military commander in Iraq, who saw Saddam overnight, said the deposed leader ``has been cooperative and is talkative.'' He described Saddam as ``a tired man, a man resigned to his fate.'' defense official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Saddam admitted his identity when captured. Two other Iraqis - described as low-level regime figures - were arrested in the raid, and soldiers found two Kalashnikov rifles, a pistol, a taxi and $750,000 in $100 bills.Ī U.S. ``There was no way he could fight back so he was just caught like a rat,'' Odierno said. A pipe to the concrete surface at ground level provided air. A Pentagon diagram showed the hiding place as a 6-foot-deep vertical tunnel, with a shorter tunnel branching out horizontally from one side. Saddam was ``very disoriented'' as soldiers brought him out of the hole, Odierno said. The commander said Saddam likely had been there only a short time, noting that new shirts, still unwrapped, were found in the bedroom. The hut consisted of two rooms, a bedroom with clothes scattered about and a ``rudimentary kitchen,'' Odierno said. Rugs and dirt covered the Styrofoam lid covering the entrance to the hiding place, a few feet from a small, mud-brick hut where Saddam had been staying. Troops found the ousted leader, armed with a pistol, hiding in an underground crawl space at the walled compound, Odierno said. Some 600 troops and special forces were involved in the raid that netted Saddam - though not all were aware beforehand that the objective was ``High Value Target No. ``Ladies and gentlemen, we got him,'' U.S. Saddam was one of the most-wanted fugitives in the world, along with Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaida terrorist network who has not been caught despite a manhunt since November 2001, when the Taliban regime was overthrown in Afghanistan. soldier died while trying to disarm a roadside bomb south of the capital - the 452nd soldier to die in Iraq.
In the latest attack, a suspected suicide bomber detonated explosives in a car outside a police station Sunday morning west of Baghdad, killing at least 17 people and wounding 33 more, the U.S. But since then, the guerrilla campaign has mounted dramatically. There was hope at the time that the sons' deaths would dampen the Iraqi resistance to the U.S. troops in a hideout in the northern city of Mosul. The event comes almost five months after his sons, Qusai and Odai, were killed July 22 in a four-hour gunbattle with U.S. ``I think it's rather ironic that he was in a hole in the ground across the river from these great palaces that he built,'' Odierno said. Saturday at one of dozens of safehouses Saddam is thought to have: a walled compound on a farm in Adwar, a town 10 miles from Tikrit, not far from one of Saddam's former palaces, Odierno said. The crucial information came after prisoners from raids and intelligence tips led to increasingly precise information, as CIA and military analysts gradually narrowed down their list of potential sites where Saddam was staying, a U.S.
Saddam's capture was based on information from a member of a family ``close to him,'' Odierno told reporters in Tikrit.
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