AP:

Two of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s daughters took refuge in Jordan on Thursday[...]

Raghad and Rana Saddam Hussein, whose father had their husbands killed in 1996, arrived in Amman with their nine children Thursday, Jordanian Information Minister Nabil al-Sharif told The Associated Press. They were allowed sanctuary in Jordan on humanitarian grounds on King Abdullah II's orders.

Al-Sharif did not say whether they had come through a third country. The daughters had reportedly been living in poor circumstances in neighboring Iraq.

Reuters

Colin Powell has approved a $30 million (18.6 million pounds) reward to the person who led U.S. forces to Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay.

Dutch Government

The Dutch SFIR (Stabilisation Force Iraq) troops took command of peacekeeping operations in Al-Muthanna province on 31 July. They have relieved the American forces there.

Dossier

From the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

A sniper killed a US soldier and four more were wounded in a grenade attack as American troops stepped up raids around Iraq on Thursday in a bid to catch toppled dictator Saddam Hussein.
...
A US soldier was killed and another two wounded late on Wednesday in an ambush on a small American base in north-east Iraq, a military spokesperson said.
The soldiers were hit by small arms fire on Wednesday evening, and returned fire, wounding four Iraqis, at least three of them attackers, the military said.
...
At least four soldiers were wounded in a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) attack on Thursday on the main highway near Baghdad international airport, an AFP photographer witnessed.

PBS:

The national security adviser discusses the inclusion of controversial information in the State of the Union address, North Korea and the refusal to declassify parts of the 9.11 report.

CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The two top U.S. officials in charge of the search for Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction will tell Congress on Thursday that so far the United States has not discovered a "smoking gun" in Iraq, but it has growing evidence Iraq had an "active WMD program," sources tell CNN.

The officials are not expected to make any startling disclosures but instead describe a more thorough understanding of how Iraqi's WMD program worked, what officials were in charge and how decisions were made, sources said. A government source said the progress in discovering the banned weapons is still described in "inches," rather than a breakthrough leap ahead.

David Kay, the top CIA consultant in Iraq on WMD, and Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton, the head of the Pentagon's Iraq Survey Group, will testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a closed, classified session.

AP:

ALONG THE IRAQ-SYRIA BORDER - The first train from Syria through northern Iraq to Mosul was a few minutes late, but after more than a year without service, the residents of Rabiyah weren't complaining.

The train, consisting of dozens of freight and tanker cars, one sleeper and several passenger cars, resumed service only half full Wednesday. But it was sold out with goodwill.

"It brings us to the future, this train," said Mohsin al Naif, a leader of the Schamar tribe that has strong ties with Rabiyah, an Iraqi border town of 25,000 residents, and in Syria as well. "We are bound by blood on both sides of the border."

That's the story - not his capture, just that it's rumoured that he might have been. From The Australian :

The Pentagon said today it could not confirm or deny rumours that Saddam Hussein had already been captured by US forces.

Whispers of the Iraqi leader's capture swept US markets just after 11am local time (2am AEST) causing an afternoon spike in stocks.

But the Pentagon said although US forces were closing in on Saddam, it had no news of his capture.

"The short answer is I have no information on that," said Lieutenant General Norton Schwartz of the Pentagon's Joint Operations Staff.

Responding to further inquiries, acting Pentagon spokesman Larry Di Rita said US authorities were not being evasive about the rumours.

"There's just nothing more to report. We're simply trying to state what we have at the moment," Mr Di Rita said.

IOL:

A hitherto unknown group of Iraqi Muslim militants warned in a videotape aired on an Arab channel on Monday they would fight a "holy war" against US President George Bush and his administration.

"Bush, Rumsfeld and decision makers in the 'black house' and in the Pentagon... we will shake the ground under your feet and we will send a fire upon you which only God can prevent," a masked man said on a tape aired on Dubai-based Al Arabiya.

The man called his group the "Salafist Jihad Group".

