- BELGRADE (Reuters) -- If
America wants to remove President Saddam Hussein it will have to go in
and get him, according to a Yugoslav construction engineer who helped build
Iraq's deep underground bomb shelters.
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- "Conventional weapons can hardly reach him and I
don't believe the U.S. can get rid of him that way," he told Reuters
in an interview this week.
-
- The engineer was one of the lead team from the former
Balkan federation contracted to build the Iraqi defence infrastructure
in the 1980s. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
-
- "Saddam's shelters can resist a direct hit by a
TNT bomb of 2,000 kilograms, or a 20 kiloton explosion as close as a kilometre
away," he said.
-
- A year after 3,000 people were killed in the September
11 attacks on America, President George W. Bush is seeking support from
allies to remove the Iraqi leader and the alleged threat posed by a mass-destruction
arsenal he is said to possess.
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- The grey-haired engineer, who has visited almost all
the defence construction sites in Iraq, said it would be extremely hard
to kill Saddam by bombing alone.
-
- Saddam's shelters are buried under a minimum of 30 metres
of stone and very difficult to destroy, the engineer said.
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- They are a copy of those built for Yugoslavia's late
Marshal Tito, the communist dictator who ruled through the Cold War until
his death in 1980 and cultivated close ties with Iraq, Iran, India, Egypt,
Libya, Cuba, North Korea, China and others.
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- "So far, they have successfully passed three tests,"
the engineer said of the shelters, referring to the 1991 Gulf War against
Iraq, the 1992-95 Bosnian war and NATO's 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia in
1999.
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- The engineer said his personal contacts with Saddam secured
jobs for firms from the old Yugoslav federation of six republics to build
military installations in Iraq in the 1980s.
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- They built the entire system of underground command posts,
air-raid and tank shelters as well as underground hospitals across Iraq,
he said.
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- The shelters are like those constructed for Tito in several
locations around the former Yugoslavia, equipped with a mix of Russian
and American technology. Their design is assumed by now to be familiar
to the U.S. military, which has peacekeeping forces in both Bosnia and
Kosovo.
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- Some can accommodate up to 500 people and provide enough
air, food, water, fuel for a month, the engineer said.
-
- "But if all exits are closed, they can survive for
only 96 hours."
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- http://www.serbianna.com/news/09_10/01.shtml
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