Facing continued skepticism from Iraqis that Uday and Qusay Hussein are dead, the U.S. allowed journalists to videotape what they say are their bodies laid out in a makeshift military mortuary at Baghdad International Airport.
The military subsequently released video that shows the corpses and media personnel viewing them. Arabic television networks Al-Jazeera and Abu Dhabi Television broadcast the footage.
While the faces have been cleaned up, the bodies in the video appear badly bruised, bloody and riddled with bullet wounds.
Military morticians partially reconstructed the disfigured faces to make them look like they had when the men were alive. Specifically, they removed a large gash from Uday’s face and trimmed his beard. Qusay’s beard was shaved off, leaving only his moustache.
“They did look like the brothers,” reported Reuters correspondent Andrew Marshall, who was one of 15 journalists allowed to view the bodies.
According to Marshall, a hole in the top of Uday’s skull was left untouched and U.S. officials said they had no evidence to support speculation he had shot himself to avoid capture. Uday is believed to have died from a head injury caused by a blunt object, according to the Associated Press.
The AP reports officials also doubt two bullet wounds to Qusay’s head – in and just behind his right ear – were self-inflicted.
The release of the grisly video follows yesterday’s release of even more gruesome photographs purportedly of the men’s faces and upper torsos taken before any reconstructive efforts.
The photographed images, along with pictures of the men when they were alive and X-rays of a leg injury Uday sustained in a 1996 assassination attempt, were similarly broadcast on American and Arab television but largely failed to sway the Iraqi public that the brothers were dead.
U.S. military and Bush administration officials say the men died in a massive firefight Tuesday at the home of a cousin of Saddam in the northern Iraqi city Mosul.
Hundreds of soldiers with the Army’s 101st Airborne Division swarmed the villa where the sons were found hiding, following a tip from an unidentified Iraqi informant.
Military officials think the brothers and a third man, likely a bodyguard, were killed by TOW missiles fired into the building.
The fourth person killed is believed to be Qusay’s teenage son Mustafa.
 Smoke billows out from the Mosul villa where Uday and Qusay were hiding after soldiers of the Army’s 101st Airborne Division launch a TOW missile. |
U.S. military officials and senior administration officials reported Wednesday that dental records, X-rays and testimony from former regime officials identified two of the four bodies retrieved from the rubble of the building as Saddam’s sons.
But many Iraqi citizens demanded proof from the United States.
“The disbelief runs very deep, and it goes to the level almost of paranoia,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told reporters at a press conference yesterday. “One of the great effects of [Tuesday] for Iraqis is to demonstrate our seriousness.”
Pentagon officials hope the photographs and the videotape will deter Saddam loyalists from further attacks against coalition troops in Iraq.
“Now, more than ever, the Iraqis can know that the former regime is gone and is not coming back,” President George W. Bush commented during an address in Philadelphia shortly after the photographs went public.
The United States offered a $15 million reward for information leading to the capture or death of each of Saddam’s sons.
At a news conference yesterday, Paul Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, said the State Department will decide whether the Iraqi informant who tipped off coalition officials will receive the $30 million in award money.
“He is safe,” Bremer further offered.
Uday and Qusay are No. 2 and 3 in the U.S. Central Command’s deck of cards depicting the “most wanted” former Iraqi leaders.
In the former Iraqi regime, Uday was the commander of the Saddam Fedayeen paramilitary unit that fought against coalition troops reportedly using Iraqi citizens as human shields. Uday also headed Iraq’s Olympic committee, and human-rights organizations say he brutally tortured athletes over their poor performance.
Saddam’s younger son, Qusay, supervised the country’s feared Special Security Organization and held a top Baath Party post in the former regime.
U.S. officials reported Qusay took approximately a billion dollars in cash from the central bank in Baghdad just before the Iraq war, but that most had been recovered.
Coalition troops found some $600 million in U.S. currency in boxes near Baghdad palace complexes.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told reporters he had made the decision to release the photographs. He said it was not a “snap decision” and defended it as “the right decision.”
“The Baathists and the people of that country are frightened of Saddam Hussein and his regime. And to get closure that those two particularly vicious members of that regime are in fact dead is, I believe, something that will contribute to more Iraqi people willing to come forward with information, less enthusiasm and heart on the part of some of the lower level Baathists to continue the fight and a greater conviction of what is, in fact, the truth – That regime is gone; It’s not coming back. And if it can save American lives, I’m happy to make the decision I made.”
When asked if it was hypocritical of the U.S., which condemned Al-Jazeera for broadcasting footage of dead American POWs in the early days of the war, to distribute the images, Rumsfeld stressed that, unlike the Al-Jazeera action, the release of the photos was “fully consistent with the Geneva Conventions” of war.
As to whether U.S. officials fear backlash in the Arab world over the photographs, Bremer said he “would not be surprised to see an uptick in attacks on American forces,” but that in the long run the move will help their cause in Iraq.
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