Baghdad, March 12, 2011:
According to a bulletin from the Baghdad Youth Movement, a squad of revolutionaries and Republican Guards captured Saddam Hussein this morning. The Iraqi president was discovered in a crude bunker at a farm outside his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq.
“He was caught like a rat in the bottom of a hole,” the Youth Movement declared.
Saddam has been fugitive since fleeing his Baghdad palace on February 21, and the report today said that he is in ravaged health but is being treated by doctors and dentists. He will be brought to Abu Ghraib prison later today, and tried for human rights violations next year, a Youth Movement spokesman told reporters gathered at the movement’s headquarters at the National Museum of Iraq, where a human chain of volunteers continued to defend ancient treasures from looters.
Inspired by the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, the youth movement surged through the streets of Baghdad in mid-February and overwhelmed the dictator, whose party has been in power for over 40 years. Saddam’s two sons were killed last week in a showdown outside Mosul, but Saddam slipped through the revolutionaries’ grasp.
The White House welcomed the news. “The world rejoices when a dictator falls,” President Feingold said in a short statement. Secretary of State Stephen Walt was traveling in Gaza but his spokesperson, Rebecca Vilkomerson, said the youth movement’s victory represents a vindication of the policies that Feingold supported when he first ran 7 years ago and again when he was reelected, support for civil society and human rights across the Middle East.
