Arab Baath Socialist Party

The former teachers huddled in small groups outside an Education Ministry building, their shoulders hunched against the damp winter wind as they resentfully looked at the place where they once were insiders. Instructors of high school biology and Arabic, social studies and mathematics, they abruptly lost their jobs last fall because they had been members of Saddam Hussein's now-banned Baath Party.

The Iraqi Governing Council softened its stance Tuesday on the possible reinstatement of some members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party to their civil service positions. Ministries will form committees to consider possible exemptions to the policy of "de-Baathification" of the ranks of Iraq's enormous government bureaucracy, the council said in a directive.

A leading member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Ahmad Chalabi, made a bid Tuesday to assert the council's independence from the American-led coalition, with his spokesman announcing a new and tougher policy for ridding the Iraqi government of former Baath Party members. Chalabi, a longtime exile flown into Iraq by the U.S. military in April, appeared to be trying to distance himself from his patrons and raise his profile with Iraqis as the jockeying for power in the country begins in earnest.

American forces hunting for senior Baath Party officials and remnants of the pro-Saddam Hussein Fedayeen fighters rounded up about 400 suspects and an undisclosed number of illegal weapons over two days, the U.S. military said Wednesday. Dubbed "Peninsula Strike," it was the largest operation by U.S. occupation troops since the end of major combat activities in Iraq in late April.

From a crowded cell several blocks from the execution grounds here, Sadika Qadir heard the staccato reports of the firing squad and knew that her son was dead. For the crime of having raised a critic of Saddam Hussein's tyranny, she too paid dearly. With her six remaining children, she was first imprisoned for three years in cells crammed with consumptive mothers and wailing infants, then exiled to an arid village on the plains north of Baghdad.

U.S. military forces raided Iraq's national police academy Saturday, arresting the dean and 14 others as they conducted a meeting of Saddam Hussein's now-outlawed Baath Party, the top American law enforcement official here said. Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who serves as the senior U.S.

U.S. troops Friday arrested a senior Baath Party official who had worked as a diplomat for the government of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, witnesses said. Nabil Nijim was not on the list of the 55 most-wanted Iraqis issued by Washington after U.S.-led forces toppled Hussein last month. Nijim disappeared when the war began and his house in a Baghdad neighborhood was deserted until he returned Friday, the witnesses said. "Two American jeeps came to his house today, and U.S.

The United States declared Saddam Hussein's Baath Party dead Sunday, with the commander of the war telling Iraqis that the instrument of their deposed dictator's power was dissolved and promising to purge its influence from the country it ruled for 35 years. Gen. Tommy Franks' message, delivered in Arabic by an announcer on the allied Information Radio, broadcast a clear message across Iraq: Any activity by Baath Party holdouts who oppose the U.S. presence will not be tolerated.

U.S. officials shepherding in an interim government in Iraq started purging the ranks of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party on Saturday, requiring Health Ministry officials and Iraqi doctors to formally resign from the party and denounce it to qualify for top jobs with the ministry. Stephen Browning, the ministry's senior U.S.

Chris Rayneri hasn't seen his dining room table for weeks. Or, for that matter, his coffee table. And he figures he's lucky his wife hasn't left him. A 30-year-old Bell South employee in Miami, Rayneri has filled every inch of available surface in his living room with playing cards. Rayneri has been bitten by a now-familiar bug -- the urge to commercialize tokens of war.