'Saddam tape' calls for uprising against American invaders

One month after the fall of Baghdad, Saddam Hussein – or someone who sounds like him – has issued a tape-recorded appeal to Iraqis to launch an underground war against the American and British occupation of their country.

The speaker on the audiotape says he is addressing his people by "secret means" from "inside great Iraq". He says in a tired-sounding 15-minute monologue interspersed with coughs: "It sounds as if we have to go back to the secret style of struggle that we began our life with." He exhorts "Arab and Kurd, Shiite and Sunni, Muslim and Christian and the whole Iraqi people of all religions ... to kick the enemy out from our country."

The voice on the recording, which, according to Iraqis who have heard it, has the same phrasing and accent as their former leader, makes a marked effort to establish that the recording was recent. It refers to celebrations by Iraqis on Saddam Hussein's official 66th birthday on 28 April.

"It was an Iraqi decision [to celebrate] because they consider Saddam Hussein as a brother or as a father to them," the speaker says, "and this is just to express of their free will that nobody forced them to do it or to live in any way against their will. It is their true attitude toward Saddam Hussein."

He calls on Iraqis to reject any new leaders "working with the foreigners" and to rise against the occupying powers by "not buying anything from them, or by shooting them with rifles and trying to destroy their cannons and tanks".

The tape was reportedly given to a correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald on Monday. The paper said it had played the tape to an Australian linguistics expert and to more than a dozen Iraqis and their overwhelming opinion was that the voice and rhetoric were very similar, or identical, to Saddam's. The newspaper said its correspondent received the tape outside the Palestine Hotel, where many television stations are based, by two men who were trying to deliver it to an Arabic language channel – al-Jazeera or al-Arabiya – but took fright at the sight of American soldiers.

When the newspaper's translator pointed the way to the hotel, which is still ringed by razor wire and US forces, one of the two handed over the tape, saying the speech had been made by Saddam that day and it was his duty as an Iraqi to ensure it was made public. The translator said the two had accents from Tikrit, Saddam's home town, where support for the former president remains strong.

The tape came as no surprise to people in Baghdad, who are likely to conclude it is authentic. Most Iraqis appear convinced that the dictator is still alive, and was not killed either in the salvo of cruise missiles fired by the Americans at the start of the war to "decapitate" the regime, or by a missile strike on a restaurant in Baghdad's Mansur neighbourhood on 7 April, after Saddam was reportedly seen there.

Many in Baghdad appear to believe that he is still somewhere in their midst, moving from house to house to avoid being caught by Americans. There have been several rumoured sightings. Some Iraqis claimed to have seen Saddam in the Azamiyah district two days later – an appearance that was videotaped and broadcast by Abu Dhabi television – but some US officials dispute the authenticity of that tape.