Salafist is a general term that fundamentalist movements in mainstream Sunni Islam use to describe a desire to live according to a strict interpretation of early Islam.

ABC:

A new audio tape purportedly from former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein vows to defeat the United States to avenge the deaths of his two sons.

"I mourn to you the deaths of Uday and Qusay and those who struggled with them ... America will be defeated," said the voice on the tape aired by Dubai-based Al Arabiya television.

"They ... died martyrs in the name of jihad [holy war]," the voice said.

The speech was rambling, breaking off in mid-sentence on occasions but a Reuters correspondent familiar with Saddam's voice said it sounded like the deposed dictator. The CIA said it was trying to determine whether the tape was genuine.

Updating this post comes a story from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

US soldiers captured four loyalists of Saddam Hussein's Baath party in a pre-dawn raid in Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, north of Baghdad.

A military spokesman in the capital backed down from a claim that one of the men was a bodyguard for Saddam, but said the quartet were all under investigation to assess their connections to the fugitive strongman.

The suspected regime loyalists included a possible brigadier general, Major Troy Smith of the Fourth Infantry Division (4ID) said, which is scouring Saddam's old hunting grounds for holdouts of the defeated Baath party.

AP Reports:

TIKRIT, Iraq - U.S. soldiers captured one of Saddam Hussein's bodyguards during a raid early Tuesday in the former dictator's hometown, where hours earlier troops found enough anti-tank mines and gunpowder for a month of attacks on American forces.

The military reported a U.S. soldier killed in an attack in the capital Monday, while guerrillas blew up a major civilian bridge in an attempt to disrupt the U.S. occupation.

During the pre-dawn Tikrit raid, soldiers fired two shots before storming a house to capture the bodyguard. He was escorted from the home minutes later, blood seeping through his hat.

"We got our prime target," said Lt. Col. Steve Russell. "This man was a close associate of Saddam Hussein."

He declined to identify the man, saying only that he was "one of Saddam's lifelong bodyguards."

An Associated Press reporter with the troops said at least two other suspected associates of Saddam were also taken into custody Tuesday.

The Army had targeted three men in the raids and captured all of them, Russell said.

The unidentified bodyguard had close ties to Watban Ibrahim Hasan, Saddam's half brother and presidential adviser, Russell said, but did not elaborate.

Watban had been number 37 on the U.S. most wanted Iraqis list and was arrested on April 13 in the northern city of Mosul as he tried to flee through Syria, U.S. officials said at the time.

[Fox News]

.S. soldiers discovered a huge cache of weapons in Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit on Monday -- enough weapons for a month of attacks on U.S. troops, the military said. The soldiers uncovered 40 anti-tank mines, dozens of mortar rounds and hundreds of pounds of gunpowder buried in the city.

Full story...

From The Australian :

Iraq's Governing Council met today to examine issues including who will preside over the 25-member body and the appointment of ministers, council members said.

The meeting, which opened at 10:25 am (1525 AEST), was chaired by acting council head Mohammed Bahr al-Ulum.

It is the first in a series of key meetings to be held this week to iron out the procedural rules for its presidency, to name key ministers and establish a working party to prepare the ground for a new constitution, a council source said.

From The Australian :

Two US soldiers were wounded when a grenade was hurled at their convoy from a bridge on a main road in central Baghdad, a military officer said on the scene.

"Someone threw a device from off of the bridge. It exploded and hit one of our trucks. We have two casualties. They are now at an aid facility," said Staff Sergeant Maximilian Sloat.

The attack occurred at 11:45 am (0745 GMT) as their Humvee was carrying supplies, Sloat said.

UPDATE: The BBC is reporting that

"Two US soldiers are believed to have been killed in a fresh attack on American troops in Iraq."

From The Australian :

A Japanese reporter was manhandled and briefly detained by US troops in Baghdad after filming their weekend raid on a house in search for ousted president Saddam Hussein, Japanese press reports said.

