Neighbors Say Hussein Son Survived Bombing

About an hour after U.S. forces targeting Saddam Hussein and his sons bombed Baghdad’s Mansour district on April 7, Ali Kashif Ghata watched from a street corner as a white Peugeot raced down the block.

Hussein’s younger son, Qusai, was riding shotgun.

“Qusai was in the front passenger seat with a machine gun between his legs,” recalled Ghata, a dentist and resident of Mansour.

The U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division had moved into Baghdad hours earlier. Within days, the battle for the Iraqi capital would be over. But the mystery over the fate of President Hussein and his sons would remain.

The U.S. government acknowledged that it bombed a street in Mansour after receiving intelligence that Hussein was meeting there with Qusai and his other son, Uday. Army Maj. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, vice director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said April 8 that the airstrike had been “very, very effective,” but that it was not known whether the three men had been killed.

U.S. officials say they still have conflicting reports about whether the three survived the bombing.

Interviews by The Times with four witnesses who live near the bombing site, and with a former bodyguard for the Hussein family, indicate that Qusai Hussein survived the blast, and that his father and older brother most likely did as well.

The bodyguard, who declined to be identified, said Hussein and his sons were at the meeting, as U.S. intelligence suggested. But the bodyguard was told by colleagues at the scene that all three men left the gathering just before the U.S. military dropped four 2,000-pound bombs on the street, and that Hussein and his older son parted company then with Qusai.

These accounts and those of other witnesses also suggest that the U.S. military either targeted the wrong house or missed the mark. The witnesses, along with neighbors on the block, say houses on either side of the two homes crushed by the bombs were used by the Husseins. They also say that at least 14 civilians were killed.

Although none of the witnesses have any idea where the Husseins may have gone after the bombing, events leading up to it provide a glimpse of how the ruling family sought to protect itself in the last days of the war.

Mansour offered an attractive hide-out to the Iraqi leadership. It is near the large palaces where many key officials worked and is on the west bank of the Tigris River with access to the main highway leading out of the country to Jordan and Syria.

Even now, in the postwar disarray, Mansour has a gracious air. Grand sandstone houses with well-tended gardens line the boulevards. Shopping streets have chic restaurants, and boutiques offer fine goods from across the Arab world and Europe.

While it is a large urban neighborhood, Mansour has a small-town feel. Despite high walls around the gardens, few movements go unnoticed. If a house changes hands or a new power line is laid, questions are discreetly raised.

“Before the war, many of the government ministers or high people rented or bought houses here to serve as safe houses,” said Ceasar Magid Athari, the district’s top real estate agent, whose office is decorated with a house-by-house street map of the neighborhood.

Athari is certain that a house next to one of the two that were hit was sold to a government official three weeks before the attack. The previous owner boasted that he had sold the house for $200,000, the real estate agent said.

“It was maybe worth $140,000, maybe not even that,” he said. “[He] told me they gave him the money in cash, in new bills, and told him to leave all the family furniture and belongings and just take their clothes.”

The buyer was almost certainly a front person for a regime member who did not wish his identity to be known, Athari said. The modest two-story home “was a simple house ... so that nobody would know Saddam Hussein was there,” he said.

By the third week of the war, as U.S. troops neared Baghdad, an increasing number of government security people began to arrive in the neighborhood. Their presence worried residents, who suspected that people at the highest level of the regime were hiding there and might make the area a target of U.S. bombing.

“We started being really scared” around April 4, said Ghata, the dentist. He recalled that was the day Hussein showed up unannounced on one of Mansour’s wealthy residential streets, accompanied by his secretary, Abid Hamid Mahmud Tikriti. Ghata, who was with his brother at the time, believes that it was the president rather than one of Hussein’s famed doubles because the entourage was on edge.

Ghata’s brother recognized a Hussein bodyguard named Nafer and approached him. “Nafer said, ‘If you take one more step, I’ll kill you,’ ” Ghata recalled.

On the same day, Mansour residents noticed government pickup trucks armed with heavy weapons stationed on many of the area’s side streets.

A day later, as the 3rd Infantry Division made its first foray into Baghdad, signaling that the regime’s hours were numbered, Mansour residents noticed a heavy-duty electric cable being strung up in the area, a matter of some interest because the war-torn city was then without electricity.

Residents later concluded that there must have been several safe houses in the neighborhood for the Hussein family and that the cable carried electricity from a generator to at least one of them.

“It had to be for [Hussein], who else could it be for,” said Ghata, who believes the generator was placed blocks away to avoid revealing the Iraqi leader’s location.

On the night of April 5, still heavier security moved into the area. Ghata awoke and found 14 armed officers standing in his front yard. He wondered: Could U.S. forces see the security detail with spy satellites? If they could, would his home become a target?

