Baghdad, Iraq – By the time the corpses of Saddam Hussein’s half brother and another top official, hanged before dawn Monday, arrived in the village of Awja for burial, the word had spread among the mourners: The head of Hussein’s brother had been severed from his body.
Many of the people who had gathered considered the decapitation of Barzan Ibrahim to be a calculated insult, another act by the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to humiliate followers of the executed former president and all his fellow Sunni Arabs.
“We knew that he would be executed and would join a parade of heroes, but Maliki, why did you behead him?” asked Salam al-Tikriti, 41, a relative of Ibrahim. “Why did you insult his body? Are you still afraid of him even after he is dead? We will cut your heads the same way that you are cutting the heads of the heroes of Iraq.”
In many parts of Iraq, the executions set off new waves of anger and celebration along sectarian lines, though al-Maliki’s government had gone to great pains to prevent the type of chaotic spectacle that accompanied Hussein’s hanging two weeks ago, when Shiite witnesses in the execution chamber taunted Hussein.
The hangings drew criticism from abroad. The Moroccan Human Rights Association said they were a “criminal political assassination masterminded by American imperialism.”
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, visiting Egypt, said she believed the hangings of Hussein and the two others were mishandled and should have been carried out with “greater dignity.”
Ibrahim, who ran Hussein’s intelligence service, or Mukhabarat, and Awad Haman Bander, leader of Hussein’s Revolutionary Court, were put to death at 3 a.m. Monday, government spokesman Ali Dabbagh said. They had been sentenced to death for their role in the killings of 148 men and boys from the Shiite village of Dujayl following an assassination attempt against Hussein in 1982.
Iraqi officials denied that the decapitation was intentional, saying that Ibrahim’s neck had been unable to absorb the noose’s force.
The hangings came on a day that the top U.S. military commander in Iraq warned that it could take months before there were any real signs of progress in a new campaign to secure the beleaguered capital.
“As with any plan, there are no guarantees of success, and it’s not going to happen overnight,” said the commander, Gen. George W. Casey Jr. “But with sustained political support and the concentrated efforts on all sides, I believe that this plan can work.”
Casey spoke at a news conference in Baghdad, where he was joined by the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad. President Bush recently announced that both men would soon be replaced.
Casey and Khalilzad played down reports of tension between the American military command and the Iraqi government, saying that any period of transition would have some friction.
As sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiite has intensified, U.S. military officers have complained that the Shiite-dominated government led by al-Maliki has repeatedly hampered efforts to restore order in Baghdad.
At the news conference Monday, Casey and Khalilzad said repeatedly that they believed that the Iraqi government was committed to working toward an evenhanded policy that would treat Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods the same. But they cautioned that only time would tell.
The New York Times contributed to this report.
Developments
Videotape of the execution of two of Saddam Hussein’s co-defendants shows that one, his half brother, was decapitated in the process, prompting outrage among Iraqi Sunnis.
Gen. George Casey, the U.S. commander in Iraq, says he does not expect significant results in the new U.S.-Iraqi security drive in Baghdad until the summer and fall.
CASUALTIES:
The U.S. military reports that a soldier was killed Sunday in Baghdad by a roadside bomb.
A suicide car bomber slams into an Iraqi army patrol in Mosul, killing seven people and wounding 40.
At least 55 people are killed or found dead across Iraq.