Kazutaka Sato, 47, was held in an arm-lock, thrown to the ground and kicked by several US soldiers Sunday when he was filming the bodies of Iraqis being removed from a car which was shot up in the raid, the reports said.

...

Kyodo [Newsagency- AEB] said US troops had tried to bar Sato[Independent Japanese News Service - AEB] from filming the raid. The soldiers did not explain why photography was forbidden in the area, it added.

"US troops might have tried to conceal the deaths of civilians," he was quoted by the Asahi [newspaper-AEB]as saying. "Violence against journalists means the obstruction of news gathering activities and supresses speech."

UPDATE : The BBC has already positively identified the 5 dead as "innocent civilians" on BBC World, though discards the word "innocent" on its website.

The death of five civilians here at the hands of an elite task force hunting members of the former regime has prompted condemnation from many Iraqis at what they call heavy-handed and uncaring tactics.
...
I went to the scene in the wealthy Mansur district after the task force had left, saying nothing except that they were fired on first.
Local people told a different story.

Something from the original story in The Australian that might explain this:

The owner of the home was Sheikh Amir Rabiha Mohammed al-Shammar, a relative of Saddam Hussein. Shammar said he believed five Iraqis were killed in an exchange of fire, but he was not there when US troops raided the home, which was targeted during the air war on Iraq.

From Yahoo / AFP:

The top US military official, General Richard Myers, reported a spike in information about Saddam Hussein loyalists waging attacks on US soldiers since the dictator's sons were killed.

"What I found today ... there's been a big spike in Iraqis coming forward, about weapons caches and where people are," said Myers, who arrived from Kuwait and toured Tikrit, the hometown of Saddam, north of Baghdad.

"It probably is having some impact," he said, in reference to the killing last Tuesday of Saddam's powerful sons Uday and Qusay in a gunbattle with US troops in the northern city of Mosul.

The Christian Science Monitor is good enough to include us on their editorial preview list. Tomorrow they will publish this story which suggests that the noose is tightening, and that the "of Saddam may be around the corner."

We can only hope. Read the story here.

A bodyguard Tells All. Maybe. Via The Australian :

Uday Hussein's personal bodyguard broke a three-month silence yesterday to give the first authoritative account of how Saddam Hussein and his sons spent the war.

In an exclusive interview, the bodyguard claimed that far from fleeing Baghdad, the three men held out in the capital for at least a week after its fall.

He said they evaded repeated US attempts to assassinate or capture them, and even appeared in public under the noses of American troops.

The man, whose father served as a bodyguard to Saddam Hussein, was one of Uday's tiny coterie of hand-picked personal bodyguards from 1997 until the moment his former boss finally left Baghdad to organise guerilla resistance further north.

From the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

One US marine was killed and another wounded in a grenade blast early on Sunday morning in southern Iraq, a military spokesman said.

"At 2:35am (local time), a marine was killed and one wounded during a grenade attack by a bridge" in southern Iraq, said Specialist Nicole Thompson.

From the Sydney Morning Herald :

The military has charged four US soldiers with abusing prisoners of war in Iraq. The soldiers and their families deny the accusations.

The four military police from a Pennsylvania-based Army Reserve unit are accused of punching, kicking and breaking bones of prisoners at Camp Bucca, the largest US-run POW camp in Iraq.

The soldiers, charged this month, are the first US troops known to face charges of abusing prisoners during the Iraq conflict.

The military's investigation continues, said Lieutenant Commander Nick Balice, a spokesman for US Central Command. Balice confirmed four soldiers had been charged as part of that investigation.

The soldiers say their actions were in self-defence when Iraqi prisoners attacked them.

From ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

One soldier has been killed and two wounded when their convoy was attacked with small arms, rocket-propelled grenades and possibly an improvised explosive device, the US military says.

The attack occurred on Highway 10 near Abu Ghuraib on Saturday afternoon local time.

