Residents seeth with anger in Saddam's village

AWJA, Iraq, Dec 30 (Reuters) Residents in the impoverished village where Saddam Hussein was born seethed with anger today at the hanging of the ousted president and said he was now a martyr in the fight against the US-backed government.

''If Saddam is executed, he will be a martyr and he will enter history,'' a young man in his 20s said, apparently sceptical that Saddam had in fact been hanged.

''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,'' another young man told Reuters in Awja, a village of orchards and palm groves next to the Tigris river, 150 km, north of Baghdad.

Saddam, 69, rose from poverty in Awja to rule Iraq by fear for three decades before he was toppled by a US invasion in 2003. He was hanged for crimes against humanity at dawn for the killing and torture of Shi'ites in the 1980s.

During his grip on power, Saddam surrounded himself with relatives from Awja and from nearby Tikrit, creating a praetorian circle of aides from the Sunni Arab Albu Nasir tribe.

Testament to Saddam's patronage, Awja still shows today some grand villas next to more humble dwellings.

The Albu Nasir tribe wants him buried in Awja, near the graves of his two sons Uday and Qusay who were killed in 2003 by US troops.

It was also near Awja that US forces found a dishevelled and disoriented Saddam hiding in a pit covered with polystyrene and a rug, near a simple shack in an orange grove.

The governor of Salahaddin -- named after the XII century Muslim leader and Tikrit native Saladin who fought against Christian Crusaders -- told Reuters he and Saddam's tribe were negotiating to have the body returned to his family in Awja.

Tikrit was under a four-day curfew to avoid violence.

Asked about Saddam's demise at the gallows, an elderly woman dressed in black was philosophical about the village's famous son's dramatic and violent end.

''It is God's will. There is nothing in our hands we can do,'' she said shrugging her shoulders.

REUTERS AKJ VV1706