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Chemical ali captured Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.boston.com/dailynews/233/wash/Iraq_s_Chemical_Ali_captured_t:.shtmlhttp://www.boston.com/dailynews/233/wash/Iraq_s_Chemical_Ali_captured_t:.shtml
Iraq's 'Chemical Ali' captured, terrorism remains a threat
By Robert Burns, Associated Press, 8/21/2003 14:40
WASHINGTON (AP) As the military announced the capture of another of Saddam Hussein's top henchmen, a general known as ''Chemical Ali,'' the head of U.S. forces in Iraq said terrorism is now the top threat there.
Gen. John Abizaid, in charge of U.S. Central Command, said terrorism was worst in Sunni Muslim areas in and north of Baghdad, where support for Saddam Hussein's regime was strongest.
''It's clearly a problem for us because of the sophistication of the attacks and because of their tactics to go after Iraqis,'' Abizaid said Thursday.
Abizaid said anti-American fighters from other countries continue to flow into Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that while those fighters may not be sponsored by governments, some of Iraq's neighbors aren't stopping the flow of fighters into Iraq.
''They clearly are not being stopped by the countries from which they're coming,'' Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld declined to comment on who might have been responsible for the deadly attack Tuesday at the Baghdad office of the United Nations.
The terrorist threat includes the al-Qaida-linked group Ansar al-Islam, which has regrouped inside Iraq and established itself in Baghdad, Abizaid said. U.S.-led forces destroyed an Ansar camp in northern Iraq during the early days of the war to oust Saddam.
The threat also comes from remnants of Saddam's regime and their supporters. The military announced that those ranks had been slimmed with the capture of Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Saddam who was No. 5 on the Pentagon's most-wanted list.
A senior defense official said al-Majid was captured on Sunday in the company of bodyguards, but not with other top Iraqis. Abizaid said he could not offer more details because ''it would give away things we do not want to give away.''
Al-Majid earned the nicknames ''Chemical Ali'' and ''butcher of the Kurds'' for leading poisonous gas attacks.
There are indications al-Majid had been connected to anti-American activity in Iraq, Abizaid told reporters at a Pentagon news conference.
''Chemical Ali has been active in some ways in influencing people around him in a regional way,'' Abizaid said.
For a while last spring, U.S. leaders thought al-Majid was dead, killed in an airstrike in April on a house in southern Iraq.
A body believed to be his was found at the site, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, ''We believe that the reign of terror of Chemical Ali has come to an end.''
But Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in June that interrogations of Iraqi prisoners indicated that he might still be alive.
Saddam's paternal first cousin and a former army sergeant, al-Majid was considered one of the most powerful men in Saddam's inner circle.
Before the 1968 revolution, al-Majid was a simple warrant officer responsible for delivering messages by motorcycle.
But he had been closely linked with Saddam since the 1960s when they were members of the then-underground Baath Party which ruled Iraq until the U.S.-led coalition invaded.
Al-Majid also was part of the ''Jihaz Haneen,'' or ''apparatus of yearning,'' the secret intelligence organization Saddam formed inside the Baath to eliminate rivals and traitors and carry out assassinations. It played a key role in the July 17, 1968, coup that overthrew President Abdel-Salim Arif and thrust Saddam securely on the path to power.
When Saddam took over from President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr in July 1979, he promoted al-Majid to full general even though his military skills were negligible.
By the mid-1980s, with the war against Iran raging, al-Majid was coordinating Iraq's five intelligence and security services and joined the ''Makhtab al-Khas,'' or Special Bureau, through which Saddam and his tight-knit inner circle ran the intelligence apparatus.
Saddam appointed him to the 17-member Regional Command of the Baath Party in 1984 and he sat on that decision-making body until Saddam's Iraqi government was overthrown.
He earned the soubriquet ''butcher of the Kurds'' for his savage campaign against the autonomy-seeking Kurds in northeast Iraq during the 1980s, in which some 4,000 villages were razed and hundreds of thousands of Kurds forcibly relocated away from their mountain homeland to Iraq's southern deserts.
His scorched earth campaign climaxed in 1988 when, in the dying days of the war with Iran, he used chemical weapons against the guerrillas and their supporters.
In the worst atrocity, some 5,000 men, women and children were slaughtered in the border town of Halabja in March 1988 when it was bombed and shelled with cyanide gas.
After Saddam invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he named al-Majid governor of the conquered emirate for the first three months of the seven-month occupation. By all accounts, he supervised the systematic looting and suppression of the emirate before he returned to Baghdad in November 1990.
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