BAGHDAD, 31 December 2006 — Saddam Hussein was executed before sunrise yesterday. The once feared Iraqi strongman struggled briefly after American military guards handed him over to the executioners. But as his final moments approached, he grew calm. Dressed in a black coat and trousers, he clutched a Qur’an as he was led to the gallows, and in one final moment of defiance, refused to have a hood pulled over his head.
A man whose testimony led to Saddam’s conviction and execution said he was shown the body because “everybody wanted to make sure that he was really executed.”
“Now he is in the garbage of history,” said Jawad Abdul-Aziz, who lost his father, three brothers and 22 cousins in the reprisal killings that followed a botched 1982 assassination attempt against Saddam in the Shiite town of Dujail.
Saddam’s half-brother Barzan Ibrahim Al-Tikriti and Awad Hamed Al-Bandar, the former chief justice of the Revolutionary Court, were not hanged along with their former leader as originally planned. Officials wanted to reserve the occasion for Saddam alone.
“We wanted him to be executed on a special day,” National Security Adviser Mouwafak Al-Rubaie told state-run Iraqiya TV.
Shortly before the execution, Saddam was asked if he wanted to say something. “No I don’t want to,” Sami Al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki who was present at the execution, quoted Saddam as saying. “He seemed very calm. He did not tremble,” said the official, adding Saddam, 69, recited the Muslim profession of faith before he died: “There is no God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet.”
Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted: “God is Great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab.”
Members of a small group of dignitaries who formally witnessed the execution said Saddam showed no sign of remorse.
Rubaie said in a television interview: “Saddam mounted the gallows calmly, without saying a word. He was resolute and courageous... At one point, he turned his head toward me as if to say ‘don’t be afraid’. It was a very strange feeling.”
“It was a terrifying scene. Saddam was in self-control. I was not expecting him to be like that,” said Judge Moneer Haddad, a member of the panel of appeals court judges who had confirmed Saddam’s conviction for crimes against humanity and who attended the execution.
“One of the attendants asked him, ‘Are you afraid?’ He said, ‘I have never been afraid as long as I lived. I lived as a Mujahedeen and expected death any moment,’” Haddad said.
“We heard the cracks of his neck. It was a horrendous scene,” he added.
His body was later flown on board a US plane to Tikrit. Lebanese lawyer Bushra Al-Khalil said Saddam’s daughter Raghd, in exile in Jordan, was in contact with her family’s tribal leaders on a burial location either in the family cemetery in Awja, a village near Tikrit, or in the Sunni stronghold of Ramadi, 110 km west of Baghdad. The burial could take place today, Khalil said.
US President George W. Bush said in a statement issued from his ranch in Texas that bringing Saddam to justice “is an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain and defend itself, and be an ally in the war on terror.”
He said that the execution marks the “end of a difficult year for the Iraqi people and for our troops” and cautioned that Saddam’s death will not halt the violence in Iraq.
Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he heard the news. “Now all the victims’ families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence,” said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 130 km south of Baghdad.
But people in Tikrit, once a power base of Saddam, lamented his death. “The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the death of a holy warrior,” said Sheikh Yahya Al-Attawi, a prayer leader at Saddam Big Mosque.
Police blocked the entrances to Tikrit and said nobody was allowed to leave or enter the city for four days. Despite the security precaution, gunmen took to the streets of Tikrit carrying pictures of Saddam and shooting into the air and calling for vengeance.
Security forces also set up roadblocks at the entrance to another Sunni stronghold, Samarra, and a curfew was imposed after about 500 people took to the streets protesting the execution of Saddam.
