An Australian newspaper claims it has been handed a two-day-old tape recording of Saddam Hussein calling on Iraqis to launch a ”secret war” against US and British forces in the country.
The Sydney Morning Herald said the tape was handed to its correspondent in Baghdad on Monday and that it would pass on the recording to US authorities today.
In a 15-minute monologue, a weary-sounding voice, interspersed with coughs, calls on Iraq’s people to come together in a revolt against the occupying forces.
”I don’t want to talk in details about the occupation and why and how, and I am going to focus instead on how to face these invaders and kick them out from Iraq,” it says.
”… It sounds as if we have to go back to the secret style of struggle that we began our life with. Through this secret means, I am talking to you from inside great Iraq and I say to you, the main task for you, Arab and Kurd, Shia and Sunni, Muslim and Christian and the whole Iraqi people of all religions, your main task is to kick the enemy out from our country.”
The newspaper says it played the recording to more than a dozen Iraqis, including a judge, a law professor and a former acquaintance of Saddam in exile, and the ”overwhelming opinion” was that the voice and rhetoric were very similar, or identical, to those of Saddam. An Australian linguistics expert also said the tape was genuine, according to the report in today’s Herald.
”Certainly it’s him,” the paper quotes an unnamed judge from a Baghdad criminal court as saying. ”I am 100% certain. I deal with physical evidence all the time.”
Talib al Shar’aa, a law professor at Baghdad University, told the Herald: ”We are not experts. We have known many many similar voices to Saddam Hussein to appear in the past few years, and similar faces as well.
”But this speech sounded very realistically like Saddam Hussein. This is the first time he has admitted the reality of the occupation. He focuses on the word occupation, and he admits to being in hiding and working by secret means. And it sounds to me like this speech is new because he mentioned the Iraqi people celebrating his birthday on April 28, 2003.”
The Herald report said that two men who had the tape approached its staff after spotting their clearly marked press car near the Palestine hotel on Monday.
One of the men, who seemed nervous, asked for directions to the offices of Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya TV while his companion waited behind the wheel of a taxi.
”When he was directed to the main television base in the Palestine hotel — guarded by a security cordon of United States troops — he appeared to lose heart and returned to the car,” the newspaper said.
”The Herald’s interpreter, Kifah Hameed Mehdi, went after him to ask why he wanted to talk to the media and the driver of the car handed over a tape, saying it was a copy of Saddam’s most recent speech, made that morning.”
The tape will fuel speculation over the fate of the deposed Iraqi leader. There have been several reported sightings and television broadcasts of him since the US targeted his palaces with ”decapitation” strikes at the start of the war, but none have been accepted as proof that he is alive. A letter, supposedly written by Saddam and dated April 28, was published a week ago in the London-based Al-Quds newspaper.
Meanwhile, the US military said a regional commander of Saddam Hussein’s Baath party on the list of most-wanted Iraqis had been taken into custody.
US central command said in a statement that Ghazi Hamud al-Adib, number 32 on its list, ”is now in coalition custody”, but gave no details of where he was taken, if he was caught, or if turned himself in. The number of people on the list known to have surrendered or been captured now stands at 19. – Guardian Unlimited Â