U.S. Strikes 'Target of Opportunity' Near Baghdad (Fox News, March 19, 2003)

U.S. forces launched a military strike near Baghdad targeting Iraqi leaders, a senior government official said.

The official, speaking Wednesday night, said U.S. intelligence had detected the possibility Iraqi leaders were in the area, which he described as a "target of opportunity."

The official declined to identify the leaders who were targeted or to say whether the attack was successful.

It sounds like this was a rather sudden decision to attack a unique target, rather than the beginning of a large-scale bombardment.

UPDATE:
It's now being referred to as a decapitation strike. It's at least conceivable that Saddam is dead already.

MORE:
TARGET--SADDAM:
Crack troops pursue Saddam (Tim Reid, March 20, 2003, Times of London)

ELITE teams of US Delta Force commandos who have been inside Iraq for weeks are preparing to descend on Baghdad with the objective of capturing or killing President Saddam Hussein, US defence officials said yesterday.

Small, highly mobile units picked from the US Army's most revered and secretive fighting force have been assigned a key mission of the war: to hunt down Saddam, his two sons and at least a "dirty dozen" of Iraq's top military and civilian leaders.

The Delta Force, the US equivalent of the British SAS, has 306 men. It has been training for several years with the CIA for the specific mission of hunting down the Iraqi leader, officials said.

Last night they were being mobilised to infiltrate Baghdad and Saddam's home city of Tikrit to begin the hunt.

As plans were revealed to drop the commandos from Black Hawk helicopters to sites outside Baghdad, it became clear that, if US forces locate Saddam, the likelihood is that they will kill him and his closest henchmen rather than capture them.

"The expectation is to kill him within days (of the start of the war)," a Pentagon official said."It's what Delta has been training 24/7 to do."

Assassinating a foreign leader runs counter to a 1976 order signed by President Ford. But White House officials cite international law, which states that, once a war begins, there are no limits on military actions against enemy leaders. Saddam, as Commander-in-Chief of Iraq's Armed Forces, is a legitimate target, they say.

CIA operatives have been photographing and spying on Saddam's numerous presidential compounds, while US spy satellites take daily pictures of the Iraqi leader's suspected hideouts. Some of the most detailed information on his possible whereabouts, Pentagon officials said, has come from Jordanian intelligence.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 19, 2003 10:56 PM