BAGHDAD — Iraqi special forces were hunting in a western province for the most senior member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle who has been on the run since the 2003 invasion, security sources said Thursday. Troops were searching for Izzat Ibrahim Al-Douri, head of Saddam's now-outlawed Baath party, in Dour, near the former ruler's hometown of Tikrit, 150 km north of Baghdad. “We have strong information that he is in Dour since last night, now we have closed the area, announced a curfew and are searching house by house,” said one senior security officer involved in the operation. Douri was long believed to be living outside Iraq, and he was last seen in January in a video message encouraging Sunni protesters to resist Shiite Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki's government. Thousands of Sunnis have taken to the streets each week since December to protest against Maliki's government which they say has marginalized their minority sect and used tough anti-terrorism laws to unfairly target them. Meanwhile, in an interview aired on the English-language channel Al-Arabiya Thursday, Traiq Aziz, the foreign minister and later deputy prime minister who served under Saddam Hussein, claimed that the deceased leader of a bygone Iraq was “mentally ill” when he gave the order to invade Kuwait in 1990, the incident that sparked the First Gulf War. In the same interview, Aziz elaborated on accusations dealing with Germany and Spain selling chemical weapons to Hussein. Aziz surrendered to US troops on April 24, 2003, and has been in prison since, first in American and then Iraqi custody. In October 2010, he was sentenced to death by the Iraqi High Tribunal, a move that was widely denounced by everyone from the Vatican to Amnesty International. The outcry was so great that a month later President Jalal Talabani said he would not sign Aziz's execution order. — Agencies
