BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was brought to his home village early Sunday morning in a simple wood coffin for burial, less than 24 hours after his execution. A few hundred mourners paid their respects in the predawn darkness for the man who led their nation over three decades of fear, brutality and war.
"The execution of Saddam was a cowardly act," said Hameed Salman al-Majeed, one of Saddam's cousins, as he greeted mourners next to Saddam's temporary grave dug into a marble-floored social center in Auja, 120 miles north of Baghdad.
"We feel proud that he stood at the gallows, proud and upright."
The burial was a bookend to six grim days that began with Iraq's highest court upholding Saddam's death sentence and ended with his hanging to jeers and condemnations from Shiite witnesses, whose community his regime ruthlessly oppressed.
Even as late as Saturday night, it was unclear where Saddam would be buried, as Iraqi politicians grappled with concerns over security and allowing Saddam's resting place to become a shrine for his loyalists. Only after U.S. pressure did the government agree to release Saddam's corpse to his tribesmen.
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The simplicity of the aftermath, without a state funeral or mourning masses, was in sharp contrast to Saddam's life and aspirations. An avid student of history, he cultivated his image with his legacy in mind. He lavished billions of his country's oil dollars on palaces, monuments and statues to invoke the ancient glory of Babylon's King Nebuchadnezzar, whom Saddam claimed as an ancestor.
In death, Saddam, a Sunni Arab, returned to the hardscrabble village that has been the scene of two of the most definitive periods in his life. The son of a landless peasant who died before his birth, Saddam was raised by an uncle in this farming region. He also chose this region to hide in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion. In December 2003, U.S. troops found him inside an underground hole the size of a coffin near his hideout, less than 10 miles from Auja.
In settling the arrangements, the Shiite-led government of Nouri al-Maliki had considered burying Saddam in a secret grave, fearing that his final resting place could attract supporters or fuel violence, according to Iraqi and U.S. officials.
Senior figures in Saddam's tribe promised al-Maliki and U.S. officials that Saddam would be buried quickly and that only a small group would attend. At close to midnight, the leaders of the Albu Nasir tribe and Tikrit's regional governor signed a letter at al-Maliki's office inside the U.S.-fortified Green Zone, agreeing to bury the body in Auja, according to Iraqi state television.
Then, they inspected the white-shrouded body and closed the casket. It was loaded into a white pickup truck and driven to a waiting U.S. helicopter. At a nearby American military base, the casket was placed in another truck. The body had been cleansed and dressed according to Muslim ritual, Iraqi officials said.
When the procession arrived in Auja, a few hundred mourners converged on the truck with Saddam's coffin. With guns firing in the air, men carried the coffin into the domed center, chanting: "Allah u Akbar" or "God is great." Others chanted: "With soul and blood we sacrifice for you, Saddam." Women were crying and wailing.
Saddam's final resting place is expected to be in his family's cemetery, where his sons Uday and Qusay, killed by U.S. troops two months after the invasion, are buried.
