Saddam Death Squad Bared
The New York Post
12/21/01
( The propaganda windup against Iraq in the press continues, not that there isn't a lot of nasty material to work with )
[ December 21, 2001 -- A top-secret squad of 30 Iraqi terrorists, all specially trained killing machines, are loose around the world and could strike anytime and anywhere, a former top spy of Saddam Hussein has revealed.
Their deadly specialties include sabotage, urban warfare, hijacking and murder, according to Abu Zeinab al-Qurairy, a former brigadier general in Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence service.
The onetime Iraqi big tells the February issue of Vanity Fair his "Dirty 30" were culled from a secret, 1,200-strong commando force called al-Qare'a - "the Strikers."
Known as Iraq's "elite of elite," the Strikers, whose existence wasn't known in the West until now, have been trained to a level far beyond the nation's ordinary special forces, al-Qurairy says.
The feared unit was commissioned by Saddam's son Uday and presented as a "birthday present" to his dad in April 2000.
But the 30 evil soldiers now roaming the world are said to be much more deadly.
Al-Qurairy said he gave the 30 new identities, complete with United Arab Emirates passports supplied by a corrupt UAE minister paid off by the Mukhabarat.
That means they can travel anywhere without creating suspicion.
In fact, Al-Qurairy believes the Twin Towers attacks have a direct link to the terror team he trained.
He notes that hijack leader Mohamed Atta twice met a notorious Mukhabaret special-operations expert in Prague, Czech Republic, and Ziad Jarrah, who piloted Flight 93, also had met with Mukhabaret men.
"When I saw the World Trade Center attack on television, I turned to a friend and said, ‘That's ours,'" he says.
The links are plausible, considering the intense training exercises al-Qurairy put his squad through.
In one of most disturbing, he fitted the Dirty 30 in diving gear and had them blow up a specially-constructed mock-up of a U.S. Navy destroyer.
The destruction of the fake ship, moored in central Iraq's Habbaniya Lake, was videotaped and then shown to Saddam as part of his birthday celebration.
Al-Qurairy, 41, says that, to this day, he has no idea where the Dirty 30 are or what they are planning in the way of murder and mayhem.
His elite force was trained at one of Saddam's main terrorist training camps, Salman Park, 45 minutes south of Baghdad.
There, he says, "trainees who fail are used as targets in live-ammunition exercises." ]
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