopters overhead that they were coming for him,” said Rija, a former soldier who worked as a secretary in a military hospital. He reached for his shirt and pants so he would be ready, and moments later the soldiers broke through the door, grabbed him and threw him to the ground.

Did he try to protect Mahmud? Rija shook his head. “How could I protect him?” he said, gesturing as if the soldiers were still surrounding the house.

As the soldiers raced upstairs to the room where Mahmud was staying, they threw stun grenades, which exploded with loud bangs, leaving the tile floor blackened.

“They asked me again and again: ‘Where are Saddam’s sons? Do you know Abid Hamid al Tikriti? Why didn’t you tell us about him, about where he was hiding?’ ”

After asking the same questions repeatedly, the Americans apparently determined that Rija was innocent and released him and his cousin. Five other relatives remain in detention.

When Rija returned home, the first thing he did was check for the suitcases, hoping the Americans had left them behind, but they were gone. “We were sorry about that,” he said. It would have been at least a little compensation for the family’s trouble.

Does he have any idea where Hussein is now? Rija smiled broadly and shrugged.

“We never knew where he was when he was the president,” he said. “He was always in hiding, always moving.”