AWJA, Iraq, 1 January 2007 — Saddam Hussein was buried in the dead of night in his home village yesterday as a video posted on the Internet showed officials taunting him as he stood on the gallows a day earlier.
Dozens of relatives and others, some of them crying and moaning, attended the burial of Saddam in a public hall shortly before dawn at Awja.
“I condemn the way he was executed and I consider it a crime,” said 45-year-old Salam Hassan Al-Nasseri, one of Saddam’s clansmen who attended the burial in the village just outside Tikrit, 130 km north of Baghdad. Some 2,000 Iraqis traveled to the village.
Saddam was captured in an underground hide-out near Awja on Dec. 13, 2003, eight months after he fled Baghdad ahead of advancing American troops. His burial place is about three km from the graves of his sons, Odai and Qusai, in the main town cemetery. The sons and a grandson were killed in a gunbattle with the American forces in Mosul in July 2003.
The head of Saddam’s Albu-Nassir clan said the body showed no signs of mistreatment. “We received the body of Saddam Hussein without any complications. There was cooperation by the prime minister and his office’s director,” the clan chief, Sheikh Al-Nidaa, told state-run Al-Iraqiya television. “We opened the coffin of Saddam. He was cleaned and wrapped according to Islamic teachings. We didn’t see any unnatural signs on his body.”
In a video footage of the execution, apparently captured on a mobile phone and spreading across the Internet yesterday, members of the party carrying out the hanging can be heard chanting “Moqtada, Moqtada, Moqtada!”
The reference is to Moqtada Sadr, a Shiite leader whose uncle Mohammed Bakr Sadr was murdered in 1980 by Saddam’s agents, and who has risen to prominence since Saddam’s fall as a politician and militia leader. One of the execution party calls: “Long live Mohammed Bakr Sadr!”
“Go to hell,” Saddam seems to respond, although the sound is not clear.
One of the guards becomes angry. “You have destroyed us,” the masked man yells. “You have killed us. You have made us live in destitution.”
Saddam is scornful: “I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persians and Americans.”
The guard curses him: “God damn you!”
Saddam shoots back: “God damn you!”
As Saddam drops through the metal trapdoor, his final prayer, the profession of faith, is caught short: “There is no God but God, and Muhammad...”
Noise erupts in the room as the filmmaker struggles to get a shot of Saddam’s face, hanging lifeless to one side. “The tyrant has fallen, damn him!”
Hundreds of mourners flocked to his freshly-dug tomb inside the marble-floored hall in Awja yesterday. Many poured out their anger against the Americans and the Iraqi government. “I can’t believe it. By God, we will take revenge,” said one man from the northern city of Mosul.
Russia yesterday strongly criticized the televised execution of Saddam and pinned responsibility for “fratricidal” carnage in Iraq on US and other foreign occupation forces.
“The hurried severity of the execution, which outside instigators were not ashamed to show on television to the whole world, further deepens the divide in Iraqi society,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail Kamynin said in a statement. “Instead of badly needed national reconciliation and accord, Iraq risks seeing another escalation in the fratricidal conflict.”
Kamynin had harsh words for the US-led forces that toppled Saddam. “This must be recognized by all those who sent their troops to Iraq,” he said. “All the weight of responsibility for what is happening in this country lies precisely on them, including for the open violation of those same humanitarian values that they were so ready to teach others.”
A previously unknown group of Iraqi Baathists pledged allegiance to Saddam’s fugitive deputy Izzat Ibrahim and named him the “legitimate president of Iraq,” a statement issued by the group said yesterday. The statement was distributed in Amman at the Jordan branch of Saddam’s Baath party where dozens of people came to pay condolences for the former president. The statement was apparently sent from the Baath party in Baghdad.
An Al-Qaeda-dominated organization in Iraq completely ignored the hanging of Saddam in a message posted on the Internet yesterday to mark the Eid Al-Adha.
“Your Mujahedeen brothers will pursue the jihad against the Crusader troops and the apostates,” said the audio message attributed to the spokesman of the Islamic emirate proclaimed by Al-Qaeda and its allies in western and north-central Iraq. “All we need is Islam to live in dignity and become masters of the world, “ the voice recording said.
However, it made no mention of the execution of Saddam, who was a regular target for criticism from Al-Qaeda.
