The photograph shows Saddam Hussein moments after he was pulled from his “foxhole”, bloodied and bewildered. Crowded around are members of an American elite special forces unit. But kneeling on his prostrate body and staring defiantly into the lens is a young man in a camouflage anorak. His look betrays more than the professional satisfaction of a job well done.

The photograph quickly found its way on to the internet, and it was at first assumed that the young man was an American soldier. He is, in fact, a 35-year-old Iraqi exile named Samir. And at last he is ready to tell the story of the night he helped to capture Saddam. He has agreed to give an interview for a documentary I am producing, his one proviso being that I conceal his full name. He is still fearful of reprisals against his family in Iraq.

We meet in a hotel in St Louis, Missouri, where Samir settled after fleeing Iraq in 1991. As a 20-year-old student he was one of thousands of Shi’ites and Kurds who rose against Saddam at the end of the first Gulf war, encouraged by the promise of western assistance.

As Saddam set about imprisoning, torturing and murdering thousands in revenge, Samir made a run for it, spending three years in a refugee camp before making a new life as a garage mechanic in the States.

The second Gulf war in March 2003 gave him hope that he might see his family again. He offered his services to the US military and was quickly hired as a translator. By December 2003 he was working in northern Iraq as translator to a special forces unit, Task Force 121. Its role was to hunt down and capture the 55 “most wanted” members of Saddam’s regime, represented by the infamous “deck of cards”. Saddam was top of that list, known to the forces hunting him as High Value Target 1 or HVT1.

Intelligence suggested Saddam had gone to ground somewhere near Tikrit, his home town, where he could rely on family and tribal ties for protection. Task Force 121 worked with the US Army’s 4th Infantry Division as they captured numerous members of the old regime. With each arrest they came a little closer to Saddam.

Months of painstaking work finally paid off in December 2003, when Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al-Musslit, one of Saddam’s bodyguards, was picked up. Known as “the Fat Man”, he was one of only two men thought to know Saddam’s whereabouts.

Al-Musslit was interrogated in one of Saddam’s old palaces. At first he lied, but he did not hold out for long, says Samir. “He started crying and said, ‘Don’t kill me, I will take you to Saddam before it gets too late. Saddam’s going to know I’ve been captured. Let’s go now’.”

On a map of the area around Tikrit he pointed out the small town of Ad Dawr where, he claimed, Saddam was hiding on farmland belonging to a family of loyalists. Members of Task Force 121 took al-Musslit on a reconnaissance mission in an Iraqi van with tinted windows so that he could point out the exact location. Then, as night fell troops cordoned off a 2km x 4km perimeter around the farm. Apache helicopters flew overhead.

At 8pm strike teams raided two buildings where Saddam was thought to be hiding. They were empty. But al-Musslit also knew of a dilapidated set of outbuildings where there was a small underground hideout. The soldiers tried to find this location, taking him with them, but he lost his way on the maze of dirt roads in the dark.

“He kept telling us, ‘This one. No, no, the other one. No, this one, the other one.’” said Samir. Finally, with night-vision goggles, al-Musslit found the buildings.

They formed a small walled compound among the orange groves on the bank of the Tigris river. A hovering helicopter lit the area. As the soldiers swept through the site they captured two young farmers. But there was no sign of Saddam.

Inside the compound there was a small bedroom and a lean-to kitchen. In the bedroom, clothes and shoes were strewn about; the kitchen contained food, including a box of Mars bars. Washing hung from a clothes line crudely strung between two date palms in the courtyard. Dried fruit and meat hung from a nearby tree. But there was no Saddam. Even the sniffer dog failed to find a scent.