Ghata asked the men to leave. “They said, ‘We are from the [ruling] Baath Party, we are here for your security.’ ”

On April 7, the day of the attack, Hussein and his sons were on the move, according to the former bodyguard. The Americans had entered the city and time was running out.

“We were moving more than constantly,” said the bodyguard, who refuses to be identified because he fears reprisals from members of Hussein’s inner circle.

Friends of the bodyguard confirmed that he worked for both Saddam and Uday Hussein, though not in the innermost circle of the security detail.

The bodyguard said he was stationed under a highway overpass on the western edge of Mansour, about 10 minutes by car from the safe house where the three Husseins were meeting on the day of the U.S. bombing.

As he waited, the bodyguard began to hear shooting coming from the south, the direction of the main airport. The U.S. Army was approaching a major Baghdad landmark, the memorial to the unknown soldier, less than 15 minutes away.

In the absence of effective radar and other defensive equipment, the Husseins had adopted a simple protection strategy. “Every time there was a bombing or the Americans made an advance, they moved,” the bodyguard said.

“The meeting ended at 2:30. It was supposed to go longer but we heard the Americans had reached” the monument, he said. He radioed a warning to Uday Hussein’s security detail at the meeting house, using code words: “Salaam alaikum [peace be with you], your mother says hello.”

According to plan, the bodyguard drove to a gathering place. When he found no one there, he went to the fallback site, the Al Harfi Pacha restaurant. After he had waited about 40 minutes, two of Uday Hussein’s bodyguards arrived, he said. “They told me to go home.”

Meanwhile, two houses in the Mansour district had been reduced to dust, along with their inhabitants.

On either side of the decimated homes are damaged but intact houses. The one that real estate agent Athari said was sold shortly before the war has a slightly damaged roof. Ghata and several other neighbors believe the Husseins were meeting there on the afternoon of the bombing.

Most neighbors said they did not know about the meeting at the time. They said they later peered through the windows and saw a large desk and lighting fixtures that some of them recognized from a videotaped speech Saddam Hussein had given after the war began.

Now there is not a stick of furniture left; the house was looted. But Ghata said that when he first arrived to take a look after the bombing, he saw not only the large desk but also four or five phone lines -- a luxury, even in Mansour. The lines still dangle outside the house.

On the other side of the bomb site, there is a second house, badly damaged but still standing. Before the day of the attack, the bodyguard was told by colleagues that the house was used by Saddam Hussein.

Until early this month, it was still occupied by an elderly man named Fadl Salman Imam and his daughter and grandson. The father and daughter swear they never saw Hussein in the neighborhood, much less in their home.

Asked about the conflicting reports, the bodyguard said it was possible that Hussein had two houses on the street, but that for security reasons he was told only about one of them.

Wherever the Hussein family was before the April 7 bombing, as the dust cleared Qusai Hussein appears to have been on the run. Numerous accounts place him driving along nearby Daoudi Street about an hour after the attack.

Ali Abdul Abbas, a security guard for a private home, said he was driving on one of Mansour’s main streets when he saw Qusai rush by. “He was in a new white car. The car went by me and Qusai wasn’t driving, but he was sitting up front,” Abbas said.

On Daoudi Street, which is lined with luxurious homes, property manager Mohammed Amir had just returned from a short walk up to the bomb site. “At about 4 o’clock, I saw Qusai in a white car, a Peugeot 306. He was not driving. He was sitting in front. He was sitting with a gun between his legs,” said Amir, a former United Nations official.

A Mitsubishi Pajero with soldiers followed the car, Amir said.

“He was wearing the same clothes he was wearing in the last televised meeting I had seen with the president. I think they were beige,” Amir added.

Two days later, April 9, the day U.S. forces helped a crowd in central Baghdad pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein, came the last eyewitness reports that the Iraqi leader was alive. In the northern neighborhood of Adhamiya, which had not yet been taken by the Americans, several witnesses later told The Times that Saddam Hussein appeared along with Qusai just a few feet from the Al Hanifa mosque.

“I talked to him. I kissed him on the cheek,” said Hassan Ladami, 43, the owner of a small electrical parts store. “I never thought I would get so close to him.”

Hours later, U.S. troops would engage in a pitched battle with paramilitary fighters at the site.

Abu Dhabi television broadcast a videotape of the appearance, but U.S. intelligence officials have said they have no idea when the tape was made or whether it showed Saddam Hussein or one of his doubles.

In the ensuing days, the bodyguard, used to being at the beck and call of the Hussein family, waited for instructions, sure that some would come.

Finally word came. On April 12 or 14, he can’t remember exactly, the same two bodyguards who had told him to go home the night of the Mansour bombing came to his house.

“They told me Uday was with his father,” he said. “They didn’t say anything about Qusai, but they said, ‘Stay home. It’s over.’ ”

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Times staff writer Greg Miller in Washington contributed to this report.