US Central Command says the soldiers were with an engineer unit attached to the 3rd Infantry Division.

It says two soldiers have been evacuated to the 28th Combat Support Hospital for emergency treatment where one subsequently died and the other is in stable condition.

A third soldier has been treated on site and returned to duty. Three Iraqis have also (been) wounded in the attack.

From The Australian :

Thirty-One Iraqis were killed in the capital by stray bullets from celebratory gunfire marking the deaths of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, a Baghdad newspaper reported today.

Seventy-six people were also wounded, 40 of them seriously, Al-Moatamar, mouthpiece of Ahmed Chalabi's Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress, reported citing hospital figures.

The victims included two children, the paper added.

The US government announced the deaths of Uday and his younger brother Qusay on Tuesday after a blistering gunbattle in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

The US-led administration outlawed celebratory gunfire as part of new weapons controls introduced in early June, but acknowledged that the practice would be difficult to stamp out.

From CNN:

Three U.S. soldiers guarding a hospital north-northeast of Baghdad were killed in a grenade attack Saturday, U.S. Central Command said.

The soldiers, from the 4th Infantry Division, were guarding the Ba'qubah Children's Hospital.

Four soldiers were wounded in the attack and were evacuated to a U.S. medical treatment facility, according to Central Command.

The Charleston Post & Courier / WaPo are reporting that the Bush administration hopes to persuade former Secretary of State James Baker to "take charge of the physical and economic reconstruction of Iraq as part of a broad restructuring of postwar efforts." If Baker were on board, Bremer would focus on political reconstruction. No word yet from Baker.

CNN:

An Iraqi scientist associated with Saddam Hussein's nuclear program has surrendered to U.S. authorities in Baghdad, U.S. defense officials said Friday.

The officials identified the scientist as Abdullah Abbus Khandush, and said he was cooperating with the United States but that any information he was providing would not be made public, at least in the short term.

It's hoped the scientist, who was captured Thursday, will be able to provide information about Iraq's nuclear weapons program. Disarming the regime of suspected nuclear, chemical and biological weapons was a prime reason given by the Bush administration for launching the war that toppled Saddam. To date, no such weapons have been found.

From the Telegraph :

The idea that American troops are lavishly equipped is also a myth, a fantasy bred out of resentment of American wealth in general. The battalion in which I was first embedded came to war in creaky, Vietnam-vintage M113 armoured personnel carriers, which frequently broke down in the desert.

The battalion fought in green heavyweight fatigues because the desert camouflage ones never arrived. And, though a shipment of desert boots turned up just before the invasion, many were the wrong size, so that these GIs had to make do with black leather clompers designed for northern Europe in December. Perhaps most resented by the troops, they were not issued with bullet-resistant vests, only flak jackets, making them vulnerable to small-arms fire.

Another myth is that the Americans are also softies who live and fight in amazing, air-conditioned comfort. The truth is that the GIs encamped in and outside palaces and Ba'ath party mansions not only lack air-conditioning but also running water, unlike most of the population they guard.

And, unlike their British counterparts, they have no communication with their families at home. Many British troops are able to use the "e-bluey" system to email their loved ones on a frequent basis. The only times most GIs in Iraq ever get to let their spouses know they are well is if a passing journalist lets them have a couple of minutes on the Satphone.

And I remember what a thrill it was when I got my hands on a British ration box after nearly three months on American MREs (meals ready to eat). GIs bored of endless variations upon chilli and macaroni were amazed to find that British rations included things such as chicken and herb paté. And they were willing to trade everything from boots to whole cases of their own rations to get some.

Reuters

U.S. forces, acting on a tip from an informant, have arrested several men believed to be part of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's personal security detachment during a raid south of Tikrit, a senior U.S. military commander said on Friday.

From the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

US forces have arrested 16 men in a pre-dawn raid north of Baghdad, including two suspected of being behind a bomb and gun ambush that killed a US soldier and Iraqi interpreter in the capital.

