Now is the time to ramp up pressure against any Baathists attempting to rally after Saddam's capture.
Baathist Remnants Locked in Power Struggle
Amir Taheri, Arab News Staff
PARIS, 24 December 2003 — With Saddam Hussein under arrest, a power struggle has started within the remnants of his Baathist regime.
At least three rival groups are positioning themselves to fight for the control of what they call “popular resistance” (Al-Muqawemmah Al-Shaabaiyah).
The issue is attracting broader Arab interest with some pan-Arabists, Islamists and other groups focusing on the Iraqi insurgency as the vanguard of a wider struggle against the West led by the United States.
Inside Iraq, however, the power struggle within the insurgency is fought around more mundane issues. At stake is some $400 million in cash that Saddam and his entourage took away from the Iraqi Central Bank in Baghdad on April 8, hours before the US Marines arrived.
The fallen regime is also believed to have stashed away billions of dollars in foreign, mostly Swiss, French and Austrian banks. Until 2002, these were managed by Barzan Ibrahim Al-Tikriti, a half-brother of Saddam who is now believed to be held by the coalition forces.
The rival groups are also fighting over control of large quantities of weapons that the Saddamites looted from army barracks last spring. One of the last orders Saddam issued to his supporters on April 8 was to “seize and secure” as many weapons as they could. According to Iraqi sources, however, there are enough arms in secret locations to supply the insurgency for months if not years.
The three main groups involved in the power struggle are organized along tribal and clan lines covered by a veneer of ideology.
What is possibly the largest group is led by Col. Hani Abdul-Latif Al-Tilfah Al-Tikriti, a former head of the Secret Services Organization (SSO) and a cousin of Saddam. Hani and his younger brother Rafi are reportedly trying to maintain the cohesion of what is left of the Tikriti clan that provided Saddam with his principal support base.
Although both brothers feature in the “playing card” pack issued by the US-led coalition, there are indications that they are still able to operate with some freedom within the so-called “Sunni Triangle.” Their group includes Sabaawi Ibrahim Al-Tikriti, a half-brother of Saddam, and Lt. Gen. Tahir Dalil Harboush, a Soviet-trained intelligence expert.
The nominal head of the second group is Izzat Ibrahim Al-Duri, who was No. 2 in Saddam’s Revolutionary Command Council (RCC). This group has absorbed the remnants of the Baath party’s secret military organization, of which Duri was leader since 1986. Some members of the Fedayeen Saddam Organization, led by the deposed dictator’s eldest son, the late Uday Hussein, may have also rallied to the group.
According to Iraqi sources the faction built around Duri is, in fact, led by Maj. Gen. Seyfallah Hassan Taha Al-Rawi, a former chief of staff of the presidential guard. The Rawi clan has a history of uneasy relations with Saddam’s Tikriti clan.
In the 1970s one of the Al-Rawis, Gen. Abdul-Ghani, defected to Iran, provoking revenge killings ordered by Saddam against the clan. The blood feud ended in 1990 when Saddam promoted several Al-Rawi officers in a bid to weaken another rival clan, the Juburis.
Two cousins, Muhammad Zamam Abdul-Razzaq Al-Saadoun and Abdel-Baqi Abdelkarim Abdallah Al-Saadoun are believed to be the group’s major contact men with Sunni Arab tribes, especially in regions close to the Syrian border.
The third group, the civilian wing of the insurgency, presents itself as “the true Baath”. It is led by Muhsin Khudhair Al-Khafji who has just declared himself “President of the Iraqi branch of the pan-Arab Socialist Baath Party”.
A former security officer, Al-Khafji who spent some time studying in France, is trying to provoke clashes between Iraqi civilians and the occupation forces in Baghdad and its Sunni suburbs. Last week Al-Khafji succeeded in setting up website, possibly with the help of Baathist elements in Algeria. He also seems to have restored contacts with pro-Saddam Baath party branches in Yemen, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt and Morocco.
Al-Khafji has also maintained contacts with non-Iraqi, mostly Palestinian militant organizations that Saddam financed and supported over the years. His contact man with some of those groups is one Khamis Sarhan Al-Muhammad, once head of the Baath in Karbala. The group’s principal contact man with the tribes is believed to be Rashid Maan Kadhim who was last seen in Mosul in June.
In a statement published Monday, Al-Khafji claimed that Saddam’s capture had been the result of “betrayal by mercenaries”. The statement claimed that Saddam remained secretary-general of the pan-Arab Baath party which has branches in 11 Arab countries. (A rival branch of the Baath is in power in Syria.)
It is not clear who the “mercenaries” mentioned in the statement are. But some Iraqis see a hint that the Al-Rawi clan members are the target of the accusation. This is because it was information provided by one of the Al-Rawis, captured by the US, that ostensibly led to the discovery of Saddam’s hide-out.
The “true Baath” group is trying to patch up relations with Syria, mostly through contacts in Europe. It wants Damascus to agree to a reunification of the Baathist movement, and throw its support behind a campaign to end the occupation of Iraq.
Syria would love to regain control of the pan-Arab Baath movement, which it lost in the 1970s largely because of Saddam’s rising power in Baghdad. Syria’s President Bashar Assad still claims to be the supreme leader of all branches of the Baath in the Arab world, including Iraq. But it is not clear whether he would wish to risk a confrontation with the US by actually taking the remnants of the Iraqi Baath into his tent.
Differences among the three groups over strategy have become clearer in the past two weeks. The so-called “true Baath” favors a strategy of urban guerrilla, by small units, plus civil disobedience. It hopes that this would force the coalition, or the transitional government to be installed next June, to seek some accommodation with it.
For its part, the Tikriti clan appears intent on organizing sporadic attacks on the coalition and killing as many American soldiers as possible.
The Al-Rawi clan is apparently trying to rally tribal elements, especially in areas controlled by the Duwailim and the Al-Shamar confederations. It believes that, by playing the tribal card, it would gain a place at the negotiating table over the shape of new Iraq.
The situation is complicated by the presence of half a dozen other groups, some consisting almost entirely of non-Iraqi militants, who have their own agendas and pursue their own strategies.
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