The dead body of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein draped in a white shroud in the hours following his pre-dawn execution.
Picture: AFP/Getty Images
 

Iraq takes its revenge on evil

EDDIE BARNES AND MUSSAB AL-KHAIRALLA
IN BAGHDAD

THE expression on his face said it all. A hooded hangman, dressed casually in a light-brown suede jacket, was explaining that a cloth would be placed around his neck. He glanced over the man's shoulder, as if trying to get his bearings. Then, looking back at the hangman, he suddenly furrowed his brow, partly out of confusion, and partly - it seemed - out of resentment, that a fellow Iraqi of lower rank should dare to order him about.
Saddam Hussein had said he was not afraid to meet his death. He looked to have stayed true to his word. Without remorse for the thousands whose lives he had ruined, and still fired with burning indignation, 69-year-old Saddam walked forward to meet his death.

Just after dawn in Baghdad, as the call to prayer echoed out from minarets across a dark and bitterly cold Baghdad, officially-backed television channels flashed the news to the nation. The shotgun-wielding tyrant who had thumbed his nose at three US presidents, who had squandered the wealth of his nation on lavish luxury for himself and his cronies, and whose needless regional wars had resulted in the deaths of as many as 1.5 million people, was dead.
Last night, as both wild celebrations and furious protests continued in Iraq, fears of reprisals among Saddam's Sunni supporters were growing. US troops and Iraqi security forces were placed on high alert while security was increased at US embassies around the world.
In Iraq itself, Saddam's death was just one of many. At least 72 people were killed in two separate explosions in the mostly Shiite town of Kufa and in Hurriyah, a mixed neighbourhood of Baghdad.
Meanwhile, the US military announced the deaths of six soldiers, making December the year's deadliest month for US troops in Iraq with the toll reaching 108. A total of 2,998 members of the US military have been killed since the Iraq war began in March 2003.
The continuing violence led to a markedly low-key response to Saddam's death from President GeorgeWBush, in contrast to the victorious tone which had greeted Saddam's capture in December 2003.
"Bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not end the violence in Iraq, but it is an important milestone on Iraq's course to becoming a democracy that can govern, sustain, and defend itself," he said.
In London, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said: "I welcome the fact that Saddam Hussein has been tried by an Iraqi court for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed against the Iraqi people. He has now been held to account."
However, both the European Union and the Vatican condemned the execution, with one EU official calling it a barbaric act that could create an undeserved martyr.
Meanwhile, as Saddam's Ba'ath party urged Iraqis to 'strike without mercy' against the US and Iran, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki issued a plea for unity: "I urge followers of the ousted regime to reconsider their stance as the door is still open to anyone who has no innocent blood on his hands to help in rebuilding Iraq."
He went on: "Saddam's execution puts an end to all the pathetic gambles on a return to dictatorship. Let the families of Iraqi martyrs killed in mass graves, Anfal, Halabja or those executed in the cells of the dead regime be happy. The mothers, orphans and widows should celebrate the death of the buried dictator."
In an apparent bid to ensure there could be no doubt over Saddam's death, his final moments had been captured on video and were then broadcast across the world yesterday morning.
The execution took place at 'Camp Justice' in the west of Baghdad, the name given to a jail which was once one of Saddam's most feared torture centres. When the Americans first took the centre over, wood-chip machines were found in the basement, said to have been used to 'process' human flesh.
Saddam was handed over to his executioners at 5:30am Baghdad time by the US military guards who had been holding him. He put up a brief struggle before being taken quickly to the centre. The Iraq authorities were eager to complete the execution before dawn and the start of Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest festivals of the Muslim calendar.
A carefully selected group of lawyers, doctors and a judge were present at the execution. Saddam was spared the fate of other criminals awaiting the gallows in Iraq, who are commonly dressed in green jumpsuits before meeting their end. Instead, in the freezing pre-dawn cold, he was allowed to wear his black overcoat over a suit and white shirt. The judge read out the sentence and the reason for his conviction - crimes against humanity including the killing, torture and other crimes against 148 Shi'ites after a 1982 attempt on his life in the town of Dujail.
Iraqi national security adviser Mouwafak al-Rubaie said: "The judge took him through the conviction, what he was convicted of - and he started his rhetoric, 'long live Islam, down with the West, down with that, down with this'. He started basically shouting his head off."
