Saddam alive, exile group's leader claims
NEW YORK -- Saddam Hussein has been seen north of Baghdad and is paying a bounty for every American soldier killed, the leader of an Iraqi exile group said Tuesday.
Saddam has $1.3 billion in cash taken from the Central Bank on March 18, is bent on revenge and believes he can "sit it out and get the Americans going," said Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress.
In Washington, Pentagon officials said they had no information that Saddam was alive and offering bounties for killing U.S. troops.
Chalabi, citing "very credible information," said Saddam also bought suicide vests for himself and his secretary on April 1 from the mukhabarat , the Iraqi secret police.
The ousted Iraqi leader has been sighted on several recent occasions moving in an arc from Diyala, northeast of Baghdad, around the Tigris River toward his hometown of Tikrit and into the Dulaimi areas to the west of the Tigris, Chalabi said.
The latest sighting was about two weeks before Chalabi left on his current U.S. trip -- and the best sighting was three days old.
"Now, he's put a price on American soldiers. He will pay bounty for every American soldier killed in Iraq now. This has been spread around in the western part of the country," Chalabi told the Council on Foreign Relations.
He said the casualty rate for American soldiers "is close to one a day, which is not good."
Between 150,000 and 200,000 U.S. troops in are Iraq, including about 55,000 in Baghdad, and there is still high insecurity and lawlessness, he said.
The United States has been trying to deal with the killing of U.S. soldiers by putting more troops into areas where they have been attacked, but Chalabi said the Americans were "sitting ducks for terrorists."
Instead, he said, the United States should move quickly to create an Iraqi security force that is armed, paid and under U.S. command. The ratio should be about one American to 10 Iraqis, he said.
Such a force could be formed in six weeks with help from community leaders to weed out criminals and members of Saddam's Baath Party, Chalabi said.
"They can actually provide order quickly," he said, and also restore water, electricity and other public services.
If the United States establishes an Iraqi security force, Chalabi said, it could then substantially reduce the number of American troops in Iraq.
"My own view is the United States should stay in Iraq by treaty -- have military bases," he said, suggesting that 25,000 to 50,000 U.S. troops remain in the country.
Chalabi said U.S. troops didn't move quickly and aggressively enough to find key scientists involved in weapons programs, and "some have left for the gulf," he said.
"The weapons of mass destruction are in Iraq," he said. Finding Saddam, his son Qusai and "the concealment teams" are the keys to finding the weapons, Chalabi said.
