Word: tikrit
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...houseguest was told to make his bed under the stars because the power had gone out and it was too hot inside without air conditioning. From the rooftop balcony of the two-story house in northern Tikrit where he sought refuge early last week, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, the fourth-most-wanted man in Iraq, had a panorama on a life come undone. To the south he could make out the sprawling family farmlands where he used to spend weekends with his boss and cousin, Saddam Hussein. A few miles up the road stood the ex-regime's garish...
...offensive was what Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called "a three-minute decision. The first two are for coffee." The raid that netted Mahmud was part of an Iraq-wide campaign, Operation Desert Scorpion, aimed at rooting out ex-regime leaders and commanders. The best harvest last week came in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, where, apart from Mahmud, U.S. forces rounded up more than 50 suspected members of Saddam's military, intelligence and paramilitary services. Desert Scorpion was modeled after an earlier operation, Peninsula Strike, in which 4,000 troops, drawn mostly from the 4th Infantry Division, launched a midnight assault...
Special forces were usually ahead of the tip of the spear: as U.S. troops pushed toward Baghdad, secret combat teams zipped into Iraq aboard specially outfitted MC-130 Combat Talon planes that used highways as landing strips, surprising the enemy at its rear. On the road to Tikrit, they fingered Iraqi vehicles fleeing the capital for destruction by M1 tanks. And inside the capital, the elite Delta Force slipped into Baghdad's back alleys and into its sewers to eavesdrop on communications, cut fiber-optic cables, target regime leaders and build networks of informants...
...from the 1st Armored Brigade began clearing up to 5,000 tons of rubble from the site of the April 7 bombing, searching for Saddam's remains. But most Pentagon officials believe he survived the raid. A longtime employee of Saddam's family who worked at their farmhouse in Tikrit told TIME the Iraqi leader phoned the house on April 8 looking for guards to launch surface-to-surface missiles. "I think he's alive," says a U.S. intelligence official in Iraq, "because if he suffered at all in that strike we probably would have heard about...
Many of the recent attacks on U.S. forces have taken place in a triangle stretching west from Baghdad to Hit, and then northeast to Tikrit. At least some of the attacks there seem to have been organized. "The combat actions that we have been engaged in over the past few days in that area," said McKiernan last week, "probably have some local cohesion to them, some local command and control." The dangerous triangle, perhaps not coincidentally, is also the area where informed speculation reckons Saddam and his sons Uday and Qusay are hiding. In Baghdad itself, money is being distributed...