From an interview with Dan Snyder, retired Sergeant of the United States Marine Corps and the United States Army:

Even though Saddam eliminated a lot of his enemies through murder and suppression, it’s kind of incumbent upon him to make a lot of appearances so that people experience the greatness that he thinks he is. Dictators have this type of compulsion where they have to go out, but at the same time they have to suppress their enemies. For people who might be anxious to get rid of the guy, those appearances make for opportunities like this one. It’s pretty easy to see why this happened; it’s a pretty standard pattern in dictatorship.

You can never be sure exactly which target is ‘the one’ when you’re dealing with a violent dictator. They’re super-suspicious by nature. Stalin used to sleep in a different bed every night, and rumor has it Saddam used to do the same. They have such a guilty conscience about everything they’ve done; they’re very suspicious of everything because they know how they would behave on the other end of it..

To set up a successful ambush, you’ve got a few things to worry about. One thing is having your ambush detected. Usually, when a column is moving through a town or a terrain they have some sort of flank protection. It could be snipers or people on the ground, so make sure the area is clear and that there aren’t any strong points that are waiting to take out your convoy.

You can’t set up an ambush along both sides of the road because you’ll be firing upon each other, and obviously crossfire is not good. What you can set up is a partial enfilade and a defilade, which is where you have some sort of barricade, a stopping force up ahead that directs fire into the target. It could be as simple as a broken-down car that stops the convoy. At this point, there may be some fire from the front that holds the target in place so that you can put your side units, your enfilade units, in the flank. The whole idea is that you have one in a pre-set position, right in the path of the convoy. Once the attention has moved toward the blockage by the target, then you can deploy your flank units and start to put the fire into them when the convoy starts to retreat. That’s when the real killing starts, and that’s how ambushes work. It’s all about timing.

Your initial shots should contribute toward blocking and holding the target in the kill sack. You may have limited RPGs or limited high explosives, so you want to choose a target near the front of the column, and one near the end so you can get your forces in there quickly. You can take out the rest of it in detail.

Don’t concentrate on the outside guys, the security forces on foot flanking the vehicles. They’re heavily armed and heavily armored and they’re trained to react. You want to take your shot to maximize the effect. The goal here is to take out the VIP; not the guards. So your first shots should score the actual contents of the convoy. Then, as the chaos mounts, you can handle the rest of those guys. If you’re really good, you can manage a hit and run, where you score your objectives early and get out of there, preserving your force.