Saddam death verdict hailed

Court's sentence could serve as Iraqi 'milestone'

? Amid celebratory gunfire, the embattled government in Iraq declared Sunday’s death sentence against Saddam Hussein as the end of an ugly chapter and an opportunity for the strife-torn country to begin to unify.

But purported loyalists to Saddam, who was convicted of crimes against humanity and murder, vowed revenge, and the nation braced itself for a potential new wave of violence.

Coming just two days before the American midterm elections, the Iraqi court’s sentence of a hanging death gave President Bush the first opportunity in weeks to speak of a success in Iraq.

“Saddam Hussein’s trial is a milestone in the Iraqi people’s efforts to replace the rule of a tyrant with the rule of law,” he said in Waco, Texas, before launching his final pre-election campaign trip. “It’s a major achievement for Iraq’s young democracy and its constitutional government.”

Despite a citywide curfew that kept most Baghdad residents confined to their homes, crowds of people took to the streets to celebrate the verdict, and the sounds of gunfire continued for 30 minutes in some Shiite neighborhoods. In Dujail, the northern city where Saddam was found guilty of executing innocent people, residents played music and fired their weapons into the air.

Alla Hussein, 42, a day worker, said, “Today my dream and all the aggrieved Iraqis’ dream came true with the issuance of this death against Saddam. We thank God because he saved us from this criminal. This will be a lesson to anyone who wants to be like him.”

One group of Iraqis hold up images of Saddam Hussein as they protest his death sentence verdict in his hometown of Tikrit.

But in Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit, residents carried pictures of the former dictator and promised a rise of retaliatory attacks if the former president is killed.

“If our president and his colleagues are executed, rivers of blood will flow,” said a 47-year-old grocery store owner who only wanted to be referred to as Abu Ahmed. Sunni politicians complained that Saddam and his seven co-defendants were convicted before an illegitimate court designed to serve America’s interests, not Iraq’s.

The Iraqi Special Tribunal sentenced Saddam and two of his co-defendants to death in a case charging that they ordered the execution of 148 people after an unsuccessful assassination attempt against Saddam in 1982 in Dujail.

As his sentence was read, Saddam initially reverted to his more violent rhetoric. “God is greater!” he told Judge Raouf Abdul Rahman repeatedly as the judge read the sentence: death for murder, 10 years for forcible deportation, 10 years for torture.

“Long live the Iraqi people, damnation for the damned,” Saddam told the panel of judges. “You are the servants of the colonizers.”

Another group celebrates the ruling in Baghdad's Shiite enclave of Sadr City. The Iraqi Special Tribunal on Sunday found Saddam guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced him to hang, as the former leader shouted God

In all, Saddam faced six charges, including murder and crimes against humanity, and was convicted of all but one of the charges – of enforced disappearance.

As the judge read the verdict Saddam, clutching his Quran, went into a rant. Referring to the court, he said: “You don’t issue sentences; you are servants of those who want to colonize us.”

An automatic appeals process was immediately launched, so Saddam’s hanging could be months away. He also still is being tried for allegedly gassing thousands of Kurds in the late 1980s, and he is scheduled to be back in court Tuesday for the next hearing in that case.

Saddam’s half-brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, the former head of intelligence, and Awad Hamad al-Bandir, former head of the Iraqi Revolutionary Court, also were sentenced to death by hanging. Bandir also kept shouting, “God is greater” over the reading of the verdict.

In a rare televised address, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said that with the verdict, “it was the end of the Saddam era,” adding Iraqis would no longer face mass graves, gassing at the hands of their leader or ethnic cleansing.

“He is facing the punishment he deserves,” al-Maliki said.