The soldier and interpreter were killed when an improvised bomb went off and they were shot at on a highway in Baghdad on Monday local time.

The company commander who led the raid at Fahhama north of they city, said he believed two of the men were behind the attack, but could not say which two.

From the AP via the Australian comes an entry for "worst pun of the year award":

The US military today showed journalists the bodies of Saddam Hussein's slain sons Uday and Qusay, as part of efforts to dispel doubts that the two were indeed killed.

The bodies were taken to the US base at Baghdad International Airport after Tuesday's gunfight in Mosul, where the two were holed up in a relative's palatial residence."

From the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)

Iraqis have reacted with a mixture of scepticism, suspicion and some relief to the release of pictures of the bloodied corpses of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, with many still in disbelief that the dreaded brothers were really killed.

The United States announced the deaths of the brothers on Tuesday after a blistering gunbattle in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul.

But despite the release of five grisly photographs depicting the two corpses, Iraqis on the streets of the capital Baghdad were left largely unconvinced.
"Anybody can fake something like that," 41-year-old Bassum Shimmary said of the photographs which were distributed on computer disc by the coalition in Baghdad and shown on Iraqi television.

"I don't believe it, because the Americans acted so unbelievably," he said in reference to the heavy-handed US force in Mosul which led to the brothers' death instead of their capture.

In Mosul, a few dozen Iraqis gathered around the shell of the house in which the two took refuge.
Several said they did not believe Uday and Qusay had been inside.
"We decided the people in the house were not Uday and Qusay," 30-year-old Shabib Hassom said.
"There is no clear evidence, we think they were just some innocent people there."

Baghdad gas station employee 53-year-old Mohsen Mallah said the facial swelling and extent of the injuries made it impossible to prove the pictures were those of the two brothers.
"Anyway, there are rumours they are living in the United States."

The vast majority of Iraqis have no access to television or the Internet.
Dental records, which the Americans stressed were used to help confirm Uday and Qusay's identities, are an unfamiliar concept in Iraq.

"Qusay and Uday, it's not them," 31-year-old Najim Aboud said, a worker in the former Saddam palace in Baghdad which now houses the coalition headquarters.
"We are not convinced, nobody in Iraq believes it," another man said at a Baghdad street market, where men had gathered round to discuss the fate of two of the most hated Iraqis.

Still, some were confident the photographs spoke the truth.
...
Meanwhile, a group loyal to the former Iraqi leader has vowed in a videotape broadcast on an Arab television network to avenge the killing of his sons.

From CNN:

The provisional authority in Iraq has released photographs Thursday it said were of Saddam Hussein's sons Uday and Qusay, aimed at convincing skeptical Iraqis that they were killed in a raid by U.S. troops.

The pictures, said to have been taken after the brothers died in a firefight with U.S. troops Tuesday in Mosul, show grim images of the heads and upper torsos of the sons, their faces heavily bearded.

An image identified as that of Uday is seen with his head shaved and with black marks on his face and head. Qusay's purported image reveals wounds apparently received in the gunbattle and missile attack in which the two men died.

The U.S. government intentionally released the photographs on CD-ROM through the provisional authority in Baghdad because the U.S. military has traditionally been reluctant to release images of slain combatants. The Bush administration complained loudly when images of American dead were broadcast on Arab television networks during the war with Iraq.

Update: For those who wish to see them (parental guidance advised), Reuters has them here.

[Fox News]

Troops were part of the 101st Airborne Division, the group that led Tuesday's deadly raid on Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay.

Full story...

"The U.S. military has used dental records and Xrays of previous injuries Saddam Hussein's sons sustained to confirm the deaths of the much-feared Qusay and Uday Hussein, a military spokesman said Wednesday."

Full story...

