At 10:50 AM, December 13, Colonel James Hickey – commander of 1st BCT 4ID – received a call notifying him that Task Force 121 had Muhammad Ibrahim al-Musslit in custody, and requesting he prepare a covering force for a seizure mission that night. After four hours of grueling interrogation, Muhammad Ibrahim had finally revealed two likely locations for Saddam: a house and a farm in the town of Ad Dawr, a Ba’athist stronghold about 15 kilometers southeast of Tikrit. Hickey, certain that this time they would capture Saddam, assembled a 600-plus strong force mounted in 25 M2/M3 Bradley fighting vehicles and 30 HMMWVs to support the two dozen special operators of Task Force 121. The mission was codenamed “Operation Red Dawn,” and the two objectives were labeled “Wolverine One” and “Wolverine Two.” These names were fortuitous if somewhat coincidental. The operations staff for the “Raider” Brigade was in the habit of naming each day’s operations after the movies they had watched the night before. Had they viewed “When Harry Met Sally” or “The Wedding Planner” the previous night, it is possible the names for the operation would have evoked less martial images than those inspired by the 1980s movie about teenage guerrillas resisting a Soviet invasion of the United States.
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| Saddam Hussein before the March-December 2003 strategic manhunt |
The beam of red-lensed Maglite flashlights and laser sights on rifles sweeping across the ground contrasted with the clear night sky over Ad Dawr. Task Force 121 searched the two objectives, but they appeared to be empty of any targets. The team leaders conferred and talked with Muhammad Ibrahim, who had been flown from Baghdad to Tikrit, and then brought to the farm by the special operations team. Al-Muslit suggested another nearby location, northwest of Wolverine Two, where a ramshackle shack stood. There was an animal stench in the air, mingled with the scent of some nearby fruit trees. The operators burst into the structure, which indeed had been an orange-picker’s hut, and seized two men. One was Saddam’s cook, the other was the cook’s brother and owner of the farm, Qies Niemic Jasim, a former bodyguard. The operators found two AK-47s and $750,000, but Saddam was not there.
U.S. forces appeared to have struck another “dry hole” in the search for Saddam.
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| Picture from On Point II, as available at GlobalSecurity.org. |
To the support and command elements following the operation’s progress via radio, the code words used suggested the operators were fruitlessly going back over the same ground, desperately searching for any signs leading to their quarry.
Then a call went over the command net: “We have Jackpot.”
The Joint Operations Center operations officer coordinating the mission asked for clarification, and an excited operator replied: “We’ve got Jackpot.”
A voice that had never been heard before on the Task Forces’ countless missions came on the radio. Admiral William McRaven, Task Force 121’s commander and a living legend within the Special Operations Forces community, asked: “Do you mean Big Jackpot?”
“Yes, we have Big Jackpot.”
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| Picture from On Point II, as available at GlobalSecurity.org |
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Minutes earlier, Muhammad Ibrahim had yelled at Qies Niemic Jasim in Arabic to show the operators where Saddam was hiding. The Fat Man apparently knew the exact spot, but wanted to be able to say that it was Qies who had betrayed Saddam. Finally, he realized it was going to be up to him, and moved to an area a few meters away from where the U.S. forces were concentrated. He began kicking the ground until he had uncovered a length of rope. The operators noticed Muhammad Ibrahim’s activities, and dug up the rope to reveal a trapdoor. The door was opened to reveal the entrance shaft to a “spider hole,” about six feet deep.
A sergeant shone a flashlight down the shaft. I think there’s something down there, an operator said, as another took the pin out of his grenade.
Then someone shouted, “Movement! We have something coming up.”
The operators held their fire when they saw the upraised hands of a dirty, bearded man with unkempt gray hair, appear. Although armed with a 9mm Markarov pistol, he put up no resistance as the soldiers grabbed him and yanked him out of the hole. As he was deposited on the ground, what looked like a vagrant said in halting English: “I am Saddam Hussein, the president of Iraq. I am willing to negotiate.”
“President Bush sends his regards,” the operators replied.
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| Task Force 121's interpreter, an exiled Iraqi-American named Samir, posing with the captured tyrant just outside his spiderhole in Ad Dawr. |
At 8:26PM, December 13, the hunt for Saddam Hussein came to a successful conclusion. Saddam was captured on the same farm where he had taken refuge in 1959 when, as a young hit man for the Ba’ath party, he had been part of a failed assassination attempt on Iraqi President Abdul Kareem Qassem, an episode that served as the founding myth to the dictator’s legend. The Arab scholar Fouad Ajami observed, great evil
never quite lives up to our expectations. The image of Saddam Hussein in captivity was true to Arendt’s theme. The haggard, disoriented man at the bottom of the ‘spider hole’ was the very same man who had inflicted unspeakable sorrow on his people, and on the peoples of two neighboring lands. The discovery of the smallness of the men behind the most terrible of deeds is always an affront: if Eichmann was only a clerk, Saddam was only a thug.In the end, the tyrant who had terrified millions and buried hundreds of thousands of his own citizens in mass graves; who had urged his countrymen to violently resist U.S. forces and bragged about going down in a blaze of glory and defiance was captured without a shot being fired.