Rubaie asked for one of the guards to loosen the ties binding Saddam's legs. Still incredulous at what was happening, he was then led up a flight of steps to the scaffold. The bleak concrete walled area contained a simple trapdoor surrounded by a set of red metal railings.
Above, a thick rope was hanging from the ceiling. Saddam was still, apparently, in denial.
"He was wondering what was going on, and he looked at the gallows, and he was not believing what was going to happen," said al- Rubaie.
"I looked at him and he kept staring at me and he said: 'Don't be afraid' - I think it was a reassurance for himself. I couldn't see any remorse on his face. He was very, very broken, he looked really, really weak."
In a final act of defiance, he turned down the offer of a hood.
"He said: 'no, there's no need for that,'" al-Rubaie added.
Sami al-Askari, the political adviser of Prime Minister al-Maliki, added that Saddam was asked if he wanted to say anything. "No I don't want to," al-Askari, who was present at the execution, quoted Saddam as saying. He asked only that a copy of the Koran he was holding be given to an associate.
Al-Askari added: "Before the rope was put around his neck, Saddam shouted: 'God is great. The nation will be victorious and Palestine is Arab."'
One of the executioners is then thought to have shouted out at the former dictator, accusing him of having ruined the country. The thick black cloth was passed around Saddam's neck, in order to lessen the physical bruising which would appear on his body afterwards. And then, over it, the noose was placed.
"The executioner started to read the rituals from Koran, verses, and what we call the witness: 'There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his messenger'," said al-Rubaie.
"He repeated this twice and then he [Saddam] went down in no time, it was so, so quick and totally painless, it was over in a second. There was no movement after that."
Another witness added: "It was very quick. He died right away," he said. The body was left to hang for 10 minutes and death was recorded at 6:10am.
Some reports claimed his death had been greeted with cheers and applause among those present at the execution.
Soon after the first pictures had emerged of the execution, a further grainy image of Saddam's body, with the neck twisted violently to one side, was also broadcast, in another bid to assure Iraqis that the former tyrant was indeed dead.
His remaining family, based in Jordan, are now demanding the return of the body.
Several precautions were immediately put in place, with Saddam's home town of Tikrit effectively cordoned off. Protests in the town and in the Sunni west of the country were believed to be relatively minor although gunmen still paraded with his picture and fired their weapons into the air, calling for vengeance.
Residents in Awja, the impoverished village where he was born, said Saddam was now a martyr in the fight against the US-backed government.
Police said Iraqi troops arrested 39 suspects with "quantities of weapons" in Balaz Ruz, 45 miles north-east of Baghdad.
A statement from the Sunni Ba'ath party gave warning of further reprisal ahead.
Addressing supporters, the statement declared: "Today is your great day. Strike without mercy at the joint enemy in Iraq - America and Iran. Forget your organisational structures and take the stand of honour you deserve which is to take revenge for Saddam Hussein".
It added: "Let your destructive response be stepping up jihad [holy struggle] against the occupation and against Iran. Our revenge from America and Iran is in defeating the occupation and causing it bigger losses."
In Baghdad, the government did not place a curfew, a reflection of the fact that many Iraqis were too busy celebrating the religious festival. In Baghdad's Shi'ite enclave of Sadr City, hundreds of people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate his death. Only within Palestine and Libya did Saddam's passing rouse much sorrow. Hamas described the execution as a "political assassination".
Libya, meanwhile, declared three days of mourning and cancelled public Eid holiday celebrations. Flags flew at half-mast.
The two explosions which killed more than 70 Iraqis were not thought to be linked to Saddam's death.
Police in Kufa, near the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, said 36 people were killed and 58 wounded by a car bomb at a fish market packed with shoppers ahead of the week-long Eid holiday.
A mob is then said to have a killed a man accused of planting the bomb in the town who was seen walking away from the scene moments after the attack.
The deaths in Hurriya were caused by three car bombs which exploded in quick succession of one another killing 36 people and wounding 77. Like Kufa, the area is mostly Shia.
Both attacks seemed timed to take advantage of the busy streets, as shoppers crowded into markets to buy supplies to keep them going for the four-day Eid al-Adha festival.
The six US soldiers were killed in three separate incidents. Three marines, all assigned to Regimental Combat Team 5, died on Thursday of wounds from fighting in western Anbar province, the US military said.
A soldier assigned to 1st Brigade, 1st Armoured Division also died in combat in Anbar.
The two others were killed by roadside bombs in northwest Baghdad, the military said.
 