MSNBC has a great article that sheds considerable new light on both the Special Operations Soldier Letter From Iraq we published Monday, and our stories yesterday about the op that killed Saddam's sons (yay!!!). Both involve a shift in tactics by allied forces, and that shift made a big difference.

It's called "Little targets led to the top", and the template it offers is worth remembering next time someone talks about combatting terrorism, organized crime with global reach, or other kinds of "4th generation warfare" threats.

We ran this on Winds of Change.NET a couple days ago, and backchecking leaves me confident in the genuineness of this letter. Some great excerpts:

"...things have been pretty hectic since the end of hostilities and the start of the real war. Despite what the assholes in the press like to say over and over:

1. We did expect some armed resistance from the Ba'ath Party and Feydaheen;
2. It isn't any worse than expected;
3. Things are getting better each day, and
4. The morale of the troops is A-1, except for the normal bitching and griping.

My brief love affair with the press, especially the guys who had the cajones to be embedded with the troops during the fighting, is probably over, especially since we are back being criticized by the same Roland Headly types that used to hang around the Palestine Hotel drinking Baghdad Bob's whiskey and parroting his ridiculous B.S."

"the vast majority don't and more and more see that the GIs don't start anything, are by-and-large friendly, and very compassionate, especially to kids and old people. I saw a bunch of 19 year-olds [deleted] not return fire coming from a mosque until they got a group of elderly civilians out of harm's way. So did the Iraqis.

A bunch of bad guys used a group of women and children as human shields. The GIs surrounded them and negotiated their surrender fifteen hours later and when they discovered a three year-old girl had been injured by the big tough guys throwing her down a flight of stairs, the GIs called in a MedVac helicopter to take her and her mother to the nearest field hospital. The Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn't been a problem in that neighborhood since. How many such stories, and there are hundreds of them, ever get reported in the fair and balanced press? You know, nada.

The civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local teenagers.... They participate less and less in the demonstrations and help keep us informed when a wannabe bad-ass shows up in the neighborhood."

"P.S. A couple of you asked me about Curly and his two sons, Dumb and Dumber. I still think we got him and one son, but the slugs may have gotten away. If they are alive, I can't believe they are hanging around here. Even Curly isn't that stupid ... then again. He might be in Syria or Lebanon. If he is, he's too moronic to keep quiet, then we'll get him. I promise."

If you want to read the whole thing, here it is. We've removed information that might compromise the author or American forces, or which we otherwise had doubts about. The rest is still a rip-roaringly excellent read.

Our coverage continues. Trent Telenko dropped me this email tonight:

"Col. David Hunt on Fox's O'Reilly Factor program just reported that the raid on the house where the terrible twins were killed started off as a classic Special Ops raid with the initial firefight lasting a couple of minutes and resulting in everyone in house being dead. The rest of the fighting was the 101st [Airborne] fighting off reinforcements who tried to come to the aid of those in the house. He also reported that there was over $50M in cash, sat phones, computers and lists of fighters from all over Iraq. For what it is worth."

Amateurs.

Meanwhile, Boomshock notes that our best "Ba'ath Poker" hand from the deck remains unchanged, despite adding 2 aces! And the hilarious satirist Scrappleface offers this delightful story: "Saddam to Offer Eulogy at Sons' Funeral." Oh yeahhh. Suuuure you're invited Mr. Hussein. Just stand right up there, in clear line of sight so we can hear you... that's it.... a bit to the right....

This just in via FOX news from a live press conference by US military (Lt. Gen Ricardo Sanchez, coalition commander for Iraq).

The military has CONFIRMED that Uday and Qusay are among the dead. Multiple sources have been used to identify the bodies. The bodies were in a condition where they could be readily identified. A question about DNA testing was not answered directly.

They do not yet have confirmation on the identities of the other two bodies.

A walk-in intelligence source provided the information leading to the raid.

Four coalition soldiers were wounded in the operation [previous report was one wounded].

A detailed briefing will be performed tomorrow (Mideast Time).

