Incredulity, joy, anger in Iraq at Saddam hanging

BAGHDAD, Dec 30 (Reuters) Scarcely able to believe the pictures of Saddam Hussein on the gallows, Iraqi Kurds and Shi'ites said he had received a dose of his own medicine when he was hanged today.

But for many of the former president's fellow Sunni Arabs, it was a sombre day.

''What happened today is unbelievable, it's a great joy that I can't even express,'' said Mohammad Kadhim, a 30-year-old journalist in the Shi'ite city of Basra in southern Iraq.

''I can't believe what I'm seeing on television -- Saddam led to the gallows where he hanged tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis by the same method,'' Kadhim said.

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 after the execution.

The date and time were set only hours before, in the early hours today after late night government meetings.

While foreign media watched every twist and turn of Saddam's final hours, many Iraqis have no electricity to watch television and anyway are preoccupied with violence that kills an average of 100 people a day, pushing Iraq to the brink of civil war.

Norzan Yaseen, a 32-year-old teacher in Kirkuk, said Saddam's hanging would make no difference and she urged the government to concentrate on security and basic services.

''The Iraqi government has brought nothing but calamities to the Iraqi people in the last three years,'' she said yesterday evening as she awaited news of when Saddam would hang.

A car bomb killed 36 people in a Shi'ite town today morning in what looked like a swift response. But given the short notice of the hanging and the frequency of such attacks, it may have been planned independently of the execution.

Jubilant Shi'ites, oppressed under Saddam, danced in the streets of the holy city of Najaf and cars blared their horns in procession through Baghdad's Shi'ite Sadr City slum.

''When I saw the pictures I knew that the era of Saddam was really over,'' said Mohammad Hussain, a government employee in the Kurdish city of Arbil. ''I wanted to see that scene. I wanted to see Saddam's reaction in the moments before his execution.'' ''JUSTICE OF HEAVEN'' State television showed film of Saddam having a noose put around his neck but stopped short of showing the actual execution. Another channel later showed amateur footage of the body, the head twisted to one side at an awkward angle.

Salwa Alwan, 45, a housewife in Basra, said Saddam had executed three of her brothers and her husband: ''It said on the death certificates that they were hanged to death and today I am seeing Saddam hanged. The justice of heaven has been done.'' However celebration was muted in comparison with the celebratory gunfire lasting hours after Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed by US forces in 2003.

The main Sunni television channel in the capital gave little coverage to the news. State broadcaster Iraqiya ran graphic footage of Saddam's agents beheading and beating their victims.

It showed scenes of Kurdish victims of gas attacks and film of a blindfolded man being pushed off the roof of a building.

A curfew was imposed in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, and there were reports of sporadic clashes there. Residents in Awja, the impoverished village where he was born, said Saddam was now a martyr in the fight against the U.S.-backed government.

''This is a mercenary court. Iraqi people reject this court.

Saddam is the legal president of Iraq. If they execute him we will rise up. We will all become a bomb,'' one young man told Reuters, apparently sceptical Saddam had really been hanged.

A few hundred Saddam supporters demonstrated in Ramadi, in Iraq's western Anbar province which is the centre of a Sunni Arab-led insurgency, chanting Saddam-era slogans such as ''We will sacrifice our blood and souls for you''.

A man from Dujail who testified in Saddam's trial over the deaths of 148 Shi'ite men from the town 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.''

REUTERS

Related Stories
Saddam Hussein executed: Al Hurra TV station
Vatican says Saddam Hussein execution "tragic"