'Justice has now been done, albeit in a crude but traditional form'
Malcolm Rifkind
WHETHER one supported or opposed the Iraq war, there will be few who will feel sorry for Saddam Hussein having to face the gallows. In a crude but traditional form, justice has now been done. There are, however, three disturbing factors that are difficult to ignore.
Firstly, we are all taught to assume that brutal bullies are cowards at heart and that this will become obvious when their power is removed. This did not happen with Saddam. One may loathe him, but one must admit that he faced his imprisonment, trial and execution with apparent courage and with a degree of dignity as he refused the hood and faced his end with his eyes open. Other despots, such as Milosevic and some of the Nuremberg war criminals, showed similar fortitude.
It does not make them better people, but it reminds us that many tyrants have inner strengths and convictions fuelled by their own paranoia. Dealing with despots needs determination and ruthlessness. Rhetoric is not enough.
Secondly, Saddam's execution is an end to an old story, not the beginning of a new one. Doubtless there will be revenge attacks by Sunni militants angry at his death at the hands of a Shia-dominated government. But Iraq has been in a state of civil war for the last year. This was never a struggle about the fate of one man. It is a battle for power between two rival communities prepared to put sectarian interests above the national needs of Iraq.
But there is a third consideration. Saddam's execution may, paradoxically, have a greater impact in the wider Middle East than in Iraq. A deep cleavage has opened up between Shia and Sunni in the wider Arab and Islamic world. Iran is the senior Shia power; Iraq is now dominated by a Shia government. Other Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia are alarmed. It was significant that in his final days Saddam presented himself as a champion of the Sunni against the Shia and of the Arabs against Iran. In his last public statement he railed against the "Persians" or Iranians. His last words on the scaffold were to declare that Palestine was Arab. He wished to be seen not just as an Iraqi hero, but as a martyr for the Arab cause.
Few Arab governments will be taken in by this rhetoric. They held Saddam in contempt. But the Arab masses may be another matter. For them, Saddam was one of the few Arab leaders willing to stand against the Americans and the West.
The Iraq war has exacerbated deep divisions within the Arab world and helped make Iran the new power in the region. Saddam was an evil tyrant, but he was a secular despot with little time for Islamic fanaticism. His regime was also a bulwark against Iran. George Bush and Tony Blair will, no doubt, be feeling satisfaction in his demise. They should ponder the price being paid by the Iraqi people and the Arab world for the manner of his departure.
Malcolm Rifkind is the MP for Kensington and Chelsea and served as Foreign Secretary from 1995 to 1997

