bSourcesbat vhe Rentcgonbandbwitjin vhe Bushbadm+nis6ration garlker voldbFox News that at least four "high-level" targets were killed inside the large villa that belonged to one of Saddam's cousins. A senior administration official said the U.S. was "90 to 95 percent certain" that Saddam's sons were among the dead.
Four bodies were transported out of the house. Three were adults -- Odai, Qusai and presumably a bodyguard. The fourth body was of a teenager -- possibly Qusai's son.
Sanchez would not say how a positive identification of Odai's and Qusai's bodies had been made, and he said a positive identification of the other two bodies had not yet been completed.
The U.S. government has DNA samples on Saddam's sons, but testing takes time. U.S. officials said earlier that they wanted to talk to people who knew Odai and Qusai in order to identify the bodies and look for distinguishing marks.
Sanchez said the bodies were in good enough condition to be identified by appearance. An Iraqi informant came to the U.S. military Monday night and gave information as to where Odai and Qusai may be, Sanchez said. Fox News has learned that Abid Hamid Mahmud Al-Tikriti Saddam's top aide who surrendered June 17 and was the "Ace of Diamonds" in the U.S. military's deck of cards representing Iraq's most wanted, provided some of the information leading U.S. officials to confirm that two of the bodies were Odai and Qusai.
The house in Mosul was burned to the ground after a loud, four-hour gunbattle between the people inside and soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division.
Gen. Frank Helmick, the U.S. general in charge of the raid, told Fox News that the occupants of the house fired at U.S. soldiers, and the Americans called in helicopters and an unmanned vehicle for assistance before storming it.
"We received direct fire from the building multiple times. We used a scaled escalation of force," Helmick told Fox News' Steve Centanni at the scene of the firefight. Helmick said U.S. forces couldn't get into the building because of the small-arms fire they were facing, so "we had to use bigger caliber weapons to render the building safe" -- including missiles, helicopters and grenade launchers.
Members of Charlie Company, 3rd Battalion of the 101st Airborne Division wouldn't say at the time whom they had brought out of the house, but all the troops "have smiles on their faces and they seemed to have carried out this mission successfully,"
Centanni reported. In Washington, Paul Bremer the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, called the raid an example of the U.S. military's "astounding professionalism."
While he didn't comment on how the deaths of Saddam's sons would affect security in Iraq, he said: "It certainly is good news for the Iraqi people."
In Washington, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld briefed President Bush personally on the assault.
"The president is aware of the reports and is aware of the military operation that took place today," White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
Intelligence sources said the U.S. task force -- Task Force 20-- was in charge of the raid. It's basically a "hit team" that follows up only on solid intelligence.
Task Force 20 -- including Army delta forces and CIA operatives -- was originally given the responsibility of finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but later it was ordered to refocus its efforts on hunting down Saddam and his inner circle.
Before the official announcement that Odai and Qusai were dead, everyone was anxiously awaiting the news. "There's no question they were diabolical forces in Iraq," said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. She said the deaths of Qusai and Odai would show the world that the U.S. work in Iraq is far from over. "I think it goes to show how important our role is in Iraq and continues to be that we have to remove these forces of fear," Snowe said. "Iraq was one of the most atrocious regimes ... I think that we all recognized that as long as Saddam Hussein continues to exist, he poses a threat to the Iraqi people -- they will never be able to breathe easy if they know he's there."
Odai, Saddam's eldest son, was commander of Iraq's Saddam Fedayeen and chaired the Iraqi Olympic Committee. He was No. 3 on the coalition's most-wanted list, after his father and Qusai. Iraqi Olympic athletes say they were routinely jailed and tortured for losing competitions or disobeying Odai's orders.
During Saddam's reign, Qusai was in charge of all the military, intelligence and security services in Iraq, including the elite Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization, which protected the regime and its weapons.
From 1988 to 1999, Qusai often ordered mass executions of several thousand prisoners, and suppressed revolts among the al-Dulaym tribe in 1995 and among Shiites in 1997. Both Odai and Qusai were active in the management of the general office of the military intelligence service, the Istikhbarat, and the internal intelligence service, the Mukhabarat.
Qusai was considered the more likely of the two to succeed their father
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