PARIS, May 25 - Special Republican Guard chief, and one of Saddam Hussein’s cousins, Maher Sufian al-Tikriti, betrayed the deposed Iraqi leader by ordering his elite forces not to defend Baghdad after making a deal with the United States, a leading newspaper reported on Sunday, May 25. General Tikriti, responsible for defending the Iraqi capital, left Baghdad aboard a U.S. military transport plane, bound for a U.S. base outside Iraq, Le Journal du Dimanche reported Sunday, citing an Iraqi source close to Saddam's former regime. His departure, along with that of a 20-strong entourage, came on April 8, the day before U.S. forces swept into Baghdad, and after U.S. Marines announced that the general had been killed. Before he left Baghdad, following the capture of the capital's international airport on April 4, Sufian ordered his troops to lay down their weapons, another Iraqi general, Mahdi Abdullah al-Dulaimi, was quoted as saying. Sufian does not appear on the U.S. military's list of most wanted Iraqis, which names Barzan al-Ghafur Sulayman Majid as commander of the Special Republican Guard. An Arab diplomat told Le Journal du Dimanche that the plot was hatched more than a year before by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), noting: "Many suitcases filled with dollars were floating around."
| That's a story that warms the cockles of my heart. I'll have to remember to tell it, next time somebody starts rattling on about what babes in the woods we are when it comes to diplomacy and black operations... |
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