Hunted, Hanged

In what looked like a swift response by Sunni insurgents loyal to Saddam, a car bomb killed 36 people in a Shi’ite town — the sort of sectarian attack that has pitched Iraq toward civil war since US troops broke Saddam’s iron grip.

State television showed him looking composed and talking with the masked hangman who placed the noose around his neck on the gallows.

A Shi’ite-run channel aired grainy, low-quality film of the body in a white shroud, showing Saddam, who was 69, lying with his neck twisted at an awkward angle, with what appeared to be blood or a bruise on his left cheek.

“It was very quick. He died right away,” one of the official Iraqi witnesses told Reuters, saying the ousted president, who was bound but wore no blindfold, had said a brief prayer.

“We heard his neck snap,” Sami al-Askari, a political ally of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, said after the indoor execution at a Justice Ministry building in northern Baghdad.

As Maliki’s fellow Shi’ite Muslims, oppressed under Saddam, celebrated in the streets, the prime minister called on Saddam’s Sunni Baathist followers to end their insurgency.

“Saddam’s execution puts an end to all the pathetic gambles on a return to dictatorship,” said Maliki. State television showed him signing the order for the hanging which officials said he did not attend.

Police in Kufa, near the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf, said 36 people were killed and 58 wounded by the car bomb at a market packed with shoppers ahead of the week-long Eid al-Adha holiday. They said a mob killed a man they accused of planting the bomb.

US President Bush, who called Saddam a threat though alleged nuclear and other weapons were never found, said: “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.” A White House spokesman said that Bush went to bed before the execution — at his Texas vacation ranch — and was not woken up after it was carried out.

The deaths of four troops pushed the American death toll to just four short of the emotive 3,000 mark. Bush already faces mounting public dismay at the war as Iraq slides toward all-out civil war between Saddam’s fellow Sunnis and majority Shi’ites.

Popular reactions were fairly muted as Iraqis woke on the holiest day of the Muslim calendar to begin a week of religious holidays for Eid al-Adha. Unlike at previous times of tension, no curfew was imposed on Baghdad.

As Iraqis across the country were trying to process the scope of what had happened, early reactions mirrored the deep sectarian divide that has been driving much of that violence and threatens to pull the country apart.

His trial and conviction have been mostly welcomed by the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds who suffered under his rule, but it has angered Sunni Muslims, helped to fuel a Sunni-led insurgency and done nothing to calm the increasingly chaotic sectarian violence here.

Shi’ites danced in the streets of the holy city of Najaf today and cars blared their horns in procession through Baghdad’s Shi’ite Sadr City slum.

The main Sunni television channel in the capital gave little coverage to the news — though it did show old footage of Saddam meeting former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at a time when Washington helped Iraq against Islamist Iran in the 1980s.

State broadcaster Iraqiya on the other hand ran graphic footage of Saddam’s agents beheading and beating their victims.

Saddam was found guilty over the killing, torture and other crimes against the Shi’ite population of the town of Dujail after Shi’ite militants tried to assassinate him there in 1982. His appeal was rejected four days ago.

A trial witness from Dujail said he was shown the body at Maliki’s office and wept for his dead relatives.

“When I saw the body in the coffin I cried. I remembered my three brothers and my father whom he had killed. I approached the body and told him: ‘This is the well-deserved punishment for every tyrant’,” Jawad al-Zubaidi told Reuters. “Now for the first time my father and three brothers are happy.”

Before his death, the former president recited the Muslim profession of faith, one of a dozen official witnesses said.

Many Kurds will be disappointed that Saddam will not now be convicted of genocide against them in a trial yet to finish, but the rapid execution was a triumph for Maliki, whose grip on his fragile national unity coalition has been questioned.

After complaints of political interference in the trial, however, the speed of the execution may fuel further unease about the fairness of the U.S.-sponsored process.

Saddam became president in 1979, and the next year led his country into an eight-year war against Iran that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In 1990 he invaded Kuwait, but U.S.-led forces drove the Iraqis out in 1991.

Saddam’s half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and former judge Awad al-Bander are to be hanged in January.

Saddam’s daughter Raghd, in exile in Jordan, wants her father buried in Yemen, a source close to the family said.

The governor from Saddam’s home town of Tikrit said his tribe was negotiating with the government to have the body interred in the village of Awja, where Saddam’s sons were buried in 2003, rather than in Baghdad as the government wanted.

He added that Bush went to bed before the execution and was not woken up after it was carried out.

Defense lawyer Najib Naimi said that US military officials asked him Friday morning to send someone to pick up the former president’s personal effects, such as clothing, books — including a Quran — and a manuscript Saddam had been writing.

“He was writing his biography,’’ Naimi said. “But I don’t think he had a chance to complete it.’’

Bushra Khalil, a defense attorney for Saddam, said that Raghad Ali, Saddam’s youngest daughter, wanted her father to be buried in Yemen ‘’until Iraq is free of the occupiers.”

“The children are crying,” Khalil said. ‘’His daughters are so very sorry and touched by this matter. I spoke with his wife. I tried to comfort her with some of my words. She was so sad. … She says all of the days are black.”

Khalil warned that Saddam’s death will have violent consequences for Iraq. ‘’A volcano will erupt,” she said. ‘’A violent sectarian war will explode. There will be showers of blood.”