In 1992 opponents of the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein united in forming the Iraqi National Congress

In 1992, opponents of the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, united in forming the Iraqi National Congress, which was supported by the US, but this has not prevented ferocious rivalries. Iraqi forces were driven out of Iraq’s three Kurdish provinces in 1991 These then became the main base of the Iraqi opposition. In one and a half hours he reveals too many secrets about the bombing of Baghdad, the rivalries of the opposition and their reliance on US support. “He is naive to think this will help him,” said one Iraqi familiar with opposition politics “I don’t think he will live very long.”.

He says, not unreasonably, that “Saddam Hussein has ruined the whole country, so how can anybody say we are terrorists?”Abu Amneh made the videotape in order to survive. It is a plea to the leadership of his own party and a denunciation of Mr Nuri, whom he accuses of betraying him. Few bomb-makers, outside a courtroom, can have been so forthcoming about their work. He may, however, have done little to improve his chances of survival. He rejects objections, apparently from the US, that he was “too much a terrorist”. The media is tightly controlled and does not normally mention bombings for fear they would show the government losing control.

But there are exceptions: last year Babel, a daily belonging to Uday, son of President Saddam, mentioned 10 bomb explosions in Baghdad, as part of a campaign to discredit his uncle Watban Ibrahim al-Tikriti, then interior minister.Abu Amneh wanted to explode bombs when they were most likely to damage the Iraqi government. He hoped to step up attacks in October in the days leading up to a referendum designed to endorse Saddam Hussein as Iraqi president. Leaflets need two people: one to take photographs and the other to distribute the leaflets.” In either case it was dangerous: anybody caught would be tortured and killed by Iraqi security forces.It is not known how many ordinary Iraqis died in the explosions. An aim of the bombs in Baghdad and Mosul, say other members of the Iraqi opposition, was to show that “those who planted them had a long reach inside Iraq and were worthy of financial support from outside”.Operations in Baghdad were not confined to bombs. Abu Amneh also had his men distribute leaflets and take pictures of themselves doing so to prove they had not thrown them away He says: “These leaflets cost us more than a bomb A bomb somebody just takes it and plants it. At one moment the cameraman shoots through the window, showing a busy city street and in the background the blue smudge of the Kurdish mountains.He drew his explosives from an arms dump farther north, in the Kurdish stronghold of Shaqlawa.

He says Mr Nuri used to say to him: “I was the one who released you from prison, so you have to do everything I say.” Abu Amneh was told to move with his men to Sulaymaniyah, two hours’ drive from Salahudin, from where “we caused several explosions in Baghdad”.Although Abu Amneh complains about money, the video shows him operating from offices that are well-appointed if not plush. Abu Amneh says that he was in prison in Salahudin, a former holiday resort in the Kurdish mountains, because he distributed a leaflet criticising an opposition party.Other Iraqis say he was jailed because he tried to kill a political rival. He is evidently frightened and embittered; he says he fears his superior officers and Iraqi intelligence will try to kill him and says that he does not even have enough arms to defend himself and the 12 men who form his inner group in Sulaymaniyah.Nevertheless, sitting at his desk, with his face to the camera, occasionally holding up old orders he has received, Abu Amneh gives a coherent account of attacks he has initiated over the past year.Other opposition members say that he is a Shia Muslim from the Khadamiya district of Baghdad who arrived in Kurdistan after the uprising against President Saddam in the wake of the Gulf war.He explains how he joined the National Accord, headed by Iyad Mohammed Alawi, after Mr Nuri, one of its senior members, got him out of jail with American help. If this sort of casual violence continues in Iraq, then the country will have no political future even after Saddam It will become like Afghanistan”. He says there is no way a few bombs in Baghdad will help bring down the government.The bomb-maker does not come well out of his film. He apparently considers planting bombs to be very much a business, often giving the cost of each operation – $600 (pounds 400) to get a bomb to Baghdad, for example – and complains about inadequate pay. Mosul is a large city on the upper Tigris.What makes the disclosures about the bombings politically sensitive is that on 13 March Mr Clinton assembled 28 world leaders at Sharm el- Sheikh, in Egypt, to denounce terrorism in the aftermath of the four bombs in Israel which killed 62 people.