With their coffins wrapped in the Iraqi flag but guarded by troops of their mortal enemy, the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein were laid to rest yesterday in a dusty cemetery in the village where their father was born.
Nearly two weeks after Saddam’s sons were killed when US troops raided their hideout in the northern town of Mosul, around 150 tribesmen and relatives gathered in Awja, on the edge of the town of Tikrit, to dig graves in the sun-baked ground and pile earth and stones on the coffins.
Mahmoud al-Nada, an elder of the Beijat tribe that includes Saddam Hussein’s family, led the mourners in prayer at the graveside as wind whipped clouds of dust into the air and a large force of American troops stood guard at the cemetery gate.
Qusay’s 14-year-old son, Mustafa, was buried alongside his father and uncle. He was killed with them during a six-hour gun battle when more than 200 US troops supported by helicopter gunships raided the house where they were hiding on 22 July.
The American-led Coalition Provisional Authority now running Iraq hopes that the brothers’ burial will end a controversy over the bodies. Uday and Qusay were among the most cruel and feared men in Iraq, but officials had feared that their funeral might be a focus for anti-coalition protests and the graves become a shrine for the deposed regime.
However, there was no large-scale protest and the burials in the old regime’s stronghold passed off peacefully, with one military official describing the ceremony as quiet and uneventful.
The bullet-riddled bodies, which had been kept in a refrigerated morgue at Baghdad airport, were delivered to the Iraqi Red Crescent yesterday morning to be driven to Tikrit in an ambulance.
Jamal al-Karboli, the Red Crescent president, said: ‘Our employees delivered the bodies to relatives.’ The family had asked his organisation last week to act as an intermediary in recovering the bodies, he added.
The director of the Red Crescent’s Tikrit region, Thawrah Abed Bakr, said: ‘We took them to the cemetery’s mosque. We prayed and buried them in the family grave. Everything was finished by 12.30pm. I had been told to do it secretly by the family and the tribe.’
The deposed dictator’s family was said to have been angered by the way American mortuary attendants prepared the dead: Muslim tradition calls for bodies not to be embalmed or retouched and to be buried before sundown on the day of death.
The brothers’ faces, however, were heavily made up using cosmetic putty before officials allowed them to be filmed by journalists in an attempt to persuade a sceptical Iraqi public that they really were dead.
As the hunt went on for Saddam, the American chief of the coalition authority, Paul Bremer, said he had not seen any hatred of US troops among the Iraqi people.
Hours before the funerals, however, an American soldier was killed and three others were injured in a rocket-propelled grenade attack on a convoy north of Baghdad. At least two American soldiers were injured in remote-controlled bomb attacks in Tikrit.
It emerged yesterday that the US army has sent a team of medical experts to Iraq to investigate a spate of pneumonia cases among troops which has left two soldiers dead and 100 more ill.
Lieutenant General James Peake, the Army Surgeon General, has sent two doctors and four other experts to Iraq, as well as doctors to Germany, where some of the sick soldiers are being treated. Lyn Kukral, an army spokesperson, said there was no evidence that chemical or biological weapons had been involved. – Guardian Unlimited Â