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| Iraq-Jordan |
| GW1: Saddam’s son ’tried to have pilots executed’ |
| 2004-05-02 |
| The battered faces of John Nichol and John Peters, the British airmen paraded on Iraqi television after their Tornado was shot down, were among the most enduring images of the first Gulf war. They were beaten and tortured during their interrogation but it has now emerged that they only narrowly escaped execution on the orders of Saddam Hussein’s son Qusay. The intervention of one of Saddam’s senior air force officers, Georges Hormis Sada - newly appointed as senior adviser for the American-backed New Iraqi Army - changed Qusay’s mind. Last week Mr Sada, an ethnic Assyrian and one of Iraq’s leading lay Christians, revealed how Qusay paid an unexpected visit to the air force’s emergency headquarters in a Baghdad bunker about a week after the air war started on January 17, 1991. "He was very angry," said the retired general. "He wanted a Kuwaiti pilot to be shot immediately. The others, including the Britons, were to be executed later or taken to bombing targets to be killed in Allied raids." At the time, six captured British aircrew were in Iraqi hands, as well as several Americans, two Italians and the Kuwaiti pilot, Lt Col Mohammed al-Mubarak. As an Anglophile who trained at an RAF base near Oxford in 1967, Mr Sada was determined to save their lives. Initially, he tried - without success - to persuade Qusay, then just 24, that killing the prisoners would breach the Geneva Convention. Then he switched tack. "I told him the prisoners were more valuable to Iraq alive than dead," he recalled. "I said that our men would also be taken prisoner, and that we could swap them." The next day Qusay returned, saying that he had decided that Iraq should "benefit" from the prisoners. Mr Sada’s account is backed by a former senior intelligence officer who was also in the air force headquarters that night. He heard Qusay asking about the interrogation of the captives. The dictator’s son was told that some were "co-operating", though not the Britons. "He said, ’OK, bring all the pilots outside and kill one of them in front of the others’," the officer said. "My leg started to shake as this would have been a terrible thing. The prisoners were pilots, and we were pilots. Someone asked him which one. He said, ’Kill the Kuwaiti traitor’." The intelligence officer said Mr Sada was credited with saving the pilots’ lives. Mr Nichol, who wrote about his experiences in his book Tornado Down, confirmed that they had been threatened with execution. Although they were initially held in the bunker, they were blindfolded and did not see the officers, including Mr Sada. By the time of Qusay’s visit, they had been moved to a military police prison on an airbase. "It is chilling to learn that someone like Qusay was intent on our death," Mr Nichol said. "It would not have surprised me if someone had carried out those executions in front of us. But nor does it surprise me that there were Iraqis who stood up for us. "The vast majority of Iraqi military and civilians were decent people, although there were clearly very evil elements too. I would love to meet Georges and shake his hand." Mr Sada, once one of Iraq’s top fighter pilots, already had a reputation for speaking his mind. He was forced to "retire" from the air force in 1986 for refusing to join the Ba’ath Party, only to be recalled in August 1990 after Saddam invaded Kuwait. His intervention saved the foreign aircrew, but ended his air force career for the second time. "I was detained at the end of January and then told I was being retired a few days later," he said. "It was made clear that this was because I had stood up to Qusay." |
| Posted by:Bulldog |
| #1 sounds like the best of the bad guys, huh? If you need to use Iraqi military at least it seems he's got brains, morals, and a conscience |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-05-02 10:35:07 AM |