Per FOX News: Pentagon sources say Saddam's personal secretary and bodyguard [Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, the Ace of Diamonds] played an intimate role in confirmation of the bodies, and that he has been providing information to the coalition.

This story from ABC News (Australia) is the best current summary I've found of the assault. It also states:

Relatives of the homeowner in the city of Mosul and local officials also said they believed the bodies of Uday and Qusay were pulled from the house bombed by US forces.

Owner Nawaf al-Zaidan "is believed to have informed US forces that Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay, Qusay's son, and a bodyguard named Abdul Samad took refuge in his house and he wanted to get rid of them", said a female relative of Zaidan who asked not to be named.

From MSNBC:

Widespread and sporadic gunfire crackled across Baghdad after dark on Tuesday as word spread that Saddam Hussein's feared and hated sons may have been killed in a gunbattle with U.S. troops.

"It's celebration. People have heard about what happened,'' a U.S. military spokesman said.

That's the headline, but it still doesn't sound certain to me. Here's the link, and here's the summary:

TWO sons of former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein were likely two of the four people killed in a US raid in northern Iraq, US media reported today.

CNN television quoted an unnamed US official as saying that the government was reasonably certain that Uday and Qusay Hussein had "met their maker".

Fox News: A live interview with a general who was on scene indicates that the attack started at 10AM. They received small arms fire from the building, and were unable to secure the building with small arms. Hence they used .50 caliber machine guns, TOW missiles, and M-19 grenade launchers. 2.75" rockets may also have been used [a helicopter, OH-58D, was used which is capable of employing either the 2.75" rockets or Hellfire missiles. Fox speculated that the 2.75" were used, but the Hellfire is more likely because it is far more accurate and less likely to cause collateral damage. This blogger has been on aircraft many times when the 2.75's were fired, and the accuracy was less than impressive].

The building is "massive, steel reinforced ceramic."

One American was shot but is "doing fine and did not suffer life threatening injuries". No civilians were injured other than the four persons inside the structure.

Fox quotes Al Jazeera as quoting the owner of the house that the sons were in the house, as was a grandson.

White house sources are giving 90-95% odds that it was the sons that were killed.

Fox sources are also reporting intelligence that Saddam's wife and two daughters have been in the Mosul recently.

From Fox News TV: They have high level military sources saying it is "very likely" that Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay were killed in the raid. Senior pentagon officials say that some sort of announcement will be made later today.

Four bodies have been transported from the scene. The bodies were "shot up pretty bad" and there will be DNA and other forensic testing for final confirmation. Two are believed to be Qusay and Uday (they bear a "strong resemblance"), one a bodyguard, and one a teenager who may be one of Saddam's grandsons.

The operation was performed by Task Force 20 and the CIA, acting on specific intelligence that Uday and Qusay were in the house which belongs to a cousin of Saddam.

FOX is running live shots from the scene in Mosul.

Many truckloads of 101st Airborne troops are now arriving on the scene - purpose unknown.

No online source yet - this just breaking.

REUTERS has quite a bit more information than previously reported.

WASHINGTON/MOSUL, Iraq (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein's two sons may have been found by U.S. forces during a shootout on Tuesday in Iraq's northern city of Mosul in which four high-ranking Saddam allies were killed, U.S. officials said.

"There is a pretty decent chance (Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were there during the shootout)," one official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Reuters in Washington.

"There was a shootout in Mosul, and there is a number of dead people and a couple of them could be Uday and Qusay," the official said, but added it had not been definitively confirmed.

U.S. forces said earlier they had stormed a house in Mosul and killed four high-ranking allies of Saddam, who was ousted as Iraqi president by U.S.-led forces on April 9.

Some 200 soldiers blasted the villa with machineguns and rockets during a four-hour battle before storming the building and bringing out four bodies, U.S. officers in Iraq said.

The officers declined to identify them or comment on local rumors Saddam's sons might have been present.