WHO CAUGHT SADDAM

Sidney Morning Herald: 'We Got Him' - Kurds Say They Caught Saddam

Washington's claims that brilliant US intelligence work led to the capture of Saddam Hussein are being challenged by reports sourced in Iraq's Kurdish media claiming that its militia set the circumstances in which the US merely had to go to a farm identified by the Kurds to bag the fugitive former president.

Sidney Morning Herald: Kurds Captured, Drugged Saddam Before US Got Him

Saddam Hussein was found by US troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him, a British newspaper reported yesterday.

Saddam came into the hands of the Kurdish Patriotic Front after being betrayed to the group by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, which quoted an unnamed senior British military intelligence officer.

The newspaper said the full story of events leading up to the ousted Iraqi president's capture on December 13 near his hometown of Tikrit in northern Iraq, "exposes the version peddled by American spin doctors as incomplete".

Correspondences: Bush Lies Again - This Time About Saddam's Capture

Well, the cat is out of the bag so to speak. Saddam Hussein was captured by Kurds, not US forces. Here is the story as best I can determine by looking through a number of articles (see full list at end of this post).

Hussein was betrayed to the Kurds by a member of the al-Jabour tribe because Hussein's son Uday had raped a daughter of the tribe. Saddam had previously paid 7 million pounds in blood money to the tribe with the warning that he would wipe out the entire tribe if it ever came out. (Sify report)

He was then handed over to the Kurdish Patriotic Front who negotiated a deal with US forces for political power before drugging and abandoning Hussein for pickup. Ultimately he ended up in the hands of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by Jalal Talabani (Aljazeera)