But this time, he was half a world away from the Midnight Rodeo in central Florida, where he'd been prying apart drunk brawlers. “Here, I offer my soul to God as a sacrifice, and if he wants, he will send it to heaven with the martyrs,” he said.Specialist Steve Hutchinson was, once again, working nights. In a farewell message to Iraqis posted Wednesday on the Internet, Saddam said he was giving his life for his country as part of the struggle against the U.S. Before the hanging, a mosque preacher in the Shiite holy city of Najaf on Friday called Saddam’s execution “God’s gift to Iraqis.” Many people in Iraq’s Shiite majority were eager to see the execution of a man whose Sunni Arab-dominated regime oppressed them and Kurds. Experts said the trial of his co-defendants was likely to continue despite his execution. “So now, what will be the next story they tell us to keep us over here?”Īt his death, he was in the midst of a second trial, charged with genocide and other crimes for a 1987-88 military crackdown that killed an estimated 180,000 Kurds in northern Iraq. Thomas Sheck, 25, who is on his second tour in Iraq. We did that, but then it was that we had to put him on trial,” said Spc. Then when there were none, it was that we had to find Saddam. “First it was weapons of mass destruction. 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.” military have been killed since the Iraq war began in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. The execution took place during the year’s deadliest month for U.S. 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. It was a grim end for the 69-year-old leader who had vexed three U.S. 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. In Baghdad’s Shiite enclave of Sadr City, hundreds of people danced in the streets while others fired guns in the air to celebrate. His neck and part of the shroud have what appear to be bloodstains. The post-execution footage showed the man identified as Saddam lying on a stretcher, covered in a white shroud. “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. “I have saved you from destitution and misery and destroyed your enemies, the Persian and Americans,” Saddam responded, al-Rubaie told the Times.Ī 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.” “He said we are going to heaven and our enemies will rot in hell and he also called for forgiveness and love among Iraqis but also stressed that the Iraqis should fight the Americans and the Persians,” Munir Haddad, an appeals court judge who witnessed the hanging, told the British Broadcasting Corp.Īnother witness, national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaie, told The New York Times that one of the guards shouted at Saddam: “You have destroyed us. By several accounts, Saddam was calm but scornful of his captors, engaging in a give-and-take with the crowd gathered to watch him die and insisting he was Iraq’s savior, not its tyrant and scourge.
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