BAGHDAD, 5 November 2006 — Iraq braced itself yesterday for a violent backlash from Saddam Hussein’s remaining supporters if, as expected, the ousted leader is sentenced to death in his trial for crimes against humanity.
National Security Adviser Muwaffaq Al-Rubaie said a curfew would be in force in Baghdad and the flash point provinces of Diyala and Salaheddin, which contains the deposed dictator’s hometown of Tikrit, on the verdict day. State television said all pedestrian and road traffic would be banned indefinitely from 6:00 a.m. (0300 GMT) today and the international airport shut, before the televised trial hearing begins.
A car bomb exploded in the Sadr City suburb of mainly Shiite east Baghdad, a security official said, as violence in and around the Iraqi capital killed at least eight people in a series of gun and bomb attacks yesterday.
Five members of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani’s security detail were killed in a roadside bomb attack Friday in northern Iraq, a source from his party said. Talabani was out of the country and in no personal danger.
Iraqi police commandos killed 53 suspected Al-Qaeda militants in a fierce gunbattle on the southern outskirts of Baghdad yesterday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said.
“This afternoon we received intelligence reports that gunmen were endangering the security of the region,” said Brig. Gen. Abdel Karim Khalaf, referring to the Baghdad suburb of Tuwaitha. “They are Al-Qaeda. The National Police had a severe fight with them and as a result of these clashes, they killed 53 terrorists, arrested 16, burned 40 cars and seized many weapons,” he said.
Saddam and seven former regime officials face a verdict today in their trial for ordering the killing of 148 Shiites in the early 1980s in the village of Dujail, where the deposed president escaped an assassination bid in 1982.
It is feared that the verdict, in which Saddam faces a possible death penalty, could trigger widespread violence in already war-torn Iraq between remaining supporters of the former president and his many enemies.
Baghdad, which is already reeling under a brutal campaign of insurgent and sectarian violence, will be virtually sealed off today as the chief judge in the Dujail trial, Rauf Abdel Rahman, delivers his verdict.
Meanwhile, Shiite militia are the main suspects in yesterday’s rocket attack which wounded four Russians and killed an Iraqi colleague working for the Basra Electricity Company.
The four “received light wounds as the result of a mortar shell explosion,” the Foreign Ministry in Moscow said. Russia was planning to repatriate the wounded men.
A gunbattle also erupted in Baghdad during the early hours of yesterday as US and Iraq forces raided the Shiite bastion of Sadr City and detained three suspects. The US military said the raid was aimed at capturing a leader and member of a group that had killed “innocent Iraqi citizens and security forces.”
