The US civilian administrator in Iraq said today that he believed Saddam Hussein was still in the country, probably hiding in the area where most of the attacks on Americans are being organised by what he called a small band of "professional killers."
Mr Paul Bremer, in an interview on "Fox News Sunday," also said US forces was putting together an Iraqi civil defense corps made up of Iraqis under US military command "to help us basically with the armed part of the work we're doing."
"... By having Iraqis help us, we're likely to get better intelligence on who it is we're fighting, and intelligence really is the heart of the matter here. We've got to know who these people are and then we've got to seek them out and either capture or kill them," Mr Bremer said.
Mr Bremer, who is overseeing the US effort to establish civilian control in Iraq, said it was at "a critical phase now" in light of the almost daily attacks on US forces since they ousted Saddam in April.
Thirty seven US troops have been killed since US President George W Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1st.
Since US-led forces invaded Iraq on March 20th, 151 US soldiers have been killed in hostile action, more than the 147 killed in the 1991 Gulf War.
"We certainly are seeing now organised resistance at small level, squad level, organized resistance by professional killers," Bremer said.
He said the attacks were being orchestrated by a "small group of bitter-enders," members of Saddam's former ruling Baathist Party, the Republican Guard and the Fedayeen.
But he said they were taking part in only "a very small part of the country ... and they pose no strategic threat to us. We will overpower them."
Mr Bremer said the area was the same one where Saddam likely is hiding.
"I think he's probably still in Iraq," he told Fox. "We don't know exactly where. He's probably located somewhere in what we call the Sunni triangle, the area from Tikrit, which is his original home, south to Baghdad, and this is the area where most of the attacks are taking place."
Mr Bremer appeared on several US Sunday television shows as two more US soldiers were killed in an ambush near Mosul in northern Iraq, a rare attack by anti-American guerrillas so far from Baghdad.
He said despite the attacks, good progress had been made in Iraq and that he could foresee a sovereign government in place in a year's time.
"If the Iraqis can write a constitution in six or eight months, and then that can be followed quickly by elections, it's possible that we could indeed have a sovereign government in a year," he said.