Word: saddams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...albeit a particularly loud one - in the middle of a terrible and unending storm. Once the clatter of celebratory gunfire that greeted the verdict had died down, Iraqis' thoughts returned to their own future, and the depressing realization that it is no less bleak than it was yesterday. "Whether Saddam lives or dies is not important to me," shrugs Imad Mohammed, a computer technician. "I'm not even sure whether my family and I will live...
...This isn't how the trial of Saddam Hussein was meant to turn out in the imagination of U.S. officials back in the winter of 2003, when he was found in that Tikrit spider-hole. J. Paul Bremer, the American administrator of Iraq, had hoped seeing Saddam on the dock would allow Iraqis to exorcise the demons he had unleashed upon them during his long reign. More recently, as the country descended into a sectarian war, some U.S. and Iraqi officials clung to the hope that the trial would remind Shi'ites and Sunnis how they had once been unified...
...Instead, the unrelenting sectarian violence in daily Iraqi life soon turned the trial into a televised sideshow. For those who bothered to watch anymore, the sight of Saddam in court sometimes had the exact opposite effect than officials expected - it evoked nostalgia for a time when, under the tyrant's yoke, Shi'ites and Sunnis were not at each other's throat. Although viewership spiked today, interest in the proceedings will quickly subside again...
...What will not subside is the violence. Far from being collective therapy, the trial has only helped widen the sectarian divide. While Shi'ites celebrated the verdict, many of Saddam's fellow Sunnis protested. In his hometown of Tikrit, over 1,000 people staged demonstrations in defiance of the curfew. In Baghdad's mainly Sunni Adhamiya district, several mortars landed near the Abu Hanifa shrine, the most revered Sunni mosque in the country...
...Anticipating an uptick in Sunni insurgent activity, the Iraqi government cancelled all military leave and put security forces on high alert. With much of the Sunni Triangle under an all-day curfew, pro-Saddam insurgents had few opportunities to express their reaction to the verdict; in Baghdad, there was only sporadic violence. Saddam's defense lawyer, Khalil al-Dulaimi, warned in an open letter to President Bush that "this decision will set the country ablaze again and plunge the entire region into the unknown." However after the verdict al-Dulaimi told the Associated Press that Saddam had urged Iraqis...