In mid-January, Col

In mid-January, Col. Dia Najm al-Din, Lt. Col. As'ad Mahmud and Lt- Col. Ali Abdullah al-Tikriti, three officers of the special Republican Guard forces, were executed on the orders and in the presence of Qusay, the Iraqi President's second son. The statement, released by the opposition Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq [SCIRI] on February 1, did not mention the reasons for the executions.
The Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq said also that Lieut. Gen. Kamil Sachit al-Janabi was executed in late January along with 8 other people for allegedly "planning a conspiracy in contact with the outside world." Two of the 8 were Janabi's assistants. Janabi was deputy to Ali Hassan al-Majid, at present army commander in the south and Governor of Kuwait during its 1990-91 occupation by Iraq, London-based SCIRI spokesman Hamid al-Bayati said. Janabi, in his mid-50s, was an army commander in the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war and later a commander of Iraq's Gulf forces in the 1991 conflict over Kuwait.
The Iraqi Communist Party and the Center for Human Rights, both based in London, said two men were executed by firing squad at the al-Taji military camp, one of the biggest in Iraq and a target of the air strikes. They were named as Col. Kazim Hussein al-Jubouri and Gp. Capt. Amin Mahdi al-Jubouri, both from the al-Jubouri tribe, from which President Saddam Hussein recruits many of his soldiers. The opposition groups said they did not know why the men had been killed.