US-led forces captured a senior Baath Party official on U.S. most-wanted list, the Central Command spokesman reported Friday. Brig. Gen. Vincent Brooks said Samir Abd al-Aziz al-Najim was handed over the U.S. troops by Iraqi Kurds near the northern city of Mosul overnight.
Al-Najim was the Baath Party Regional Command Chairman for east Baghdad and was the four of clubs on the 55-card deck U.S. military officials handed out to American forces.
The capture of al-Najim marked the second straight day the Brooks opened his briefing by announcing the capture of a significant official. Thursday, U.S. forces grabbed Barzan Ibrahim Hasan, a half-brother of Saddam Hussein and a former head of Iraqi intelligence.
Al-Najim is a member of the Baath party's Regional Command, the top decision-body in the party. He was Iraqi Oil Minister until earlier this year and was Saddam's chief of staff for several years after the 1991 Gulf War.
Al-Najim is a Sunni Arab from Baghdad and a veteran Baath party member who took part, with Saddam, in the attempt to kill Prime Minister Abdel Karim Qassem in 1959. "The man who was captured is in fact one of the 55 top wanted. ... He is now in coalition control," Brooks said.
Meanwhile, thousands of people carrying Korans and waving banners demonstrated outside a Baghdad mosque on Friday demanding the United States leave Iraq. In the first Friday prayers since U.S. tanks drove to the heart of the Iraqi capital last week, Imam Ahmed al-Kubaisi said in his sermon the United States invaded Iraq to defend Israel and denied that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
His followers poured out of the mosque after prayers chanting anti-U.S. slogans and waving banners that read "No to America. No to Secular State. Yes to Islamic State." (Albawaba.com)
© 2003 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
