By Sabrina Tavernise

Published: December 31, 2006

BAGHDAD, Dec. 30 – Saddam Hussein was dead, but his legacy was more alive than ever.

Skip to next paragraph As Iraqis across the country awoke to the news that the former dictator had been hanged; the bitter remains of his rule defined their responses.

For Shiites, long oppressed, it was a moment of intense release. "This chapter of Iraqi history is over," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the national security adviser, speaking on national television early Saturday. "Let us forget it and live with each other."

Sunni Arabs were skeptical. After three years of grinding violence and abuses by the Shiite government security forces, trust has all but fallen away, and few feel genuinely represented by the government. Most, in fact, are afraid of it. "I’m not part of their world," said Yusra Abdul Aziz, a teacher in the Sunni Arab enclave of Mansour. "They are not speaking about Iraq. They are speaking about themselves."

Their reactions showed just how far Iraqis have drifted apart in the three years since Mr. Hussein’s capture. And while he has long faded from relevance in the life of everyday Iraq, in many ways, the country is living the legacy that he built.

The new Iraq appears capable of inflicting only more of the abuse it suffered for so long, perpetuating it with overwhelming brutality. People disappear in the night. Bodies with drill holes surface in trash heaps. Government forces moonlight as killing squads.

As vicious as he was, Mr. Hussein also held the country firmly together. Beyond military control, there was subtle social glue: Iraqis of all sects loved to hate Saddam together. Now that he is gone, Shiites are afraid to joke with Sunnis about him, and Sunnis feel they are being blamed for his crimes.

Ahmed Hilly, a 32-year-old tailor, whose suits hung on the walls of his narrow shop in Sadr City like a mute chorus, recalled watching from a hiding spot in an empty area in northeastern Baghdad as elite members of Mr. Hussein’s government gunned down large groups of Shiite opposition members. He was 6 at the time.

That area, an old dam called Qasr Attash, is now one of the most common body-dumping grounds for Shiite militias.

Mr. Hussein spared almost no one in his murderous ways, but Shiites were particularly abused as a group. That systematic mistreatment seems to have left lasting scars that carry through to the current day, infusing neophyte leaders with an uncompromising and emotional approach to running things.

"When they put the rope on his neck, did he remember how many innocent people he killed?" said Husam Abdul Hussein Jasim, a watch store owner in Sadr City, whose wall was swinging with synchronized pendulums. "He’s like a Satan."

Mr. Hillu, sitting behind a counter piled high with a television, plastic flowers and cellphone cards, said: "He didn’t represent anything for me. He was just a death grip imposed on our neck."

Even though their oppressor had been hanged, Shiites in northeastern Baghdad were giving no parties. Blocks had none of their usual bustle. Even the office of the cleric Moktada al-Sadr was closed.

The response was markedly different than the reaction after the November verdict sentencing Mr. Hussein to death, when Silly String and sweets were plied in equal measure.

For some Iraqis, previous humiliations were enough to feel justice had been done. Smeisam, a teacher in the largely Shiite area of Binouk, said her mother, whose parents had been murdered by the government, said the moment of revenge came sweetly for her when she saw the footage of American soldiers pulling Mr. Hussein out of the spider hole near Tikrit in December 2003.

"It was when I saw him hidden just like a mouse," she said by telephone, while assembling ingredients for dolma, rice-stuffed grape leaves, for her family’s holiday dinner.

Her husband, Mukaram, was completely unsentimental.

"Truly I feel nothing," he said. "He executed so many people. Now it is his turn. For me he died when he was arrested, so he was not important at all. "

Indeed, the violence left behind has taken on a life of its own. In Kufa, a Shiite holy city south of Baghdad, a bomb in a fish market killed 34 people on Saturday, Iraqi authorities said, and a mob on the scene killed a man suspected to be the bomber. In the Hurriya district of Baghdad, a series of car bombs killed 36 people.

Depressing new realities did not dampen the Shiites’ joy, but they were still subdued in expressing it. Mr. Hillu, who lost two brothers to Mr. Hussein, said he brought boxes of cookies and chocolate to his neighbors in the morning, when he learned about the execution. A stranger brought free orange juice into his and other shops along his block.

Mr. Hussein’s execution took place early on a day that for Sunni Arabs was the beginning of the Id al-Adha holiday. (Shiites will begin celebrating on Sunday.) Mr. Hillu said the death "adds some more taste."

Skip to next paragraphIf Shiites saw the hanging as a gift, most Sunnis were revolted that, in what appeared to be a violation of Iraqi law, the execution was scheduled on a holiday of forgiveness.

"Actually, I felt angry," Ms. Abdul Aziz said. "It’s not a proper time. I assure you, those who are feeling that this is a good time and a good judgment, they are not Iraqis."

Others, namely Kurds, opposed the quick hanging. Now, Mr. Hussein will not testify in other important genocide cases, especially the trial over the Anfal military campaign against the Kurds, in which he is accused of unleashing mass killings and chemical attacks that killed tens of thousands of villagers.

"The truth of what happened in al-Anfal has been buried," said Abu Abdul Rahman, a 38-year-old Kurdish taxi driver. "What happened in al-Anfal? Who took part in it?"

Others were less bothered by the speed of his execution.

"I think it’s too strong to say that I’m cheated," said Bakhtiyar Amin, a Kurd who is a former Iraqi minister of human rights. "He deserves what he got."

The suffering Mr. Hussein inflicted was almost inconceivable, and it caused entire population shifts of equal intensity but in opposite directions to moves taking place today.

At a bakery down the block from Mr. Hillu’s tailor shop, two Shiites, a man and his uncle, told their story of fighting against Mr. Hussein in the ill-fated Shiite uprising of 1991. In the southern city of Nasiriya, where they lived, they fought for 37 days, said Ali Muhammad, bouncing his nephew on his knee as workers holding large trays of cookies moved gracefully through the shop.

After it was over, 10 members of their family had been killed. Another eight, all members of the opposition Shiite Dawa Party, had been murdered by Mr. Hussein’s henchmen. The family fled to Baghdad and began working in a bakery in Sadr City, then called Saddam City. Now families follow some of the same patterns, only this time in reverse.

The bakery smelled of sesame. Almost everyone was smiling.

"I feel like my mother delivered me for the first time," said Abdel Ali Jasim, Mr. Muhammad’s 46-year-old uncle. "It’s my birthday."

But that area is Shiite, insulated from the outside by Shiite militias that are much more effective than government forces, and are sometimes a part of them, too. Life there flows somewhat more easily than in Sunni areas.

Still, car bombs regularly intercede, shattering the calm. In response, Iraqis of both sects attempt to draw circles around the chaos in their own minds. As a result, they tend to generalize about the other, coming up with conspiracy theories, to make the violence easier to explain and accept.

"If we got rid of the terrorists, there would be no country better than Iraq," Mr. Jasim said. "It’s the non-Iraqis that are against the Shiites."

Ms. Abdul Aziz, who refuses to state her sect, saying only that she is a Muslim, lives closer to the center of the war. Her area, Mansour, is one of the most heavily contested by the Shiite and Sunni militias now.

In September, her son Omar was shot and wounded, they think because of his name, which is Sunni. Her other son was detained by the police. She was able to secure his release because she spoke English and an American soldier agreed to help her find him. She has since moved one of them to Syria.

Mr. Hussein may be gone, but the fear that succeeded him is what defines her life today.

"Where can I live, if Baghdad is divided?" she said in English. "In the Shiite sector or Sunni sector?"

"I have to run away. It’s not a place to live in anymore."

The International Herald Tribune

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