'This was not so much retribution for his crimes as a public lynching'
Magnus Linklater
IF EVER there was a visible argument against hanging, it came in the gruesome footage which showed the end of Saddam Hussein. Not since the days of public executions - and perhaps not even then - have we seen in close-up detail the final minutes of a man about to die, watched the noose being placed around his neck, recognised the strain in his face as he listened to the last-minute instructions of the hangman, and looked into the eyes of a dictator as he realised his life was about to come to a brutal conclusion.
There was something medieval about the black masks worn by his executioners. This was not so much retribution for the crimes against humanity as a public lynching, seen on prime time television. As a supposedly civilised world, we have not made much progress in the last 500 years.
Those who claim that Saddam should be punished according to the legal code of his own country ignore the fact that he was captured, tried and sentenced under the auspices of allied power. It was entirely within the jurisdiction of his captors to determine where and how he should be put on trial and what punishment he should face. By handing him over to the Iraqis and allowing him to be publicly executed for the crimes he had committed against his own people, the United States has not only washed its hands of responsibility, it has shown that it believes in the doctrine of an eye for an eye, the notion that a man's violent actions should be punished by the infliction of equal violence against him.
Most civilised democracies have long rejected this idea. Over the years, in Europe and most advanced countries, though not including certain American states, the execution of criminals is seen as a denial of justice rather than a vindication of it. When the state kills a man for the crime he has committed, it has simply shown that it shares the same values that led him to offend in the first place. It allows no room for rehabilitation or remorse. It takes no account of mitigation or circumstance. It is a way of demonstrating revenge. It does not even have the merit of acting as a deterrent. America, which retains the death penalty for murder, has three times the murder rate of Britain.
Iraq, which was invaded in the name of democracy, should have demonstrated the principles of democracy by sentencing Saddam to life imprisonment - to be served outside the country. In that way it would have demonstrated that, for all the horrendous nature of his crimes against humanity, those who succeeded him have inherited principles which are more humane than any he possessed in his lifetime.
Instead of that, his death means he will become a martyr to his followers. They will glorify his ending much in the way that they glorified his bloody deeds while he was alive. The victors of Iraq have shown that they are no better than their predecessors, as much steeped in the principles of bloody vengeance as Saddam ever was. And the visible testimony of that televised execution will ram the point home.

Quiet vigil as Scotland's Iraqis hail end of a cruel era
A GROUP of Scots-based Iraqi campaigners against Saddam's regime yesterday gathered at a memorial to one of the executed dictator's worst atrocities.
About a dozen Iraqis congregated at the Halabja Tree in Glasgow's Queen's Park and hailed his hanging as the "end of an era". The tree was planted in remembrance of the Kurdish civilians from the town bordering Iran that lost about 5,000 citizens after Iraqi planes attacked it with chemical weapons in 1988.
Among those present yesterday was Dr Kamal Ketuly, whose family was torn apart just months after the dictator came to power.
He said: "It is the end of an era in which a criminal, dictatorial regime ruled and destroyed our country, which was the cradle of civilisation."
Ketuly was in his second year of a PhD at Glasgow University in 1980 when his mother, sisters and brothers were among countless Iraqi citizens who were deported to Iran.
His brother Jamal, then doing his Iraqi national service, and 11 of his cousins were held hostage, then taken to the infamous Abu Ghraib jail.
"For the first two years we knew where they were and then there was nothing. We were just cut off and I have had no trace of my brother," said Ketuly.
Since then he and other Iraqi dissidents have campaigned against the Ba'ath party's brutal regime.
"We were one of the first people to campaign against the Ba'athist regime and expose what they were all about," said Ketuly.
"Today we just wanted to pay our respects to those who died at Halabja and remind the world that this is what Saddam Hussein did."
The tree was planted in 1990 by the group in the park, which is in the south side of Glasgow.
Meanwhile SSP leader Colin Fox said Britain and the United States should now examine their own consciences after Saddam's execution.
"As someone who campaigned against the tyranny of Saddam Hussein for decades, I shed few tears for his passing," he said.
"But this is no time to let the fact that the British and US governments made him what he was sink into silence.
"Saddam Hussein was their 'muscle in the Middle East' for two decades.
"They funded him and armed him throughout, in the barbaric war with Iran and when they turned a blind eye to the massacres of his own people."