Saddam Defiant To The End
(CBS/AP) Former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was executed by hanging before dawn Saturday in Iraq, which was just before 10 p.m. Friday EST. This final chapter in Saddam’s life followed three years spent in U.S. custody.
Hours after Saddam faced the same fate he was accused of inflicting on countless thousands during a quarter-century of ruthless power, Iraqi state television showed grainy video of what it said was his body, the head uncovered and the neck twisted at a sharp angle.
Arab satellite television channels said Saddam’s body had been returned to Tikrit for burial Sunday next to his sons Odai and Qusai in the main cemetery in the nearby town of Ouja, where Saddam was born. The sons and a grandson were killed in a gunbattle with the Americans in Mosul in July 2003.
State-run Al-Iraqiya television later confirmed the body had been handed to the Salahuddin province governor and the leader of Saddam’s Albu-Nassir clan.
Saddam struggled briefly after American military guards handed him over to Iraqi executioners. CBS News correspondent Randall Pinskton reports that he was shouting, ‘long live Islam’ and ‘down with the West’ and he showed no remorse.
But as his final moments approached, he grew calm. He clutched a Quran as he was led to the gallows (watch video — warning graphic content). In one final moment of defiance, he refused to have a hood pulled over his head.
CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports that until being turned over to Iraqi control, Saddam remained in a jail cell in U.S. custody. The U.S. military had been prepared since early Friday morning to hand over Saddam to the Iraqi government, which wanted to execute the deposed dictator as soon as possible.
On his last night alive, Saddam sat alone on death row with his Quran, the Muslim holy book, Pinskton reports. As his time waned, Saddam received two of his half brothers in his cell and was said to have given them his personal belongings and a copy of his will.
Pinkston added that he was told that Saddam’s daughters watched the execution on television from Jordan where they live. They reportedly said they were pleased their father went to the gallows showing no sign of fear and they were proud of him.
A man whose testimony helped lead to Saddam’s conviction and execution before sunrise 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.
The execution came 56 days after a court convicted Saddam and sentenced him to death for his role in the killings of 148 Shiite Muslims from Dujail.
“Clearly there has to be visual proof at a minimum,” senior Brookings Institution fellow Michael O’Hanlon told the The Saturday Early Show. “The Iraqis know there have been many doubles for Saddam over the years… They know that Saddam is a person who always, in his own mind, at least, seemed to defy death and overcome the odds. So I think a lot of Iraqis were still believing he would somehow find a way out of this one, too.”
In Baghdad’s Shiite enclave of Sadr City, hundreds of people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. The government did not impose a round-the-clock curfew as it did last month when Saddam was convicted to thwart any surge in retaliatory violence.
It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. presidents. Despite his ouster, Washington, its allies and the new Iraqi leaders remain mired in a fight to quell a stubborn insurgency by Saddam loyalists and a vicious sectarian conflict.
The execution took place during the year’s deadliest month for U.S. troops, with the toll reaching 108.
President 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.
Martin reports the president had already gone to bed by the time Saddam was executed.
Within hours of Saddam’s execution, a bomb planted aboard a minibus exploded in a fish market south of Baghdad, killing 31 people. At least 58 others were wounded in the explosion in Kufa, a Shiite town 100 miles south of the Iraqi capital, said Issa Mohammed, director of the morgue in the neighboring town of Najaf.
Within Baghdad, a parked car bomb killed 37 civilians and wounded 25 others in northwest Baghdad on Saturday, police said. The blast occurred in Hurriyah, a mixed neighborhood of the Iraqi capital, at around 3:30 p.m. local time
The Pentagon said that U.S. fighting forces in Iraq are ready for any escalation of violence there.
Ali Hamza, a 30-year-old university professor, said he went outside to shoot his gun into the air after he learned of Saddam’s death.
“Now all the victims’ families will be happy because Saddam got his just sentence,” said Hamza, who lives in Diwaniyah, a Shiite town 80 miles south of Baghdad.
But people in the Sunni-dominated city of Tikrit, once a power base of Saddam, lamented his death.
“The president, the leader Saddam Hussein is a martyr and God will put him along with other martyrs. Do not be sad nor complain because he has died the death of a holy warrior,” said Sheik Yahya al-Attawi, a cleric at the 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, 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.
A couple hundred people also protested the execution just outside the Anbar capital of Ramadi, and more than 2,000 people demonstrated in Adwar, the village south of Tikrit where Saddam was captured by U.S. troops hiding in an underground bunker.
In a statement, Saddam’s lawyers said that in the aftermath of his death, “the world will know that Saddam Hussein lived honestly, died honestly, and maintained his principles.”
“He did not lie when he declared his trial null,” they said.
