WHO TURNED IN UDAY AND QUSAY?….One of the curious things about the killing of Saddam’s two sons was that they were hiding out in Mosul, a city right on the border of the Kurdish north and probably not the best hiding place in the world for Saddam loyalists. So why were they there? The Washington Post has the story:
Nawaf Zaidan Nasiri answered the front door of his elegant mansion 24 days ago, and greeted a nightmare.
Standing there, he told his neighbors Tuesday, were the two sons of Saddam Hussein, Qusay and Uday, Iraq?s second- and third-most wanted fugitives, asking Zaidan to repay years of privilege and favors they had doled out to him.
“I answered the doorbell and there they were, right in front of my face,” Zaidan told his neighbor, Mukhlis Thahir Jubori. “They asked to stay in my house and I could not refuse them. This is a disaster for me.”
But sometimes disasters can turn into blessings:
U.S. military spokesman said they were acting on a tip. They said a “walk-in” came to them Monday night with information about the Hussein brothers? location. They have not identified the informant, but they said the $15 million bounty on the Hussein brothers? heads will be paid.
Thahir and the cleric, who has known Zaidan since he was a boy and was friends with his father, said they strongly suspect that Zaidan was the informant. They said the $15 million temptation was probably too much to resist after the two fugitives had been hiding out in his house for more than three weeks.
That sounds about right. Live by treachery and corruption, die by treachery and corruption.
It does bring up a question, though. Granted, this is not the kind of operation you can second guess from six thousand miles away, but I’m a little surprised we didn’t make more of an effort to take them alive. If it really was Zaidan who betrayed them, surely it would have been possible for him to allow special ops teams into his house to take the the Hussein sons without a fight? You’d think it would have been worth trying since they surely would have been worth interrogating at length.
I imagine there’s a story behind that. Perhaps we’ll hear it sometime over the next couple of days.
